The Rover (2014)

Australia, ten years after an economical apocalypse that leaves the country looking quite close to the first Mad Max film.

Henry (Scoot McNairy) and two associates have stolen something valuable, leaving behind Henry’s developmentally challenged brother Rey (Robert Pattinson) for dead. Thanks to the distracting powers of bickering they crash their truck during their flight. They’re lucky in basically crashing – and it’s not much of a crash, as they’d realize if they weren’t bickering and in panic – the truck right next to a fresh ride, which they proceed to steal.

The nameless owner of the car (Guy Pearce), a man with trauma and violence written on his face, doesn’t take the loss of his ride well, and begins to chase after the car thieves in their own car, proceeding in a manner that suggests he has left sanity and reason somewhere behind in the world before the Collapse. Leaving a trail of bodies – both real and metaphorical – behind, the man encounters Rey and – after getting him patched up - decides to press him into service finding Henry.

David Michôd’s The Rover is quite an astonishing film in the way it uses elements of the post-apocalyptic films that came before it – with the first Mad Max a particularly close relation in the shape of its apocalypse and in what I can only describe as Australian-ness (australity?) – to make a meditative film about lives that don’t stop just because the world has decided to stop, finally making all the tenets of nihilism true for its characters in a world where nothing they do is of any import anymore, and where violence isn’t even morally important enough to cause much reaction from anyone anymore. To the people roaming the wastelands here, there’s not even enough reason to life anymore that concepts like sadism or transgression matter much in their violence.

Consequently, most of the film’s unpleasant acts are pictured with an emotional apathy, suggesting most everyone we see in the film (and wouldn’t that be the whole world) to be suffering from some form of PTSD. In a move as clever as it is disturbing, Michôd always gestures towards some of the things an audience would expect in this sort of film and world, some suggestions of healing, or redemption, or even just a clear explanation of why the characters here do what they do, yet never lets the characters go through with these gestures in any meaningful way, everything not just ending in blood but feeling as empty and dried out as people’s lives have become.

The Australian desert landscapes are a perfect fit for this sort of tale, both through their suggestion of other Australian desert landscapes in other post-apocalyptic films, as well as in their mirroring of the characters’ loss of humanity (or is it the other way round?).

Watching the film, I found myself particularly impressed with the way Michôd suggests much of its world, as well as of the inner lives of the people living in it, through minor throw-away details he trusts the audience to notice. Which, after reading some of the reviews of The Rover that can only see Pearce’s character as a cipher because the film only discloses in its last scene why his car is so important to him despite the fact that he can – and already has – easily acquired another one, is clearly too much trust for the sort of viewer who wants everything to be “relatable”, which is to say, without herself having to do any of that pesky thinking or relating. How you can watch a performance like Pearce’s grand, subtle, portrayal of a man who really has lost any concept of meaning in his life stumbling through a world utterly incapable of even suggesting one to him, going through the motions of violence and survival not because of any true will to survive but just because that’s what you do, and still feel the need for a detailed explanation (one supposes with many a flashback with dramatic violins on the soundtrack), I honestly don’t understand. But then I’m usually pretty annoyed by the tendency of parts of the movie and TV watching world to need every piddling detail of a film explained to them in excruciating detail. as if using one’s own imagination from time to time were unthinkable.

But speaking of acting for another moment (instead of ranting further), despite laying it on a bit thick for my tastes from time to time, Robert Pattinson actually delivers a performance that not just doesn’t embarrass him beside Pearce but really provides the film with an easier emotional anchor (and hey, relatability-needing people, that’s the character in the movie for you), if one that suggests a disquieting irony – namely, that you need to be as intellectually and emotionally challenged as Rey is to even countenance the idea of hope in a world such as the one he lives in (“innocence” doesn’t come into play here at all, by the way, because Rey is utterly immoral).

The Rover does a lot of thoughtful things with the clichés of post-apocalyptic cinema without feeling the need to get on its soap box and moralize yet also without condoning – or enjoying – its characters often horrible deeds.

Technorati-Markierungen: australian movies,reviews,post-apocalypse,david michôd,guy pearce,robert pattinson,scoot mcnairy

In short: Killing Them Softly (2012)

Squirrel (Vincent Curatola), a small-time criminal, has a plan for his even smaller-time acquaintance Frankie (Scoot McNairy), and Frankie's junkie friend Russell (Ben Mendelsohn): the two are supposed to raid an illegal gambling room belonging to the local mob. Usually, this sort of thing has lethal repercussions, but Squirrel has it all figured out. This particular game is held by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). Markie had already hired people to raid one of his own games in the past, so, Squirrel thinks, he'll be the guy the mob will make responsible, leaving his friends and especially his planning hand untouched and unknown.

