Capsule Reviews: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Life Without Principle, On the Road

Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)

Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, uses memories of Katrina as fodder for a sub-magical-realist burst of half-stylized poverty porn. Zeitlin aims for inoffensiveness by casting the severe limitations the poor face—no access to healthcare, poor education, the laughably weak safety net—as fantastical positives. This is a film where witch doctors brew medicine in jars, where everyone looks freshly rubbed down in dirt to achieve just the right look of want, and where only the truly worthy both refuse to evacuate from a coming storm and violently reject any attempts by outside bodies to help them. Young Quevenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry give performances entirely too good and revelatory for such heinous rot, but even their raw and honest work is undone by the falsity of what they are meant to invoke. Like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the film approaches a serious, national trauma and filters it through the eyes of a child. And like that other disaster, it does not use this perspective to grapple with the scope of tragedy but to infantilize it. Grade: D-

Life Without Principle (Johnnie To, 2012)

Life Without Principle cuts against the grain of financial crisis movies that take place behind solid, wooden doors, instead curving around the public floor of the bank, where employees are watched through their transparent barriers to provoke them into selling more, always more. It also moves among those unconnected to the financial industry save the shackles they place on themselves to pay for their lifestyles, linking not only the benign social climbers reaching beyond their grasp but the criminal element who come off as farcically sloppy compared to the machinations of the banks. By keeping his camera street-level, To can approach the tangled web of culpability with empathy and admonishment without the saccharine crucifixion of the fatcats who set the collapse into motion. We do not even have to sit through yet another portentous realization that the market will crash; it simply does one day, and we know about it because the financial analyst struggling to make her quota suddenly fields dozens of frantic, furious calls from people watching their life savings disappear. Movies like Arbitrage spare false sympathies for those who had every indication of what was coming but kept ignoring it, but Life Without Principle truly captures the sudden upheaval experienced by those who subconsciously put their faith in the system, and the coldness of that faceless, inhuman greed hangs over the proceedings. Even its resolution, a triumph on material grounds, reflects the amoral, arbitrary meaninglessness of a world in which the vagaries of monetary value hold sway. Grade: A-

On the Road (Walter Salles, 2012)

Shot as if making a teen film set in the present, On the Road divorces the Beats first of aesthetic, then social context. Salles’ film portrays the characters as the sort of listless creatures who populate our current movies, youth in medicated, dead-eyed search for a cause, rather than having a plethora of choices at their disposal. Drug use, sexual experimentation and jazz run through the film as they did the book, but there is no element of transgression to the behavior, no feeling that they are doing something wild. So interminably dull, even repellent, are the characters and their journey to nowhere that, for a brief spell, I began to hope the film would undermine and critique the solipsistic Beat escapism on display, with privileged white youth rebelling against a society that affords them such comfort that they can do as they please while others must toil. But no, there is a terrible earnestness to the self-evidently awful lives inflicted on an entire nation as the road carries the characters back and forth. So maybe it’s a faithful adaptation, after all. Grade: D

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (Bill Condon, 2011)

Only the most cynical financial motivation could lead anyone to split Breaking Dawn, the conclusion to Stephenie Meyer's embarrassing and tedious tetralogy about a girl's inability to function without the sexual presence of her emotionally unstable lover. There isn't even enough material to fill this film, which goes above and beyond the already over-saturated prevalence of helicopter shots of Pacific Northwest forests, the visual trademark of this film franchise. Breaking Dawn Part 1 starts with a wedding and ends with a birth. It's like Yi Yi, only replace the rationalist evocation of life's pains and pleasures with dialogue so mortally stilted that the actors can only prolong their demises by fighting against it.

Breaking Dawn Part 1 is a film of even mores. It's got even more helicopter shots, even more Edward flightiness, even more Jacob sulking, and, amazingly, even more Kristen Stewart lip biting (how has her lower lip not fallen off?). The one exception is plot, of which there is even less than usual. Director Bill Condon gets us through Bella's and Edward's wedding painlessly enough, but soon the film languishes as their honeymoon bliss turns to crazed pregnancy fears softened by so much religious conservatism that even the occasional newcomer dragged to this film by a fan will know that everything will turn out fine for our empty shell of a heroine.

From the start, Breaking Dawn displays the franchise's glacial pace and unintended humor. Melissa Rosenberg, writer of all the saga's screenplays, has tried to alleviate the former by shoehorning in various stabs at intentional comedy, but with the exception of Billy Burke's always reliable Charlie, everyone's jokes fall flat while the sheer listlessness of everyone involved makes it hard for one not to bust up laughing amidst a sea of Twi-hards. Consider the montage of toast givers at the wedding, where everyone awkwardly stumbles through some lame jokes, then look at the far more entertaining moment of tension between the invited werewolves and the offended vampire Irina. Watching Maggie Grace attempt a look of disgust and effrontery, which instead comes out a sort of overwhelming social panic (as if she'd just loudly farted and had no way to deflect blame), proves one of the film's comic highlights.

There's also the acting, which continues to suggest either hostility to the script or mere incompetence. It's certainly embarrassing to see people like Michael Sheen and Peter Facinelli stooping to droning out portentous lines, though not as bad as Taylor Lautner's seemingly immobile face hissing sour comments out of any break between teeth. Robert Pattinson continues to be unreadable, delivering Edward's clinging lines with conviction but also betraying moments where one can't help but think he's in on the joke. Indeed, the only pleasure I've gotten from these movies is gradually catching on to Pattinson's strange game, and having to fret over Bella's half-breed demon fetus—or, as one vampire insists, "baby," opening up a political argument this insipid, anti-feminist text cannot hope to argue with any depth—is like a comic gift from heaven.

Forced to comply with a PG-13 rating, Condon cannot plumb the depths of Meyer's unhinged sexual fantasy, eliding over sex scenes and censoring the Grand Guignol birth scene of this first part's climax with some simplistic but schizophrenic effects. The repression that so ensnares Bella extends to the framing and editing, to the point that Breaking Dawn would make a fine add-on to Condon's biopic on Arthur Kinsey, if for no other reason than to prove the sex researcher right in his belief that an unhealthy view of sex could lead to unhealthy psychological problems. After forcing Bella to remain chaste for three novels, Meyer abruptly throws her into physically harmful sex and a pregnancy that any sensible person would abort, basking in the long-delayed sexual euphoria and then meting out punishment for it. And then Meyer makes sure to clarify that Bella quite literally asks for it so no one raises any objections.

But as much as I revile the sexual politics inadvertently thrust into this franchise, what continues to rile me the most is the mere lifelessness of these films. Not one of them has a spark of chemistry between anyone, much less the raging torrents of passion each installment is meant to invoke. After their night of bruising lovemaking, Bella asks her guilt-ridden husband, "Why can't you see how perfectly happy I am?" to which one wishes he would respond, "Because you just said that sentence so flatly it didn't even sound like a question." So unutterably dull is this picture that its casual inclusion of offensively simple-minded issues—from its pro-life stance to its forgiveness of Edward's past murders (see, he only killed bad people, so he's actually a hero)—could not even rouse me to anger. That would be some form of emotional response, which this film cannot hope to conjure. I was, however, incensed that Guillermo Navarro, the cinematographer responsible for the breathtaking blue nights of Jackie Brown and Pan's Labyrinth (among others), is the man behind Breaking Dawn's murky, atrocious night shots. Now that is an artistic offense.