The Devil Inside (Zero Dark Thirty)

Shortly before Zero Dark Thirty came out, I flippantly remarked that I'd give the movie "bonus points if it spares us a Mission Control Applause scene." As you know, Mission Control Applause is nearly obligatory in dramatic thrillers depicting real-life, high-risk scenarios pulled off successfully while Ed Harris or Bryan Cranston barks orders at a team of men staring at computer screens with their shirt-sleeves rolled up and cigarette butts dropping to the floor. It's no surprise, at the end of Kathryn Bigelow's film, that the grand plan to kill Osama bin Laden succeeds; what is surprising is the absence of celebration. Instead of a hearty round of hand-clapping, Bigelow holds instead on the pensive expression of Maya (Jessica Chastain), the young, female intelligence operative who brought the ten-year pursuit of bin Laden to its end. Actually, her face is more than pensive. She looks haunted, as if the ghosts of 9/11 can never be fully excised.

Ghosts are haunting, indeed clouding the reception of the movie as well, namely the specter of Abu Ghraib that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal - to either their credit or detriment - revive. As everybody knows by now, Zero Dark Thirty contains scenes at a CIA "black site" where an American agent named Dan (played by Jason Clarke) strips, dog-collars, hot-boxes, and waterboards a captured al-Qaeda member named Ammar (played by Reda Kateb). Maya, who is introduced during these passages as a troubled yet complicit bystander, eventually learns from Ammar the name of a courier ("Ahmed from Kuwait") whom she comes to believe is in the employ of bin Laden. Some critics - an odd, unwieldy mix of admirers of the film (Owen Gleiberman, David Edelstein), politicos with insider info (Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, John McCain), and left-wing crusaders who either have or haven't seen the movie (Glenn Greenwald, Ed Asner, Martin Sheen), it isn't always clear - have traced the steps from the black site to bin Laden as evidence that Zero Dark Thirty is saying "torture works."

While it appears that Boal and Bigelow have, in raising this topic, opened a Pandora's Box more incendiary than their methods (or interview statements) can quite get a handle on, I think that their stance is more complicated than these connect-the-dots reviews suggest. This is evinced not only in what Glenn Kenny perceptively defines as Bigelow's "film grammar," which conveys sympathy for Ammar in the early scenes (as a suffering and degraded human being, even though the movie never lets us forget he is also a terrorist with ties to 9/11), but in the narrative itself. Mark Bowden (author of The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden, which I haven't read) is one of only a few discerning viewers who have pointed out that the initial torturing of Ammar does not, in fact, accomplish Dan's objective - the prevention of an attack in Saudi Arabia - and that the discovery of the courier is obtained through Maya's subsequent kinder, gentler act of subterfuge. Others, like Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot, have referred to a later scene, where Maya's friend and colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) shakes her head dismissively during a broadcast of newly elected President Obama's condemnation of the treatment of detainees, ostensibly in response to the man's naivete. Yet this overlooks what ultimately happens to Jessica, involving a lead in Afghanistan that turns deadly, and could be inferred as payback (direct or karmic) for the detainee program.

The controversy over Zero Dark Thirty has become convoluted to the point where smart and stupid things are being written by the same people in the same pieces. Bowden interrupts his otherwise sound reasoning with an silly anecdote that suggests we know Kathryn Bigelow isn't pro-torture because he heard she's a nice person. Conversely, Reichert makes amid some inaccurate interpretations the most valid criticism I've read about the movie: that Zero Dark Thirty's journalistic realism is, like all "reality-based" cinema and television, just another fictional construction. "When Olivier Assayas...mounted Carlos, a similarly scaled production dealing with global terrorism, his opening card noted the necessary fictionalization of events," Reichert notes. He goes on: "Bigelow and Boal stick to their personality-free 'just the facts' approach as obsessively as their heroine sticks to her dogged pursuit of bin Laden, but what happens to a film like Zero Dark Thirty when the filmmakers' facts are hotly disputed, especially by people who are in a far better position to know?"

What happens, unfortunately, is we're left with one of those movies shanghaied by the agenda-mongerers, a film whose veracity and artistry can't be viewed entirely clearly in the present day. This will likely mean a shutout at the Oscars (oh-deary-dear!), among other irksome side-effects. Yet while I can't speak for the movie's veracity, I do believe, once the dust settles, its artistry is going to hold up well over time.

As a longtime non-fan of the "reality approach" (jittery cameras, etc.), I have to give Bigelow her due as its reigning expert. Less obtrusively than Paul Greengrass, she has, in her two collaborations with Boal, developed a style that looks "journalistic" (read: objective) yet embeds within that style a subjective perspective toward the events it's documenting. This leads us back to the issue of film grammar, and the notion that whereas a picture used to be worth a thousand words, now, it seems, a word is worth a thousand pictures. Just as some viewers cannot discern Bigelow's position on torture via her visual language, both fans and foes of Zero Dark Thirty have been praising or condemning the movie entire for "not taking a stand" and "letting you draw your own conclusions." It's true that Bigelow doesn't overtly push an agenda, nor do she crowd us, as Pauline Kael once complained about Oliver Stone. Her approach is visceral, not intellectual. And I think, in purely visceral terms, she has a pretty clear viewpoint about what she's depicting.