Not surprisingly, Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), the fixer the mob calls in to mete out appropriate punishments, does not fall for that particular trick: Markie surely couldn't be that stupid. Not that it matters much. A business has to uphold appearances, so Markie has to die even though Jackie knows he's innocent. Frankie and Russell, on the other hand, could actually get away scot free if not for Russell's loose tongue. Clearly, things won't end too well for anybody except Jackie.

Andrew Dominik's adaptation of a George V. Higgins novel, on the other hand, is the good stuff, at least if you like your hardboiled crime movies laconic, grim, with an underlying sneer towards the American Dream yet also a sense of compassion. Not that this compassion saves even a single one of the characters here: Late capitalist America is not the kind of place where compassion plays an active role in anything anymore, no matter what the politicians on TV might say about ideals (and as we all know, ideals that aren't followed by actions are worse than no ideals at all).

It's really rather fascinating to see how alive the old tropes of this sort of thing can still feel in the hands of a director and writer who knows how to make them sing without having to use grand gestures or letting his cast do all-caps ACTING. It's not that kind of gangster movie, but one that concerns itself with the losers, the lost, and the people at the bottom of the criminal food chain, so all grandstanding would be completely out of place.

Instead, direction and performances go for nuance, a sad somewhat bitter humour, and dialogue that is intensely stylized to take on the appearance of naturalism. One could accuse Killing Them Softly of silently wallowing in the sordid. The lack of glamour, however, is rather the point of the whole affair, with characters whose lives don't so much fall apart - there hasn't been much whole about anyone's life here for a long time - but just end the same way they have always been.

Killing Them Softly is a fantastic piece of work, with a director and an ensemble cast (there are also James Gandolfini as depressed killer and Sam Shepard as mob councillor to mention) that completely disappears inside the material.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,crime,andrew dominik,brad pitt,scoot mcnairy,ben mendelsohn,james gandolfini,sam shepard

A Night In The Woods (2011)

And now, the news: three people have disappeared on a camping trip in Dartmoor, and the film we're talking about does of course consist of the video material they left behind.

Said three campers are Kerry (Anna Skellern), her American boyfriend Brody (Scoot McNairy) who loves his cameras and won't ever stop filming in what will become an actual plot point, and her cousin Leo (Andrew Hawley) whom she hasn't seen in more than two years. The trio is the perfect example of a group of people that should really not spend their time alone on the moors or in the woods, at least not without a bunch of therapists nearby. Kerry still has to cope with the death of her father - or rather the childhood abuse her father's death reminds her of. Brody's camera obsession is quite explicitly far from healthy, with voyeurism and an obsession with control that more than just suggest mental illness being the more benevolent interpretations of his behaviour. And Leo and Kerry seem to be cousins who are very, very close for people who haven't seen each other in ages; one might just think they are sharing a secret.

Needless to say, this is not going to be the most fun camping trip imaginable for anyone on screen, and that's before we come to the folklore surrounding the area the unhappy campers are in. A black huntsman is supposed to hang "sinners" (whatever that may be) from bleeding trees there. It will come as no surprise to anyone than the characters that things won't go well for them. There will be breakdowns, and death, and just possibly a malevolent supernatural force.

Even though Richard Parry's A Night In The Woods keeps quite closely to the form of the POV movie as set down by Blair Witch Project (right to the mostly improvised nature of the dialogue) when my hair had less grey in it, it recommends itself by doing some important and rather interesting things differently.

Mostly, the difference is one of emphasis - where Blair Witch took great care with its characters but did this to make their fear when confronted with the unknown more real, Night is interested in the characters for their own sakes, leaving the supernatural horror part of the equation not exactly an afterthought, but an element that intensifies the characters' troubles instead of the other way round. In fact, it's not clear if there is any supernatural agency working here at all, and the whole affair not just a very normal case of several people losing it with horrible consequences.

In general, I'm not a big admirer of films that don't want to make up their minds if the supernatural in them is real or not, but in Night's case, I actually don't mind, for the exact nature of what is doing what to whom here just isn't important to the film. This one really is all about paranoia, the moments when you realize you don't know the people close to you or yourself as well as you think you do, bad life experiences that lead to even worse decisions later on, the consequences of trauma, and why you really shouldn't go camping with the wrong people in Dartmoor.

For some viewers, the film's highly improvised dialogue and acting will probably be a big turn-off. I think the actors do this rather well, showing some subtleties and complexities of their characters this way that couldn't have been shown in a film going for a more mainstream type of storytelling. It also makes for an interesting contrast with how bad a lot of POV films are at actually drawing interesting characters. Despite the closeness to their protagonists the immediacy of the style suggests, many films of the sub-genre just want warm bodies to screech, cry into the camera and stumble through the dark, giving them as little depth or actual character as the slasher genre did at the worst of times. If you're in luck as a viewer these films can still do something with their cardboard cut-outs, of course, yet it's a pleasant surprise to find a POV movie that is so explicitly character-based.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,horror,reviews,richard parry,anna skellern,scoot mcnairy,andrew hawley

Monsters (2010)

So, extraterrestrial life does exist, after all. Six years before the main action of Monsters takes place, a US space probe crashed in Central America, bringing with it a bunch of tentacled creatures that soon enough began to multiply and change the local ecosystem. Generally, these monsters seem only as aggressive as animals are when they feel threatened, but they are so large, and their actions so unpredictable, that the locations they have conquered are declared the "Infected Zone". In a not unexpected reaction to the situation, the USA have built a wall on their Southern border, and are now running regular chemical bombing raids on the Zone whose main effect seems to be to make the creatures there more aggressive.

