PBlue Caprice
Runs Fri., Sept. 27–Thurs., Oct. 3 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Rated R. 93 minutes.
Blue Caprice is not about the Beltway sniper killings of 2002. No one was cast to play Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose, who became synonymous with the shootings as he updated a terrified county and voracious news cameras during the serial murders. We see none of the victims felled at gas stations, nor get any sense of the frantic efforts to find the elusive snipers. But for one blood-curdling moment, we see nary a rifle emerging from the trunk of the killers’ titular sedan.
Rather, this haunting film is about two men whose last names we never learn. John (Isaiah Washington) is an older man to whom the essentially orphaned teenage Lee (Tequan Richmond) is drawn when they meet in Antigua. The two then travel to Tacoma, where in the woods Lee learns to shoot and in the city learns to kill at random. This exaggerates the true role our area played in the saga: In fact, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo did come to Tacoma, and stole from a local gunshop the Bushmaster that they’d later use for their killings. However, no Washington state murders have ever been linked to the men; their killing spree is believed to have begun in the deep South.
Yet director Alexandre Moors’ powerful film isn’t meant to be a true-crime documentary. Instead, it’s about love at its most manipulative and vengeance served ice-cold. It’s about the making of a homegrown terrorist whose hatred of the United States is never explained (though it seems to come from some toxic mixture of insanity and John’s child-custody battles). The moody score casts even the most emotionally fraught moments in a melancholy light.
Some may feel that Blue Caprice gives Lee a free pass. Richmond’s quiet portrayal casts him squarely as a victim who’s psychologically and physically pressed into his deadly deeds. And at the very least, Richmond’s performance makes Lee seem so harmless that it challenges belief when the bloodshed starts. For all the panic that ensued, this fictionalized prelude is both completely chilling and eerily plausible. Daniel Person
Don Jon
Opens Fri., Sept. 27 at Varsity and other theaters. Rated R. 90 minutes.
If Joseph Gordon-Levitt has spent much of his grown-up career running away from the image of a sitcom child star, he couldn’t have devised a better way to cut the cord than this. He wrote, directed, and stars in Don Jon, the story of a porn addict who’d be right in place amongst the braying loudmouths of Jersey Shore. That Gordon-Levitt is still as likable as he was back in the days of Third Rock From the Sun—or the more recent 50/50 and (500) Days of Summer—goes a long way toward explaining why we stick with his obnoxious character here. The movie’s first twist is that although Jon is introduced to us an Internet porn addict, he’s no antisocial nerd: He’s got local fame as a ladies’ man, prowling the disco with his buddies and searching for a “dime” (a “10,” on the immortal scale) to take home on a Saturday night. Yet that success leaves him unsatisfied, so his laptop porn rituals are repetitively chronicled in near-NC-17 detail.
An encounter with the lushly named Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson, in a deft caricature) suggests that our boy may have found authentic love, but Gordon-Levitt throws in some reasonably fresh variations on the tale of an addict redeemed. One of them comes in the form of a night-school classmate (Julianne Moore) who’s got more honest life experience than most of the people in Jon’s circle. There’s also a terrific scene in a generic department store, as Jon describes his pleasure in cleaning his own house (if you haven’t guessed, he’s got control issues). The scene becomes a revelation about Barbara, as she leaves no doubt about her own insistence on control in this relationship.
Gordon-Levitt hasn’t gone completely sensitive-indie on us; his grasp of sitcom timing is abundant in family scenes. (Tony Danza and Glenne Headly are a hoot as Jon’s trashy parents.) And his own body-sculpted performance is high on aggressive macho strutting. All this is in service of a very simple message, of the kind an earnest young filmmaker might feel is important to say for his generation. Which is maybe more endearing than insightful. Don Jon is a marshmallow heart wrapped in a spicy shell. Robert Horton
Enough Said
Opens Fri., Sept. 27 at Sundance and other theaters. Rated PG-13. 92 minutes.
Nothing much happens in a Nicole Holofcener film, and that’s OK. What transpires in Walking and Talking or Friends With Money or Please Give is mainly women fretting about potential catastrophes that might ruin their lives. Earthquakes, adultery, alien invasion, ungrateful children, brushfires, horrid mothers—they’re all the same. Enough Said is yet another well-wrought example of Holofcener’s focus on the problems intelligent women create for themselves through their constant worry.
Ten years divorced, her daughter soon to leave for college, Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) wearily lugs her massage table from client to client, hearing their petty complaints without comment, seemingly resigned to a single woman’s slide toward menopause. The large, hairy obstacle in that path is Albert (James Gandolfini), also divorced with a college-bound daughter. Demographically, they’re identical baby boomers, quite conscious of their age and future prospects. Why do they click? “Our middle-agedness is sort of comforting and sexy,” says Eva by way of explanation, but even she doesn’t know for sure. Albert and Eva are set in their ways; neither is going to change the other; and Eva has a secret pipeline to confirm her doubts about him: Albert’s ex-wife Marianne (Catherine Keener) is one of her clients.
