Capsule Reviews: The Day He Arrives, Bad 25, The Sessions

The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo, 2012)

Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives begins with a man walking down a street and taking a left. It ends with him returning to that street and going right. This mirroring movement captures the film, so reflective that even the lead actor’s name, Yoo Jun-sang, is spat back out as the character Yoo Seong-jun, an ex-filmmaker who returns to Seoul to catch up with friends, pitifully attempt to rekindle an old flame, and idly philosophize. Hong’s subtle but pristine compositions and varied repetitions tease out character beliefs, hypocrisies and longings as Seong-jun’s rants against the lies of fate that cinema propounds even as he chases a waitress solely for resembling his ex. The repetitions also cinematize the life he feels is so separate from the artifice of movies, the distorted sense of time starting over until Seong-jun “gets it right” recalling a more poetic Groundhog Day. But it’s that poetry that makes all the differences, making even Hong’s cheeky (sometimes outright funny) reflexive details so human that they work not only as critical observations but affecting conduits for the character’s own feelings. Grade: A

Bad 25 (Spike Lee, 2012)

Going into Bad 25, I had fears of the banal, uninsightful visual monographs VH1 used to do (still does?) for classic albums. Happily, Spike Lee is no slouch documentarian, and Bad 25 goes far beyond the usual fluff pieces in the detailed technical accounts for each song. But it is the other areas Lee must probe, the interviews with business managers and, especially, music video—excuse me, short film—directors that deepens the film. The doc is a map of a carefully orchestrated, cross-media campaign to take over the world using the 11 songs contained in the album’s grooves. Thriller, of course, was the more dynamite success, but it caught even MJ by surprise. With Bad, he, and the team of talented people he attracted to help him, were ready. The only objection: for a film that pointedly leaves out the tabloid traumas that would corrupt so much of Jackson’s legacy, Lee includes an unsettlingly exploitative montage of friends and collaborators tearfully remembering where they were when they heard the news back in 2009, a rapid tour through tears complete with zoom-ins to make sure the camera picks up the glistening drops sliding down cheeks. A host of interview subjects offer a wealth of personal anecdotes, technical information and retrospective appraisal, but sadly it is that montage that remains in the head as much as a desire to revisit Bad. Grade: B-

The Sessions (Ben Lewin, 2012)

There is such great potential in The Sessions, starting with its forthright admission that the disabled have sexual urges, too. Too often, disabled people get pitied into a kind of dehumanizing sanctity, one that especially weighs on Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) as a guilt-ridden Catholic. The film acknowledges the basic humanity of sex, and it even treats sex and nudity as mere facts of life. A shot resting casually on the exposed torsos of Mark and his sex surrogate, Cheryl (Helen Hunt), shows veins in the actress’ breasts that feels more beautiful and unvarnished than Hollywood’s coy, idealized treatment of nudity. Yet one can almost watch the film deflate in real time, its warm comedy tipping into trivialization as the frank treatment of its subject turns sheepish and deflecting. Hawkes does not get to grow and reflect with O’Brien, and his defensive humor never falters as Mark’s time with Cheryl introduces him to the realities, not the punishing self-perceptions, of his body. Numerous “Sundance” touches riddle this picture, from William H. Macy’s awkward Hip Priest to Levin’s banal direction being put toward a wan approximation of visual poetry, but nothing sums up how The Sessions squanders its assets like its approach to male nudity. Cheryl holds up a mirror to Mark’s naked body so he can finally see the real him, to see how normal he really is, but fear of the MPAA trumps honesty. Likewise, the denouement trades the somber, resigned reflection of the essay that inspired the movie for a treacly conclusion that rebuilds the pedestal that, ever so briefly, this film seemed primed to destroy. Grade: C-

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, 2011)

I have always defended cynicism, even outright despair, as a valid form of creative expression from those who feel that all art must affirm. One cannot tell an artist how to feel, and to deny very real human emotions from the artistic equation, or to insist that those emotions be subsumed into a more palatable conclusion, is naïve nonsense. But Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin's feature debut, displays such tawdry, put-upon nihilism that I would have preferred the most reality-blind Hollywood cheese to its technically immaculate wallowing.

The title refers to three names the protagonist uses at different times over the course of the film, "Marcy May" joining two of the words into one rustic sobriquet. Her real name is Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a title she gets back upon escaping a cult in upstate New York and contacting her estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson). Despite sporting a bruised ear and audibly trembling when she calls Lucy for help, Martha does not get taken to a hospital, the police, or even a therapist. Instead, Lucy and her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), bring Martha back to their vacation home in Connecticut where they behave as if everything is now instantly back to normal. But as flashbacks illuminate what happened to the younger sister, the belligerent attitudes of all three in the present become not merely grating but noxious, and Martha Marcy May Marlene quickly establishes itself as a movie in which things only ever get worse, not for dark comedy but plodding, hopelessly tedious stabs at psychological drama.

