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Showing posts with label Robert De Niro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert De Niro. Show all posts
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Sunday, December 29, 2013
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The nicest thing I can say about Last Vegas is that it isn’t quite as bad as it so obviously should be. High praise indeed for a film that takes De Niro, a titan of cinema if there ever was one, and subjects him to an excruciating scene where a whooping moron grinds his thong clad groin in his face to the thumping beat of LFMAO’s Party Rock Anthem. Suddenly Taxi Driver feels like a film from an alternate (better) reality. The inception of the film was obviously 'The Hangover but with famous old dudes' - a pitch so safe that studio heads probably began writing cheques so fast their pens blurred. And so we wind up with Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline do Vegas, a quartet whose combined star power is so colossal that this movie can only be so bad, right? R-right?
The four play a gang of childhood friends who find themselves scattered across the country in their old age; Michael Douglas' Billy is desperately clinging to the last vestiges of his youth, preparing for marriage to a woman more than half his age; Kevin Kline’s Sam is living a horrible living dead life in Florida, impotent and emasculated; Morgan Freeman’s Archie is recovering from a stroke and consequently being infantilised by his overbearing son; and, most depressingly of all, Robert De Niro’s Paddy is a grumpy widower leading an isolated existence in a mausoleum to his dead wife. With Billy’s impending marriage the stage is set for one final big blowout, the four men throwing caution to the wind escaping to Vegas.
With that setup the script practically writes itself, each hilarious comedy encounter leading the four men towards re-igniting the dynamic spark of youth buried deep inside. The film thus becomes a series of set-pieces in which the central joke is always is always an old fart having to deal with a situation usually suited for a much younger man. The film parades through nightclubs pumping out dirty bass, plastic fantastic bikini pool parties, high stakes gambling games and via an increasingly improbable amount of young, beautiful women willing to overlook their wrinkled, craggy exteriors and appreciate our heroes inner beauty.
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| Even the press pack screengrabs are bereft of style. |
This is a cliche-written crapfest of a story, but for all the groanworthy narrative developments, Last Vegas never quite strays into the actually dire, settling on homogenous 'there-ness'. The critical mass of acting talent means that though the material is unquestionably middle-of-the-road, thankfully no-one humiliates themselves - their combined screen presence papering over the numerous cracks in the film.
Turtletaub’s direction is quietly competent, though absent of pizzazz. There’s the odd heavyhanded yet workable moment; like Douglas’ Billy finally realising he should come to terms with his age while surrounded by ruined neon signs from the Sinatra-era, and a climactic party sequence is at at least visually busy and nicely colourful. This anonymous, workmanlike directorial style is probably a hell of a lot more difficult to achieve than it looks, yet, frankly, it's just not very interesting to watch. Mercifully the pacing is pretty brisk - a product of a palpable and grim determination threaded through the entire production to get this shit out of the way in as professional and competent a manner as possible so everyone can get back to doing what they actually want to do in life.
The four actors at the centre of the film appear to be largely sleepwalking through this, with good reason, De Niro in particular continuing to squandermuch of the recent goodwill he chalked up with Silver Linings Playbook - a performance that now feels like an exception to the rule rather than any indication of a late cinematic renaissance for him. Douglas suffers from a rather cartoonish and underwritten role, a sharp contrast from his intricately realised Liberace in Behind the Candelabra. The only small mis-step is Kevin Kline, who just isn't quite on the same cinematic level as the other three, his casting looking suspiciously like the backup choice after Bill Murray declined.
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| I can't think of anything interesting to say about this. I like Morgan Freeman's jacket I guess. |
By the climax we're up to our knees in syrupy bullshit as the men finally arrive at the predestined emotional endpoints that've been telegraphed since the first ten minutes. This is a film with zero surprises, dull visuals and a condescendingly obvious message; a film with all the rough and interesting edges sandpapered away with the aim of producing a bland, forgettable product rather than anything worthwhile. That said, there are a few things to like.