Zero Dark Thirty, like David Fincher's Zodiac, is a procedural about an obsessive manhunt that shows the effects of the hunt on the obsessives. Some of this is explicit: Black-Site Dan, for example, tells Maya that he's returning to Washington for less stressful work (and, not incidentally, because he tips her off that oversight committees are forming, and "you don't want to be the one caught holding the leash"); there are also a telling couple of scenes where Dan enjoys playing with monkeys in a cage (one, to his delight, steals his ice-cream cone), then gets upset that they were killed out of concern that they'd escape. Yet much of what happens is implicit, not just the look on Maya's face as she watches hours of video of tortured prisoners, but the way Bigelow's camera glides by a computer monitor for a fleeting glimpse of a digital image of Maya and Jessica on the desktop. It's in the completely unremarked-upon international gallery of light- and dark-skinned players who help Maya link the elusive Ahmed to bin Laden, among them none other than Edgar Ramirez (Carlos the Jackal himself), as well as the expressive Lebanese actor Fares Fares. (I do wish American movies, even well-intentioned ones like Zero Dark Thirty, would give foreign actors like Fares more to do besides stare suggestively.) It's in the opening prologue, similar to a scene in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in depicting the events of September 11 via audio on a black screen, except Bigelow and Boal focus on one phone call from a victim trapped in the Towers and a 911 responder - both women, which subconsciously prepares us for the female protagonist we are about to encounter.

Most powerfully, the clarity is there at the end, a stunning thirty-minute recreation of the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. I'd be lying if I didn't admit looking forward to this sequence, to obtain some kind of visual "closure" in something we've all only heard or read about (most notably in Nicholas Smidle's superb August 2011 New Yorker account). Bigelow is uncannily good at casting familiar faces in small yet crucial parts (remember the doomed Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes in The Hurt Locker?), and among the Navy SEALS who led the assault are Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, and other actors capable of simultaneously embodying courage and lack of virtue. It's precisely this multifaceted approach that makes closure anticlimactic, unreachable. The details of the raid are vivid and unfussed-over (like the Belgian Malinois - similar to a German Shepherd - brought along, Smidle informs us, to sniff out false walls or hidden doors). Yet we miss nothing: a woman is killed; children wail; an extra bullet is put in each body unceremoniously. The killing of Osama bin Laden happens in the corner of the frame and is over in the blink of an eye.

If I were the type of critic who always feels the need to "balance" a positive review by pointing out a few flaws ("That thing in the corner, I don't like that thing"), I would mention that Boal's script includes a few cliches that clang (Maya telling off her superiors, etc.), and that Bigelow's staging of a long set-piece involving Jennifer Ehle could use a tad more imagination for leading to such a predictable outcome (ditto Alexandre Desplat's ominous "Middle Eastern" music). Boal is an odd talent, fumbling between occasionally overcooked zingers with lines of terrific precision and insight. (When told that Maya is smart, James Gandolfini's CIA Director deadpans, "We're all smart.") Yet he sidesteps many of the cliches Ben Affleck wades into in Argo: Maya's singlehood is brought up briefly and dropped quickly, without any couched family-values implications of disapproval.

Moreover, Boal has brought out the best in Bigelow. Their collaboration on The Hurt Locker, however impressive, has been eclipsed by their achievement here. As Tom Carson explicates, "the movie is about the moral, psychological, and even spiritual price we paid" to bring down bin Laden. It's there in the words, and most of all the images; and it's in the latter quality that the movie ultimately departs from David Fincher's aforementioned great film about the Zodiac killer. The main characters in that film see their lives destroyed by the case. With Dan, whom we see startlingly fresh-faced later in Zero Dark Thirty, and Maya, shedding tears at her mission's end, we can only imagine the damage that has been done to their souls. Yet a lingering shadow across their eyes - as well as the victorious SEALs, on the helicopter ride home, looking silently upon the corpse of the evildoer who so feverishly occupied the American imagination - is clearly, unambiguously there. It isn't hard to see why. In Zodiac, the monster is never found. In Zero Dark Thirty, the monster is killed at last. And it's a decrepit old man in a body bag.
        

Best Favorite Films of 2012: A Big Year For Small Gems

I can't on good conscience do "Best" lists, seeing probably less than 10% of the new releases over the year. I'm very selective of what I go to see and not infrequently disappointed by what I do, so I wonder if having to view the truly bad films would make me go easier on the merely mediocre. Whatever the case, this year I found the heavily hyped "big" movies often underwhelming (two of my favorite filmmakers, Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, whiffed big-time), yet several small gems impressed and delighted. Consider then the following a sample survey of the Year In Film.