Mexico for its part has to fight off the creatures' half-yearly migration wave with what little resources it has, obviously with an economy now completely in ruins. The rest of the world - also keeping with its traditions - really doesn't seem to care much about what happens south of the USA.

When the film starts, Mexico is just a few days away from closing its borders completely for the next six months. The photo journalist Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is quite unwillingly pressed into a different service for one of his employers than the ones he's usually paid for. His employer's daughter Samantha (Whitney Able) has been in some sort of accident, and her old man wants Kaulder to escort her out of Mexico as long as getting her out is still possible. Kaulder, who is a bit of a jerk at the best of times, only reluctantly agrees to help the slightly shell-shocked young woman.

After some travels through the countryside during which she and Kaulder get closer to each other, a slightly contrived set of circumstances leads to Samantha missing the last boat out of the country. The only alternative to waiting out the next six months - and who knows if there will still be a country to flee from afterwards - is to take the completely illegal, dangerous route through the jungles of the Zone to the American wall.

A few of the more critical reviews of Gareth Edwards' Monsters I read on the 'net were loudly complaining about the film not being the giant monster bash the reviewers expected nor (oh my gosh!) it being the horror movie they expected. These reviewers are right on both accounts in so far as there's no monster bashing or mashing at all to be found in the movie and that it surely isn't a horror movie, but rather SF/romance film. Personally, I've always been fond of trying to deal with a movie on its own terms instead of reviewing what it isn't, and so can't help but call bullshit on the idea that a film not being what I expected of it means that it is a bad movie.

Monsters is in fact pretty darn great, treating its characters and its SF-nal concepts with an earnestness that shows great respect for the intelligence of its viewers. There is not a single second of the usual (and terrible) talking down to the audience that in too many films manifests itself in long, tiring and usually dumb reams of exposition to be found in its worldbuilding. What my synopsis above takes quite a few sentences to explain about the basic set-up, the film itself does through two sentences in the credits and intelligently placed incidental details that fully trust in the ability of the movie's audience to not only see something, but actually understand it. You know, like I'd hope for in all contemporary SF films (for a great example of how not to do low-exposition SF, see - or rather not - Skyline). This aspect of Monsters, a deft application of the old "show, don't tell" rule if I've ever seen one, reminds me most of that other great, unassuming SF film of the last few years, Moon.

Of course it's not enough to put just any old detail in to make a slightly different world (be it a mining operation on the moon or a near-apocalyptic Central America) believable and make it feel like a real place, it need to be the right details. Monsters is more or less perfect in this respect, starting with the flashes of newscasts we see, continuing through the ubiquitousness of gasmasks and not ending in elements like the short snippet of a (public service) children's cartoon from a world in which monsters are real. These details and the way the characters act towards the world they are living in come together beautifully and make the film's near future perfectly believable, not like an idea made flesh for ninety minutes, but like a real world.

Another reason for Monster's effectiveness is director (and writer, too) Edwards' photography. Edwards' camera work has a semi-documentarian quality about it, the sort of thing that could easily just end up as a mess of shaky cam and random shouting on the soundtrack. But where many other film's making use of this style tend to the hectic, Edwards' film seems more interested in using it to get closer to things and characters, to make them feel more real.

There's a true sense of beauty - possibly even poetry - running through the film's sideways looks at deserted ruins where a few years ago people were living and at the changes an alien ecosystem has brought. Monsters is driven by a visual sense of awe that reminds me of the films of Werner Herzog. Although the film is quite clear about the fact that its monsters are frightening and dangerous, the audience's clearest looks at them are clothed in a sense of wonder towards their beauty and strangeness. On a less obvious level, Edwards suggests that the monsters are made more dangerous by the way humanity interacts with them, without ever landing on the soppy side of the "poor, unloved alien". The film's very low-key love story (that might be more of a story of attraction through loneliness) with its sad, yet underplayed, ending is just as lacking in sentimentality, and just the more convincing for it.

Strangely enough for a film that doesn't have much of a plot, the word that comes to my mind most when I think about Monsters is "richness". It's not the sort of richness that could result from the ideology of "more is more", but something that is grounded in showing just enough of the right things to pull a viewer into a film as if it were a place and not a story.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,gareth edwards,reviews,sf,romance,whitney able,scoot mcnairy