Prime among them is Mary Steenburgen as the principal love interest. She's one of those actors that you'd never think to name as a favourite yet improves practically any production she turns up in. It's nice to see her cast in a properly romantic role rather than the sexless, maternally school-marmish roles women her age usually end up saddled with. Another point in the film's favour is a nice surprise in its treatment of trans people. There's a gag where Kevin Kline goes into a Vegas bar and unbeknownst to him, starts chatting up a broad-shouldered drag queen. At this point I was shrinking into my seat, this ancient comedy setup generally leading to embarrassingly shite 'chicks with dicks' material. But for once the film zigs where it usually zags, even allowing these side-characters a nice trans-positive coda in the final sequence.
That isn't really enough to warrant seeing this though, Last Vegas is about as unremarkable a film as its possible to be. Your life will not be enriched in anyway by this film, whether you see it for not. It's just there: now a fact of our lives like the English Channel or Cumulonimbus clouds, like the music of Leona Lewis or Countdown. Just another title that'll spin past unwatched in the comedies section of Netflix for years and years to come. That it's maybe not as bad as it could be is faint praise indeed - Last Vegas is the very definition of unremarkable.
★★
Last Vegas is on general release from January 3rd
Monday, May 20, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
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I wasn't exactly looking forward to seeing The Big Wedding. It currently sits at a near rock-bottom 8% on the Rotten Tomatometer, with critics variously describing it as "bland", "vulgar", "witless", "tired" and "dated". This, coupled with the fact that the screening I was booked to attend meant I had to be up 9am on Sunday morning, a time when I'd really rather be eating toast and reading the paper. Then there's my long-held dislike of wedding films. The same tired old jokes, the boring caricatures, the plot locked on rails and the cute kids/dogs - it makes me so tired. What happens in The Big Wedding is such a tired old jumble of cliches and crappy sitcom contrivances that it's honestly not worth outlining. There's a wedding and some things go wrong, you know the deal.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
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‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a film about mental illness. We follow the story of Pat (Bradley Cooper), sufferer of a bipolar disorder. As the film opens he's being released from a state mental institution after serving a sentence for violently beating someone half to death. He suffers from intense mood swings, turning on a knife edge from happy and upbeat to depressive and violent.
David O. Russell has created a film that pulls itself in two directions at once. It’s obviously striving to present an accurate and sympathetic view of various types of mental disorder but is shackled to the conventions of the romantic comedy. These two ‘genres’ (if ‘mental illness film’ is really a genre) sit uneasily together.
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| Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) and Pat (Bradley Cooper) |
The narrative shows us Pat’s attempts to conquer his condition and reintegrate himself into a society that’s suspicious and scared of him. They’re scared of him with good reason though, he lacks a filter on his words and actions, frequently acting inappropriately and with no empathy for how he might come across to others. While he’s constantly feeling some kind of extreme emotion, he entirely lacks the apparatus to identify how he’s affecting those around him. He’ll burst into his parent’s bedroom late at night to rant about Ernest Hemingway and throw a book through the window, or run up and hug a visibly frightened ex-colleague.
Pat is not the most likeable filmic hero. Throughout the film he operates under the illusion that he’s going to get his marriage back together, which everyone around him can immediately tell is not going to happen. People try to let him down gently and get him to see that his wife probably isn’t coming back. He labours under the illusion that their love is unbreakable, even after she’s had an affair and he’s nearly beaten a man to death in front of her.
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| Pat's parents, Dolores (Jacki Weaver) and Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) |
Into this tangled world comes the equally complicated Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence). She’s a recent widow and ever since her husband died has been undergoing an alienating nymphomania. To the obvious disgust and embarrassment of her family she’s been having sex with nearly everybody she comes across. It’s gotten to the point where she’s been fired from her job for sleeping with everyone in the office. So can these two damaged people come together and help each other with their problems?
But it’s not just our two leads that are suffering psychic pains. One of the points the film makes is that the dividing line between those that are diagnosed mentally atypical and those that appear to lead normal lives is blurred. Nearly every character in the film appears to be dealing with some kind of problem, be it an obsessive compulsive disorder, violent fits of rage or a hidden depression. Russell is much more sympathetic to those like Pat and Tiffany who are honest enough to recognise their own problems and has a deep respect for the methods they use to try and fix themselves.