Favorite Film: Friends and family scared me away from seeing The Grey (they hated it), until I halfheartedly caught up with it near the end of the year on DVD. For a while into the picture it seemed they were right. Even though I admired the craft of the movie (the plane crash is a model of economy), I thought the early wolf attacks, while terrifying and upsetting, were staged for nothing more than cheap thrills. Then somewhere along the way, the film stopped looking like a survivalist docudrama and turned into something more mysterious and substantial. Richard Bellamy on Twitter perceptively cited Jack London ("To Build a Fire" comes vividly to mind), and I also recalled what one critic said  about Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue (reportedly a far gentler movie): It's a poetic allegory about a dying man coming to terms with his own mortality. I disliked Joe Carnahan's ballyhooed 2002 debut Narc and avoided all of his A-Team, Smokin' Aces Hollywood product since, but now he has my attention: His work in The Grey, anchored by Liam Neeson's stirring performance, has the diamond-hard integrity of Peckinpah at his peak.  

Other Faves: Moonrise Kingdom turned out to be a fragile classic, more beautiful and delicate than any of Wes Anderson's previous films while miraculously avoiding their pitfalls. Leos Carax's Holy Motors was the year's best movie about movies, a self-reflexive subject that's growing tiresome, but which Carax navigated with thrilling unpredictability. David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis was a sleek, masterful satire about an unfeeling robot (Robert Pattinson's billionaire limo-rider) who yearns to be a real boy. 2012's most impressive debut goes to Kleber Mendonca Filho's Neighboring Sounds, an Altmanesque survey of economic stratification in urban Brazil; while the nimble action-thriller Haywire was Steven Soderbergh's most entertaining, unfussiest work in over a decade. Forget the perfunctory plot: the real story was about a pointy-headed nerd-director falling in love with Gina Carano's physical prowess and staging her action scenes with verve and alacrity.

Also: Mia Hansen-Love's Goodbye First Love was a touching, observant film about the pain and joy of young romance, and Terrence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea the same - yet even better - about a middle-aged affair (with Rachel Weisz winning the year's Kirsten Dunst-in-Melancholia Award for most unexpected great performance). Last and possibly least, Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts was the wisest and most generous of the year's obligatory naval-gazing American indies. It's also the kind of movie a lot of other people don't like, and has the kind of setting (college campus) and theme (the precipice of middle-age) that together may make a blind spot for me. So be it.

Favorites of 2011 I saw in 2012: I was very glad to see Asghar Farhadi's superb A Separation at Ebertfest, a docudrama-thriller whose gradual revelation of its central event keeps expanding your understanding of what happened (and of Iranian culture in general) and shifting your loyalties even as it expertly tightens the screws. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was, for me, an immeasurably superior adaptation to the slow-as-molasses BBC miniseries, whittling down its visual syntax to a fine blade. Finally, The Big Year, David Frankel's uncommonly gentle comedy, makes some keen observations about the loneliness of obsessives and the bonding and competitiveness that derive from shared obsessions (rather topical, I thought). Among numerous lovely touches, Steve Martin's acceptance of facing "the abyss" is his most moving moment ever on screen.

Favorite Revivals: For the second full year, the Indiana University Cinema was the place to be (if you don't live in New York, Chicago, or L.A.) for revivals of classic films. Things peaked early, with a January screening of Once Upon a Time in the West, a 35mm presentation introduced by the supervisor of the restoration, retired film preservationist Barry Allen. Other delights were seeing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (2K DCP) with my dad, followed by Casablanca (2K) and The Third Man (35mm) with both my mom and dad. 2012 also ended on a high note, with a ravishing 2K digital restoration of The Leopard. As the laments over digital grow increasingly tiresome (as do the "See, I told you so!" reports of technical foul-ups at screenings, from folks forgetting all the occasions where film reels have broken or unspooled), the quality of both film and digital at the IU Cinema reinforces that it's the skill and experience of the projectionist that matters most. 

I'm Probably Overrating: The Avengers. Admittedly, it's a bit messy, with too many superheroes to keep track of, some more interesting (e.g., Mark Ruffalo's Hulk) than others. But it's still a rare comic-book movie that possesses a genuine's artist's worldview, and Joss Whedon's light touch with so much character and incident was a balm following more heavy-handed affairs (see below).

Everyone Else is Overrating (But I Still Liked It): I might have enjoyed Richard Linklater's Bernie more had I not read so much about the plot in advance. Nevertheless, Jack Black's finely-tuned performance as a kind-hearted self-aggrandizer and murderer (on the heels of his fine work as a completely different character in The Big Year) is a showcase for his unappreciated depth and range.

It's Not That Bad: John Carter. Can a motion picture cost $250 million and still qualify as a "B"-movie? I'm somewhat skeptical, yet Andrew Stanton's old-school sci-fi epic feels lively rather than bloated, silly instead of self-important. That's a compliment.

And there were disappointments:

Biggest Load of Hot-Air: The Master. Paul Thomas Anderson's loud, posturing postwar/Scientology/male-bonding character study huffs and puffs on a whole bevy of topics without saying anything remotely insightful about any of them. It's never a good sign when scenes from the trailer not in the final cut looked more intriguing than what remains onscreen. 

Biggest Load of Hot-Air (Comic-Book Version): The Dark Knight Rises. Christopher Nolan stumblebummed his way through another grim portrait of the Caped Crusader, only this time with greatly diminished returns, trotting out a half-assed allegory of the financial crisis and Occupy Movement (see Cosmopolis for a superior take) so we never forget, as always, that he means Serious Business. It's been a long time since I've seen a movie repeatedly blow one potentially stirring moment after another.