It should be said, however, that Durkin has a not inconsiderable skill with a camera. Weaving together the two time lines with match cuts so harmonic they become less counterpoints than one undulating line, Durkin at least knows what he's talking about when it comes to cults. With each new revelation, we see not only the horrors inflicted upon Martha and the other women of Patrick's (a terrifying John Hawkes) clan but how they become complicit in the crimes inflicted upon the next batch of recruits initiated into the "family." Likewise, Martha's inability to shake her dependence on Patrick continues to wreak mental havoc as Ted and Lucy selfishly fail to understand the gravity of the situation.

Hawkes' Patrick hangs over the whole film, even in his absence. Gathering runaways and emotionally vulnerable youths to his hidden farm, Hawkes lures his captives with the promise of fixing them, of helping them beat addictions, to find the love they never felt as children. But Hawkes, who looks as haggard and lethal as he did in last year's Winter's Bone, always carries a trace of ulterior motives made increasingly plain as he remolds these people into his slaves. His playful act of giving pet names to all who join becomes merely his first step of eliminating each member's old identity, cutting that person off from thoughts of one's past to ensure that Patrick becomes his or her whole world. The effect is so complete that even Martha, who fled him in terror, continues to spout his teachings and worldview to her bewildered (and increasingly impatient) sister.

But the same structure that makes Martha Marcy May Marlene such a striking technical achievement also turns its potential insight into such complex psychological scars by parceling out information as if leaving a trail of bread crumbs, an approach clearly meant to draw out the audience but so shamelessly forward about it that I broke quickly and often from the narrative. Rather than build tension, Durkin's narrative just throws an endless number of intended gut punches designed to jolt the crowd. Furthermore, by framing the story this way, the writer-director puts all of the emphasis on the revelations themselves, not their after-effects. The moments of understanding and depth he brings to Martha's brainwashing eventually give way to a narrative too in love with its own curveballs.

Yet Durkin still clearly thinks he's delving into his characters, generating a severe pacing problem between its perceived character analysis and its actual adherence to thriller structures. This leaves the film dramatically inert, robbing some of the later, crucial events of both their immediacy and their ripple effect. The characters stagnate as well, with Lucy and Ted continuing to act so self-involved that one almost welcomes the danger they flirt with by not rushing to get Martha help. By the same token, Martha falls into such a static trap of sloth and cruelty that the unending string of new horrors unearthed by the flashbacks begin to resemble a desperate attempt to keep the audience engaged with this locked-up character and to keep sympathizing with her terrible behavior.

Perhaps Durkin feels as if his dead air is evocative, creating atmosphere by virtue of its lethargy. This view would certainly be backed up by the ridiculous ending, which some have inexplicably called ambiguous because it is not explicit, despite there being only one clear outcome for the final shot. The cast give it their all, particularly Olsen, Paulson and Hawkes, but Durkin cares not to use his clever structuring or his ominously washed-out aesthetic to delve into the issues he broaches but merely to writhe around in all the evils and pain that hit these characters. It is a wasted opportunity, one that turns an initially gripping and mysterious view of a traumatized person's attempts to reintegrate into normal society into a plot-heavy bore. But like Olsen, who lines her beautiful, youthful face with prematurely aging furrows of terror and insurmountable rewiring, Durkin does display enough talent with his feature debut to warrant keeping a tab on his future endeavors. Let us just hope they work better than this hollow exercise.

Winter's Bone

Winter's Bone might be compared to Deliverance, what with its hellish look into the America neglected by everyone fortunate enough to have never stepped into a particularly poor area of the Ozarks. Yet as I looked at its bleak gray skies, stripped trees and barren landscapes, the film that came most often to mind was Threads, the what-if faux-documentary that questioned what nuclear war might mean for the world.

Dirty, broken down objects litter each yard of the decrepit, rotting houses. Meth production and usage is rampant, and high schools appear to function less as preparatory facilities for college than recruiting stations for the military. That raises questions about the fairness of voluntary enlistment, but for those growing up in this situation, a hostile Middle Eastern desert might seem a tropic getaway.

Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) also has dreams of joining the Army to get the $40,000 signing payment and to get the hell away. But when her father, Jessup, goes on the lam, Ree knows she'll never be able to leave, forced to care for her younger siblings and a brain-dead mother. To make matters worse, the local sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) comes 'round to inform Ree that Jessup skipped out on his bail, and if he doesn't show up for his hearing, the bondsman will come and collect the house Jessup put up as collateral.

Winter's Bone unfolds as a mystery, yet the core of the story veers off the path of the usual thriller. When we learn Jessup made meth, the film instantly ceases to be about Ree trying to find out what happened to her dad and simply a story of her looking for the inevitable corpse. Yet it's also not a whodunit: Jessup's brother and Ree's uncle, Teardrop (John Hawkes), knows what will happen if word gets out, and at one point he sternly whispers to Ree that if she ever finds out what happened to Jessup to never tell anyone, not even him. If the grim setting were not macabre enough, Winter's Bone is ultimately the quest of a young woman to find and recover just enough of her father that a forensics lab can identify.

There can be no doubt that director Debra Granik, working from Daniel Woodrell's novel, exaggerates its characters and conditions. It is a work of drama. Yet the film sidesteps the usual garish stereotyping that befalls and grim absurdity of backwoods horror, digging into a serious issue plaguing these economically crippled areas. Ree has an admirable fearlessness, but the deeper she travels into the complicated, deadly web of drug production and insular community, the more her courage becomes a liability.

Avoiding garish, gory displays of violence and cheap scares, Granik and cinematographer Michael McDonough instead create a constant sense of unease, as if the world is slowly collapsing until we suspect time and space might bend and form a noose around this young woman's neck. Not even family is much help to Ree, and everyone she encounters, whether they have anything to hide or not, exudes a threatening aura. The people of this region have aged prematurely: deep wrinkles threaten to make mole people out of the middle-aged. Stringy, oily hair hangs in clumps.

That's what makes Lawrence stand out. Granik doesn't "prettify" her -- Lawrence has the same messy hair as everyone else -- but for all the emotional maturity she conveys, there's a youthfulness to her appearance that no one else shares. Though fit from constant hard work and a few too many missed meals on account of money, Ree still has a lining of baby fat that retains her youth in a way that even her peers do not enjoy. Her friend Gail, already saddled with a baby, lost all her pregnancy weight but looks as if she aged about 10 years from delivery, and while the husband from her shotgun wedding still wears jerseys and plays video games, he simply looks foolish trying to hang on to his teenage years to get away from the responsibility thrust upon him. Previously known for playing the daughter on The Bill Engvall Show, a tidbit already destined for a "before she was big" clip on a future episode of Inside the Actor's Studio, Lawrence turns that program's gentle, pandering Southern stereotypes on their head, getting at the dark side.

Lawrence has enjoyed about as big a wave of critical praise this year as any actor, and she earns every plaudit. She plays Ree as if a put-upon straight (wo)man who hasn't been informed she's in a horror film and not a comedy. Even her body language communicates an exasperated sigh, as if she knows everything she's about to do is ill-advised but to hell with it, anyway. Encountering characters so grotesque and misshapen that they become the mythological beasts in this Greek drama, Ree never flinches, even after she proves that flinching is not an indication of weakness but an important instinct to protect oneself from harm. Only once does she fully break down, and it's in a moment so horrific that to only shed tears is itself a sign of courage. So natural is Lawrence in the role that she can be in the middle of a monologue and interrupt her train of thought to say "Bless you" with concern when her little brother sneezes.

The sociological implications of Winter's Bone are clear, its setting evoking some East European, post-Communist hellhole that never stabilized when it really occurs in a section of the United States that has been neglected for decades. (When an American flag appears in the reflection of a windshield, it seems a cruel, nagging joke.) Yet Granik has the presence of mind to temper what could have been a parade of clichés -- meth heads, pregnant teens, incestuous communities -- into something that eerily taps into the feelings of hopelessness felt even in the affluent cities during this recession. Furthermore, Granik ensures we admire Ree, who at 17 appears more capable of taking on the world than damn near anyone I've met in college (and that absolutely includes myself). If anything, we're meant to bemoan the fact that Ree will never be allowed to move into the bigger world and contribute, which explains why Granik does not build up the Army as a scapegoat or a strawman image of opportunistic feeders. The dark truth running under the narrative is that, if Ree fails to clear the family, social services will take away her siblings. However, if she succeeds in keeping the house, she effectively binds herself to it forever. But Ree never wavers, and it's a good thing too, for you'll need her strength to face the terror she confronts on a daily basis even from the safe distance of artifice.