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| also Chris Tucker is in this film. |
Both Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence have raging internal storms constantly bubbling behind their performances. They’re portraying people that are not only volatile, but to some degree also have the knowledge that they can ‘get away with it’. The two have both been damaged in some way, so both have an 'excuse' for their actions. One of Cooper’s best tactics is to use his wide, bright blue eyes to show Pat's terrifying clearness and confidence in his actions. The disconnect between how sure he is that his course is the right one and what we in the audience know to be true makes him both tragic and fairly frightening. Cooper is confident in a difficult role, and in less skilled hands runs a risk of losing audience sympathy altogether.
Lawrence is a good match for him, her and Cooper bounce off each other realistically and reflexively. She doesn’t have quite as many emotional gears to shift into as he does, but this is more of a function of her character rather than a limitation in her performance. What she does fantastically is the transformation from reserved, cool and collected to towering, violent, frustrated rage. There’s a physical change that comes over her in one scene that’s a marvel to behold, it’s like suddenly there’s a completely different person that’s sprung out of the character.
The world that these two inhabit is as carefully constructed as the two central characters. Due to their mental states, both Pat and Tiffany live and are dependant on their parents. Russell takes the same kind of downbeat look at working class American life as he did in ‘The Fighter’, although with a slightly softer touch. The film takes place in an overcast suburbia, row after row of identical houses, identical streets and nosy neighbours. This endless downtrodden domestic conformity gets to you after a while, but does the job of making our leads stand out like sore thumbs.
It’s clear that everyone involved here is sincere in making a film that aims to educate us about what it is like suffering from or living with a person with a mental disorder. The characters are treated with nothing but dignity, even in their most unsympathetic moments we at least understand why they are doing what they’re doing. Despite this, the film does use the pretty lame cliche of saying ‘maybe the ones who’ve been diagnosed with mental illness are actually the sane ones?’
This film has genuine flashes of complexity, and when it resorts to cliché like this it falls flat. Russell goes some way to justify this by making nearly every other character in the film a bubbling pit of vague symptoms, but this ends up feeling like a clever way to dodge the point. ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ doesn’t exactly glamorise mental illness, but that fact that it propels the central love story means some of the rough edges are necessarily sanded down.
For the vast majority of the running time ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a downbeat, bittersweet indie drama. The last quarter of the film feels like it’s been parachuted in from a glossy, conventional romantic comedy. Suddenly these damaged characters that we’ve gotten to know are acting relatively normally, and the focus shifts not onto whether they’re healing mentally, but bizarrely, onto their dancing skills. The argument the film puts forward is that their dancing skills are directly linked to their mental health, but after treading so carefully on this territory for the first 90 minutes it becomes very clumsy, very fast.
It’s a let down. We have it impressed upon us that this is an impossibly complex situation with no easy solutions, but the film takes a tonal swerve, shows us that actually there are easy solutions and ties everything up in a neat little bow. A happy ending and roll credits.
Other criticisms include the fact that this film assumes you have a knowledge of American Football, and specifically know a vague history of the Philadelphia Eagles. Characters repeatedly reference events in the history of this team, which may be common knowledge in the US, but I’ve got no idea what the hell they’re talking about and there’s not enough context to figure it out.
The climax of the film involves a ridiculously complex bet on which all the emotional and financial woes of our characters rest. The set up for this bet is one of the most interminable and confusing scenes I’ve seen in a film lately, and assumes you’ve got a knowledge of both American Football and US betting lingo. There’s a protracted negotiation of ‘points’ on a bet and just when this is decided, the characters begin discussing transforming the already complex bet into a parlay (I didn’t know what this was). To be fair they include a clumsy bit of exposition after the scene is over that translates it all into plain English, but it’s too little too late. If the audience is watching the set up to the big climax and they don’t know what the hell anyone is talking about, it saps urgency from the film and replaces it with alienation and confusion.
‘Silver Linings Playbook’ for the most part is an achingly sincere film that clearly cares a great deal about its subject matter. It’s got a solid core of talent and some deftly and sensitively sketched characterisation. But it can’t work out what it wants to be. Does it want to be an serious indie drama about mental illness or a conventional rom-com with two sweet, attractive leads? By trying to do both it doesn’t succeed at either.
‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is on general release from 21st November 2012
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