Most Inexplicable Comparison to Alan J. Pakula: Argo. Ben Affleck's lame Iranian hostage-crisis thriller reduces a fascinating real-life incident to a stockpile of Hollywood cliches. Brilliant!

Betrayed By Its Own Ending: Friends with Kids. For the majority of its running-time, Jennifer Westfeldt's anti-romantic comedy challenges cultural assumptions of marital superiority, only to validate them with a deeply phony cop-out climax.

Good Will vs. Wretched Excess: Peter Jackson's The Hobbit returns to Middle-Earth without the heart and emotion of the original trilogy. Turning a feather of a story into a sledgehammer, it plays like a padded DVD Extended Edition released theatrically. Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained starts strong before getting uncharacteristically bogged down in its own unconvincing plot developments (some convoluted nonsense about an offscreen character named Eskimo Joe), rather than following through on the freedom-vs.-power, working-outside-the-system vs. manipulating-from-within friction between Jamie Foxx's bounty hunter Django and Samuel L. Jackson's plantation servant Stephen. It's the kind of glib, shoddy work Tarantino's critics have always accused him of delivering, but hadn't until now.

A Good Movie with One Unfortunate Distraction: the Dardenne brothers' The Kid with a Bike is a lovely, touching, well-acted film. And the entire drama hinges on a recurring plot device so irritating that more than once I blurted out: "Geez, kid, get a lock!"

Other Bummers or Near-Misses: Gary "Mr. Literal" Ross's visually incoherent The Hunger Games is the year's most breathtaking demonstration of directorial ineptitude. Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress has some witty early moments yet repeats itself and bottoms out by the end. Walter Salles's On the Road is a well-made adaptation of material that no longer speaks to me. Oliver Stone's silly Savages makes a lot of noise without going anywhere. The low-budget indie sci-fi comedy Safety Not Guaranteed has a few nice offbeat touches and won over some admirers, but for me Mark Duplass's dealbreaker performance is the definition of anti-charisma.

Have Yet to See: Zero Dark Thirty and Tabu. Both coming soon to Bloomington. And Soderbergh's Magic Mike, which I missed in theaters, is up next in my Netflix queue.

Can't Bring Myself to See: Les Miserables, which many have despised and a few defenders went in ready to love in advance and have told everyone else to shut up and so there. Maybe Tom Hooper will prove me wrong when I finally catch up to it, but I doubt it. I'm more interested in Lincoln, due to the participation of Daniel Day-Lewis and Tony Kushner, but something keeps holding me back. I may finally give in before the year is up, but right now the thought of Spielberg and speeches is too much to bear. 
   

More on The Big Year, with notes on the Extended Edition

I've become a little obsessed with The Big Year, the birding comedy I reviewed just three weeks ago and have seen a couple more times since. The movie isn't a towering masterwork, but it has the ability to shake the bad thoughts out of your head, a quality some of us could use these days, and which you're not going to get out of something like Au Hasard Balthazar. I'm not a birder - or even, really, much of an obsessive - but whatever granular inaccuracies the movie may have, it seems to get the essence of birding right. Although the film pokes some gentle fun at its subject, it's surprisingly respectful, even reverential on the whole. A cast that features Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson may promise the kind of big yuks (or, given their recent collective track record, unfunny ones) that The Big Year has no intention of delivering, yet David Frankel, who directed, offers something more: a sustained, sublime bliss.

The Blu-Ray (recently purchased, as a Christmas present for myself) of The Big Year contains both the Theatrical Release and an Extended Edition, and the two offer a vivid comparison of the choices filmmakers make in post-production. The theatrical version runs 100 minutes, the extended 103 - either one still about 40 minutes shorter than the average Judd Apatow joint. The additional three minutes don't provide any more laughs; they're mainly superfluous character development scenes that the movie is better for having cut (e.g., a phone call from Black's ex-wife). Frankel, who did fine directorial work on HBO for a number of years (most famously on Sex and the City, but also two of the best episodes of Band of Brothers: "The Breaking Point" and "Why We Fight"), as well as the brisk, entertaining feature film The Devil Wears Prada, is a modern-day comedy director who obviously understands the value of editing. Fashion and birding aren't exactly topics that lend themselves to the term "fast-paced," yet both The Devil Wears Prada and The Big Year move swiftly, not as wild knockabout farce, but through character beats that cumulatively build narrative momentum. (Frankel's editor on both films is Mark Livolsi, who does a stellar job; yet watching Livolsi's work on Cameron Crowe's plodding We Bought a Zoo or Vanilla Sky suggests that Frankel is the prime mover for how nimbly his own films move.)