If there is a Hippocratic oath for masseuses, Eva knows she’s broken it tenfold. She should be disbarred from the profession, her table burned. Yet she continues to knead and befriend the cynical poet while allowing Marianne’s complaints to poison her relationship with Albert. (“He’s a loser. Who would date a person like that?”) She’s hedging, trying to guard against a future letdown by finding all his faults upfront. It’s a terrible ethical betrayal acknowledged a third of the way into the movie; the next hour consists of the fallout—or rather, talking about the fallout. (Eva, after many lies, doesn’t confess until late.)
Holofcener often directs for television, and here she has two top-shelf TV stars—if not the benefit of sitcom writers who might’ve given the plot a few welcome kicks forward. There are few zingers in Enough Said, but plenty of inflectional humor. Is Eva serious about Albert? “Yeahhmaybe,” says Louis-Dreyfus, her face yawning with uncertainty, denial, and affection. In his last screen role, Gandolfini conveys a lumpy shyness and decency; his Albert is genuinely hurt by the fat-shaming of Eva’s yoga-toned cohort. Eva’s BFF (Toni Colette) tells her to learn to compromise in a relationship, even while constantly dissing her husband (the excellently indignant Ben Falcone). For the women of Enough Said, too much candor has its risks, but remaining silent can bring disaster. Brian Miller
PInequality for All
Opens Fri., Sept. 27 at Harvard Exit. Rated PG. 85 minutes.
The basis for this advocacy doc, Robert Reich’s Aftershock, was published three years ago as we were tentatively clambering out of the Great Recession, which began with the subprime-mortgage collapse of 2008. The film now arrives with a new paperback edition of Aftershock, in which Reich writes that real annual median household income actually declined from $51,144 in 2010 to $45,018 in 2012. That’s the opposite of a recovery. And in a widely cited new study, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during 2012, the top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income; and worse, the top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of income earned.
That kind of imbalance existed before the federal income tax was introduced in the progressive era; it leveled out during the postwar years, as Reich explains in Inequality for All. Then, as he shows using the same graphs he employs as a UC Berkeley professor, the inequality curve began climbing in the ’80s, accelerating with the deregulation of financial markets during the Clinton era (when he worked in the White House). Everyone’s income took a hit after 2008. But, per Saez and Piketty, since the wealthy own most investments, the Wall Street recovery has meant that the 1 percent has captured about 95 percent of the income gains since the recession ended.
Directed by Jacob Kornbluth, Inequality for All isn’t a dry, stat-filled lecture. Seen in his classroom and tooling around San Francisco in his Mini Cooper, Reich is anything but boring as he advocates federal stimulus and other policies to grow the middle class and get it spending again, to raise that median income (essentially flat since the pre-OPEC ’70s, measured in constant dollars). To that end, the film includes a handful of recession-impacted family profiles, including Seattle entrepreneur Nick Hanauer. “They are the job creators,” says Hanauer. “We need to replace trickle-down economics with middle-out economics.”
Reich would raise taxes on carbon and the elite (particularly capital gains), and he encourages federal spending in areas like bridge repair and infrastructure that create middle-class jobs. Would the Tea Party go along? No, nor are they the likely audience for this film. It’s the same dilemma expressed in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?: Republicans misled into voting against their own economic well-being. Working two 20-hour-per week jobs, without benefits, will never get you into the middle class or beyond. Republican rhetoric about an “opportunity society” has become a cruel irony: Social mobility is trending in the wrong direction, making the country ever more polarized. And that is why, despite Reich’s ebullience, this is such an important, dismaying film. Brian Miller
Our Nixon
Runs Fri., Sept. 27–Thurs., Oct. 3 at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 84 minutes.
I come from a family of rabid Nixon haters. With my grandfather I watched what seemed like all the Watergate hearings on TV. (If childhood memory serves, he bought a new color set for that express purpose, because black-and-white wasn’t good enough for his contempt.) So while I wanted to like this found-footage archival mashup of Super-8 home movies made by Richard Nixon’s White House staffers, maybe I know too much about that era of American politics. To me, the stories of H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin are relatively familiar, but director Penny Lane has to interpolate lots of old TV broadcasts and after-the-fact interviews to explain to millennials why her archival footage is so wonderful.
And it is: Here is the cheerful, playful, colorful, and dare I say Nixonian optimism of the first term. Nixon crushed McGovern in ’68, and his staffers had every reason to gloat. (It’s worth remembering that, were it not for Watergate, Republicans would’ve held the White House for 20 consecutive years; Carter was the historical aberration.) Still, Lane shrewdly overlays Nixon’s secret audio recordings—unknown to Haldeman and company—to give ominous context to their happy backstage scenes. Haldeman, then in his early 30s, was an acutely image-conscious ad man; and what we now call political stagecraft was being perfected by the Republicans of that era (Roger Ailes prominent among them). For that reason, the home movies now read like camera gaffes and sly visual commentary—Walter Cronkite framed upside down, horse shit at the Vatican, a camera zoom out the White House window to a waiting pack of reporters who smell blood after Watergate. But of course it’s Lane, with benefit of hindsight, who has control of the editing.