With a plot involving a trio of protagonists, a timeframe that covers 365 days, and a milieu expanding across the country, The Big Year offers some enormous editorial challenges; yet the most significant difference between the extended and theatrical version isn't anything we see but what we hear. The theatrical, which I saw first, features extensive narration from Jack Black, who plays the blue-collar birder Brad Harris, and an early in-and-out voice-cameo from John Cleese, whom Brad cheekily introduces as "this English guy" who briefly and loftily explains what a "big year" means in the world of birding. The theatrical release's narration foregrounds Brad as the main character, yet it also offers some occasionally incongruous phrasing and moments where Brad tells us about his principal competitors, retiring billionaire Stu Preissler (Martin), and big-year record-holder Kenny Bostick (Wilson), even though he couldn't have known what they were up to when he wasn't present.

The Extended Edition explains these oddities: Brad wasn't the original narrator. It was John Cleese, whom I am calling "John Cleese" because he never appears as a character onscreen. He plays, in fact, an omniscient narrator, whose voiceover in the extended version provides a kind of ironic counterpoint to what we see onscreen. Cleese's supercilious tone appears designed to resemble a ornithologist giving a presentation at an academic conference, the idea seeming to be that we should regard birders as possessing the attributes of a particular "species." I encourage you to see the extended version, but only after viewing the theatrical release, because the former - however clever the original narration may have sounded on the pages of Howard Franklin's script - is instructively disastrous on the screen.

While the J.C.V.O. levels the playing field between Brad, Stu, and Kenny - viewing each of them equally, objectively - the ironic detachment severs the movie's emotional connection, which Brad, as the most sympathetic character, provides. Consequently, even though Martin and Wilson come across as slightly more secondary in the theatrical release, they make stronger impressions there than in the extended edition. (This is Steve Martin's most committed performance in two decades, and possibly - particularly in his scenes with Black - his warmest ever; and the prickly qualities of Owen Wilson's Bostick, when viewed through Brad's eyes, come across as the temperament of an uncompromising artist devoted to his craft.) Cleese's inflections, while amusing for the "history of the big year" segment, intrude on the genuine passion and affection that The Big Year has for its subject. So while some of Cleese's scientific jargon sounds a little strange coming out of Black's mouth - much of it is rephrased or eliminated, but bits and pieces sometimes slip through - Black gets the emotions right, and that's what counts.

I don't know if the changes were the decision of the filmmakers or the studio, but they enhance the impact of the movie considerably. Even if nobody saw it. It's easy to denounce a studio's lack of imagination in the release of a movie that's a tad unconventional - a movie about birds that features no scenes where characters are crapped on from on-high is undeniably a tough sell - and I certainly did, but I'll give Fox 2000 Pictures and its financial partners a token of credit for being at least adventurous enough to green-light the picture in the first place. The Big Year didn't give them a hit; but it is a movie that deserves to be seen. It has my favorite line of dialogue from any movie all year. ("Fallout.") And it contains my favorite montage since the one where Anne Hathaway goes to work in an array of outfits in Frankel's Devil Wears Prada. In The Big Year, it comes during the middle portion of the movie on Attu Island (actually the Yukon), a remote hinterland that offers some of the best birding in the world. As the birders collectively set out, the names of the species they find are captioned on the tundra; and Frankel's scoring of this sequence to Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" becomes the most elating use of a major pop hit since U2's "With or Without You" in Tell No One. Like much of The Big Year, the words of the song aren't important to the scene; it's the feeling that's transcendent.

Flocked Together (The Big Year)

You may faintly recall the previews for The Big Year (2011), the Steve Martin/Jack Black/Owen Wilson birding flick that came out about a year ago - "dumped" is more like it - on American theater screens. With more than a whiff of desperation, the trailers emphasized the comic stylings of the stars and featured a couple of scenes (fake-looking birds mock-attacking a shrieking woman, Martin and Black doing a jig) that made the movie look like a strenuously wacky farce. (It may have included James Brown's "I Feel Good," I can't remember.) Like everyone else I gave The Big Year a wide berth, finally catching it recently as a what-the-hell Netflix pick, and I'm here to report it's a real find. It's a lyrically paced, beautifully shot, meditative comedy about three lonely men who become friends or, at least, respected rivals over a shared obsession. No wonder Hollywood didn't know what to do with it.

What Hollywood did do right (before the movie's release) was give $40 million to a talented director to shoot a thoughtful script about an unconventional subject with a familiar-faced cast on one gorgeous location after another. (Canada doubles convincingly - sometimes for U.S. locales, sometimes for itself - for many of the trans-American regions.) Directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada, Hope Springs) and written by Bill Murray's Quick Change co-writer and -director Howard Franklin (adapting the 2004 book by Mark Obmascik), The Big Year chronicles an annual competition among devoted birders to see and identify the most species of birds. The rules are...none. The winner gets...nothing. It's all done on an honor system (photographs are often taken, but unnecessary), with prestige accorded among only the inner circle.

While duos are a staple of most screenplays, from buddy movies to romantic comedies, I often find more interesting rare films that feature a lead trio. (I know romcoms often feature "romantic triangles" - and, who can forget, Harry Potter - but the deck is usually stacked against one of the characters.) Something about triangulation lends itself unexpectedly well to narratives ranging from L.A. Confidential to The Big Year: we get to see the characters as individuals and in pairs; the scenes stay fresh and varied and inform one another. In The Big Year, Brad Harris (Black) is the underdog birder, a low-level nuclear power-plant employee who pulls together his meager savings for a shot at the world record. Stu Preissler (Martin) is a wealthy entrepreneur whose efforts to retire (and have a "big year") are thwarted by turmoil within the company he founded. Kenny Bostick (Wilson) is the defending record-holder who thrives on competition, to the chagrin of his wife back home. As Brad, Stu, and Bostick (referred to with derisive irritation by his last name, a la "Newman" on Seinfeld) trek from one end of the country to the other - a middle passage on frigid Attu Island is a highlight - we meet their fellow birders (including Rashida Jones, Jim Parsons, Anjelica Huston, Tim Blake Nelson, and TV weatherman Al Roker) amid pauses with their families (Dianne Wiest and Brian Dennehy as Brad's parents, JoBeth Williams and Rosamund Pike as, respectively, Stu's and Bostick's wives). 

The Big Year does a nice job grounding the principals in their disparate worlds. (Dennehy, in particular, puts an expert spin on the so-very-tired disapproving father routine that eluded good actors like Chris Cooper in October Sky and Robert Patrick in Walk the Line.) It's tough to make integrity and decency appealing onscreen - or at least that's what Hollywood tells us, as an excuse to never try it - yet The Big Year is most compelling when it envelopes us in the (mostly) world of birding and the silence and patience it demands and accords. Brad and Stu's friendship is touchingly developed, and brings out Steve Martin's best work in eons. (Martin has always been more of a soloist than a team player, yet he connects with Black, even when the latter a few times oversells the wide-eyed self-pity.) As Bostick, Wilson reminds us of his ability to play unlikeable and yet remain engaging in spite of it. The movie teases us with suggestions that Bostick is a cheater, yet when it's revealed that he plays by the rules, the character becomes more interesting and earns a grudging respect.

Even tougher to pull off, The Big Year makes the world that the trio share look - for all its obstacles - alluring. The problem with obsessives is they frequently mistake telling you all about themselves for actually sharing why they love what they love, and in convincing you why you should too. (To put it another way, their emotions about a particular subject seem to matter more to them than the subject itself.) The Big Year isn't a great film, but it's precisely the kind of good one that recalls enough of the pleasures of what used to be known as conventional narrative filmmaking to seem almost quaint. (It also continues the curious, time-honored tradition of experts enjoying a movie about their specialty that critics and mainstream audiences ignore -- see also medieval historians on The Thirteenth Warrior.) Frankel and Franklin keep the narcissistic yammering to a minimum. Wisely, instead, they invite us into their movie, teach us the terrain and the lingo ("fallout" is given an amusing connotation), show how different people can forge a common bond (what else besides birding could bring James Wolcott and Jonathan Franzen together?), and give us reason to stay.

Off-Road, All-Terrain (Holy Motors)

Here we go again: Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012), like The Artist, Hugo, and Argo over the past year, is a "love letter to movies." It's about the power of cinema, you see, a dominion the medium's most dogmatic (read: insecure) supporters grow ever more insistent is indomitable and all-encompassing, a claim nearly as tedious and tunnel-visioned as the rash of preliminary obits they're quick to lash out against. They seem to not consider that some of their most revered auteurs made films that skeptically deconstructed movies (Welles, Altman, De Palma), or the possibility that Carax has crafted an epitaph as well.

The plot of Holy Motors is already famously indescribable - the closest approximation being it's about a day in the life of a mysterious individual, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), who assumes the identity of various characters (father, beggar, hit-man, dwarf, etc.), as he's driven around Paris in a white stretch-limo. Yet if the story is hard to classify the film's mood-trajectory feels familiar, largely comic for the first half before veering into melancholy and tragedy in the second. Oscar has nine "appointments" throughout the day (I assume he accomplishes all of them, I lost count), and those that draw the biggest laughs and provide the most energy occur in the opening hour: a dwarf kidnaps a model (Eva Mendes) during a fashion shoot; a motion-capture sex scene, with Oscar donning an Andy Serkis-like suit; an enthralling "Entr'acte featuring Oscar leading a group of accordion players around in an Aaron Sorkin-like circle. The tone shifts, however, during a quiet passage where Oscar portrays a father disappointed that he captures his daughter in a lie; then progressively darkens, without really deepening, through a string of scenes where Oscar is "killed," as well as a wistful musical interlude featuring Kylie Minogue.

While I think Carax's film is too insular and calculatedly bizarre to earn emotional resonance (although Lavant's scenes with Edith Scob, as his devoted chauffeur, come close), it's fair to interpret - via the later passages, the physical weariness of his lead actor, the expressions of longing for a past where the cameras weren't small - that he sees cinema less as a vital, indestructible force than in the throes of a death-grip. Or, perhaps, like Paul Schrader, he sees cinema as not dying but changing - like Oscar, morphing into a different form. (Holy Motors was shot entirely on digital; and, sorry again, film purists, but the 2K DCP version I saw looked gorgeous.) The climax - or, rather, one of them - where Oscar plays papa to a house of chimps, could be seen to symbolize the medium in an evolutionary state.