In one priceless bit, after Nixon praises the Ray Conniff Singers at a White House concert (“If the music is square, it’s because I like it square”), a brave young woman performer holds up a Vietnam War protest sign and denounces the president. His minions didn’t realize it, but they were filming the future. Brian Miller
Passion
Runs Fri., Sept. 27–Thurs., Oct. 3 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated R. 102 minutes.
Along with its other shortcomings, Passion is woefully mistitled. This off-key exercise is drained of any authentic juice, belying its apparent place in the crime-of-passion film tradition. But then passion has never been the long suit of its director, Brian De Palma, whose strengths have been his fiendish cleverness and his often giddy intoxication with the movie-ness of cracked stories and characters. Those talents find their footing mainly in some humid dream sequences in the third act of Passion, where De Palma finally asserts himself. Until then, the film has been a bland remake of Alain Corneau’s quite dandy 2010 film Love Crime, a trim tale that mixed All About Eve with The Servant and threw a big, bloody murder into the mix.
In this telling, set in the offices of a marketing behemoth’s Berlin office, stiletto-shod executive Christine (Rachel McAdams) takes credit for the ideas of her chief assistant Isabelle (Noomi Rapace), soothing her underling’s hurt feelings with assurances of the importance of teamwork and the occasional kiss on the lips. The back-stabbing doesn’t end there, as Isabelle is sleeping with Christine’s kinked-up lover and embezzling colleague, Dirk (Paul Anderson). The levels of humiliation and subordination continue, yet De Palma (who also wrote the adaptation) doesn’t particularly savor that back-and-forth, even if those exquisite machinations are a large part of the appeal of a movie like this.
What’s worse is the generally flaccid tone, and especially the awkward performances. De Palma has been accused of lacking an interest in non-homicidal interactions between human beings, and rarely has that been more evident. McAdams never lacks sharpness, but the rest of the cast, most of them non-native English speakers, are seriously out of rhythm, and everybody’s way too busy “indicating” instead of inhabiting their thoughts and feelings. Rapace, so dynamic in the Swedish Dragon Tattoo trilogy and Prometheus, looks completely ill at ease; like De Palma, perhaps she’s comfortable only in a certain kind of heightened genre picture. Which, by description, Passion ought to be. But by the time we reach the end of a series of corkscrewing nightmare scenes, it’s hard to detect that the filmmaker of Dressed to Kill and Body Double actually believes in his own lurid plot twists any more. Robert Horton
Rush
Opens Fri., Sept. 27 at Guild 45th and other theaters. Rated R. 123 minutes.
Car racing means something different in Europe. Here, NASCAR is about working-class authenticity, the legacy of Southern moonshiners, popular mainly in the red states. In Europe, Formula 1 is unapologetically elitist. That’s its brand: champagne and sex, exorbitant budgets, a V-12, VIP celebration of wealth and engineering, yet carrying the cologne of sudden death. Rush is the mostly true stories of two star drivers of the ’70s: the British rogue James Hunt and the Austrian technician Niki Lauda.
Ron Howard has made and starred in some good movies about cars (Gone in 60 Seconds, American Graffiti, etc.), but here he’s a director-for-hire. Written by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United), this is a picture firmly set in 1976 Europe. The Cold War is still on, Thatcher is a lowly back-bencher, and it’s not clear if the hedonistic ’60s have even ended. Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) is a posh, privileged, oversexed product of his times. His wealthy backers have bought him into the big leagues, and his leonine self-confidence is suddenly undercut by this reality: Given a fast-enough car, there are no more excuses if you lose. The methodical, unlovable Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) has meanwhile paid his own way onto the circuit: He makes every car faster through strict engineering discipline, not panache. He and Hunt are yin and yang, a dynamic that Morgan repeats far more often than necessary.
Howard certainly remembers the ’70s, and with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) he gives Rush a wonderfully Campari-soaked period look. The sun flares in Hunt’s golden hair; his girlfriend Suzy Miller (Olivia Wilde) is a model stepped from the pages of Cosmo; smoking and sex are still tolerated on planes—for first-class passengers only, of course. The racing scenes are excitingly conveyed with vintage cars, CGI, and snippets of real race footage among the many montages. Perhaps for the benefit of us Yanks, too many races are narrated by the TV commentators. For Europeans, the Hunt/Lauda rivalry needs no such explanation, and Lauda’s near-fatal accident at the German Grand Prix is part of racing lore.
Hemsworth, an Aussie from those Thor movies, isn’t a bad actor; and Bruhl, a German-Spanish utility player, is a good actor soon to co-star in the WikiLeaks movie The Fifth Estate. I only wish the writing were up to their and Howard’s talents: Hunt is made to say things like “The closer you are to death, the more alive you feel,” and after marriage, Lauda frets that “Suddenly you have something to lose.” Both may be true, but neither needs saying. Morgan’s annoyingly formulaic this-versus-that writing style doesn’t suit a movie with two heroes and no villains. Rush successfully captures the glamour and danger of its sport; only the script isn’t up to speed. Brian Miller
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