What saves Holy Motors for me isn't any semblance of depth but that its best parts embody mischief. The film has an ornery spirit and a sense of a nutty fun, most notably in that dwarf sequence, when Lavant runs through a cemetery where the tombstones feature website URLs, and the director/photographer of the fashion shoot seems to be there for a pointed jab at David Lynch's worldview. "Beauty! Beauty! Beauty! Beauty!" he shouts excitedly while photographing Mendes; then, when he spots Lavant's demented leprechaun: "Weird! Weird! Weird! Weird!" As with all of Lynch's films, critics are showing off their collective imagination by calling Carax's "dreamlike" (described as such in at least 14 of 26 reviews linked by Metacritic). But Holy Motors is nothing like a dream. It feels utterly, completely a movie, in all its glories and limitations.

You Oughta Be in Pictures (Argo)

The most haunting moment I've ever seen Ben Affleck deliver as an actor comes at the end of Chasing Amy: his back to the camera, having parted ways with Joey Lauren Adams, there's something about his hunched-over, defeated body language in that moment that's surprisingly moving. It has since occurred to me that most of Affleck's best moments in front of the camera have been with women, and his near-deferential air with actresses (and not just J-Lo, who has always demanded deference) has become his best quality behind it.

With Amy Ryan and Michelle Monaghan in Gone Baby Gone, then Rebecca Hall and Blake Lively in The Town, Affleck is the rare male director attuned to the nuances of his female performers without a hint of sadism or masochism. Argo doesn't have quite the same level of memorable female characters - it's more of a guy's picture, with Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman and Alan Arkin heading the cast - yet it still offers the best role for Clea Duvall in eons. She plays one of six Americans who in 1979 managed to flee the takeover of the embassy in Tehran and eventually escaped the country. I haven't seen Duvall in a movie since her memorable bit part as the prison witness who offers a key lead near the end of Zodiac, yet as always, she plays her character with total conviction. There's also an impressively tremulous performance from the strawberry-blonde Kerry Bishe as another of the escapees, and a good scene with the poker-faced Sheila Vand as an Iranian servant who may or may not reveal to the authorities that her employer, the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber), is harboring the six. Even with extras, like the terrified woman who is captured at the embassy, Affleck never lingers on the moment with anything resembling the Male Gaze. He attempts to treat everybody with respect.

I wish I could say the rest of the movie was as refreshing. Looking back at my review of The Town, I see that I praised the film in spite of its being "a compendium of cliches,"so why am I panning Argo for offering more of the same? Maybe it's because a true-to-life story brings out my bullshit detector, makes me less inclined to grade on a curve. Although I am not overly literal with historical facts, and I understand that movies need drama, conflict and tension to hold our interest, there is still a difference between a film that develops these elements plausibly and organically and a film that blatantly tacks them on. The preposterous third-act of Argo begins with CIA operative Tony Mendez (Senor Affleck) having a Dark Night of the Soul, because the weenie bureaucrats back home in the States have pulled the plug on his crackpot plan to whisk the American Six out of Iran under the guise of being a Canadian film crew. Following a long, drunken evening where Mendez tours the city to the stirring tune "Freedom Isn't Free," and an awkward rendition of "Pearl Harbor Sucked, and I Miss You," Gentle Ben in the morning calls his boss (Bryan Cranston) and tells him that by golly they're going for it anyway. On the way to the airport, he explains to the Six that the Tehran Airport will be just like a Ron Howard movie, a hackneyed situation at every turn: no reservations for their flight the first time they're checked, then suddenly they're in the system the second; the obstacles placed in front of Hollywood movie-people John Chambers (Goodman) and Lester Siegel (Arkin) on the way to a ringing telephone; the wimpiest hostage who comes through with a convincing description of the movie to the Revolutionary Guard at the final checkpoint; the stalled clutch on the airport shuttle on the way to the plane; and a climactic chase on the runway so madcap it lacks only the army of monkeys from Crystal Skull.

That movie buffs are familiar with these cliches only adds to their admiration, however, the more reality-based, practical-minded of them comparing Argo to 1970s thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. While Affleck is clearly fond of those films, he, unlike Pollack and Pakula, is gun-shy about truly hurting his characters or troubling the audience. Argo is comparably fair-minded about the Middle East to other contemporary movies, blaming the U.S. for its handling of the Shah, yet nests this perspective in a chase narrative so textbook an exec like Griffin Mill would approve. ("Political doesn't scare me. Radical political scares me. Political political scares me.") Argo co-opts Alan Rudolph's pitch at the beginning of The Player down to a 'T': Affleck has made a movie that is "politely politically radical, but it's funny...and it has a heart in the right spot. It's a funny political thing. And it's a thriller too, all at once." Argo also departs from 70s cinema by emphasizing American ineffectualism and self-interest over conspiracy. I do believe that that view is closer to how it all went down; but it's also why I part ways with the comparison.

Ever since Adaptation, the more extreme cinephiles have eagerly plunged down the rabbit-hole with "meta" readings of movies like Argo that are, even peripherally, about movies. For them, Argo resorts to cliches because Affleck deliberately aims to turn an important historical event into a B-thriller - a more charitable way of saying that he made the movie "bad on purpose." (The question that's always left dangling: Wouldn't that intent be a tad reductive?) Spike Jonze, of course, did make the third act of Adaptation intentionally terrible; pumping up the melodrama was Charlie Kaufman's way out of his own dilemma (the real Kaufman's and Cage's version) of adapting an "unfilmmable" book. We're talking about Iran here, not orchids, of course; so what's Affleck's excuse? Probably the fact that the real escape somehow made it through the airport without incident. I get that an easy flight home wouldn't be too compelling onscreen. But Affleck strikes me as far too earnest a klutz to be fully conscious of his own effects, much less that he's presenting them as any kind of wily ironic commentary.

Although I enjoyed Hugo and Inglourious Basterds, I would like to humbly suggest a lengthy moratorium on movies that are "Love Letters to Movies," or ringing endorsements of "The Power of Cinema." Both qualities have been somewhat mystifyingly attributed to Argo because, I guess, it weaves a bad Star Wars ripoff into its plot - nostalgic satire being rather toothless, yet still wish-fulfillment for fans of Affleck's buddy Kevin Smith who appreciate that Affleck, unlike Smith, can operate a camera. Yet because it has come to our attention - ad nauseum on Twitter and elsewhere - that the term "overrated" offends the delicate sensibilities of the Word Police, I will instead offer Argo the backhanded compliment that in its own boneheaded way I think it's kind of brilliant. Mainstream audiences don't give a damn about love letters to movies; they understandably want the hearts and flowers delivered solely to themselves. Argo provides this and more to casual moviegoers. It conjures a memory in a way that is relevant to the present, yet with a greeting-card-like sentiment that goes down easy for liberals and conservatives alike. It's a movie that knows how to push our buttons. I'm not a fan of the practice, but I have to half-respect a filmmaker who is aware that they're there, waiting to be pushed.
  

Town and Country (Neighboring Sounds and Liberal Arts)

Kleber Mendonca Filho, the director of Neighboring Sounds (2012), is intensely quiet in person, with a manner that suggests he isn't sizing you up so much as taking you in, like a refracting telescope. I met him a few weeks ago on a research visit where I work, which I mention not to name-drop (because we all know of no critics who do that), but to convey how the pleasures of his debut film capture the essence of the filmmaker behind it. Neighboring Sounds covers a few days in a neighborhood of Recife, Brazil, and it's the kind of ensemble picture that shines light on a particular character or group of characters before focusing on the next. A respectable businessman named Joao (Gustavo Jahn) negotiates with his thief cousin Dinho (Yuri Holanda) for a CD-player pinched from the car of his new girlfriend, Sofia (Irma Brown), only to get another stolen player back instead. Both are related to a powerful patriarch (W. J. Solha) whose casual sovereignty over the neighborhood must be entreated by Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos), head of a security team that begins patrolling the area for shady customers. Mendonca Filho is interested in all of these people as well as the hangers-on around them, like the group of tenants at a meeting voting whether or not to can a security guard sleeping on duty. He has a good ear for idle talk and a keen eye for authenticity, as when a housewife down the block (Maeve Jinkings) lies down on the couch, exhausted from a howling dog keeping her up all night, as her children give her a vigorous massage.

There aren't as many characters in Neighboring Sounds as there are in films like Nashville or Short Cuts, yet the movie sustains a sophisticated visual and aural technique (plenty of panning zooms, or zooming pans) that envelopes you the way Altman's films often did. It doesn't resonate as much as those movies - or films like Inarritu's Amores Perros and Haneke's Cache, both of which Mendonca Filho also appears to reference - but Neighboring Sounds still offers a fascinating glimpse of a foreign culture filled with a few sparks of recognition.

Liberal Arts (2012), the deeply likeable new comedy from writer-director-star Josh Radnor, showed me a slice of life I know all too well. (I caught it - as you may - on On Demand.) Jesse Fisher (Radnor) is a 35-year-old admissions officer at a university in New York who returns to his alma mater in rural Ohio to commemorate the retirement of his mentor (played by Richard Jenkins). The Ohio institution is never named but take my word for it that it is Kenyon College, located in Gambier, about an hour into cow country northeast of Columbus. I taught there for a couple of summers and recognized every square inch (all twenty-seven of them) of that tiny, beguiling campus; (I also have reason to suspect that the Jenkins character is based on a recently retired former colleague, but I need to confirm that.) Radnor knows it even better. He went to school there, and both his his camera and his script are lovingly attenuated to the details of campus life: the way you can feel lonely at a party yet comfortable by yourself at a bookstore or neighborhood bar.

Jesse strikes up a friendship - and, later, when he returns to New York, an epistolary correspondence - with Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), a 19-year-old theater major whose name suggests the kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl that the character, as written and played, thankfully belies. She's a real person, not a fantasy; and Radnor navigates all the traps deftly, aware of the obstacles in such a relationship but also not automatically nullifying the possibility of its working. Liberal Arts could have been a Doc Hollywood kind of comedy, where the protagonist finds happiness in a utopia far away from the big city. But if New York bewilders Jesse at times, he sees beauty and potential there too.