Just Mercy: “The Cabin in the Woods”

Five –somethings (Chris Hemsworth, Kristen Connolly, Jesse Williams, Anna Hutchison, and Franz Kafka) take a trip into the woods.

Two white-collared workers (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) prepare an operation in a large round room full of buttons and levers and sealed with a heavy door.

The trip does not last long.

The Cabin in the Woods is a slaughterhouse puzzle box. A Rubik’s cube of menace. A trick film that disappears inside out. A postmodern moratorium, heretofore, on the very mechanics that support it. It’s a film that defeats itself.

The Cabin in the Woods is also bloody fun — and funny, too, and wily in its thin-stringed suspense and rusty metallic muderousness. The film has too much fun with its college-age coed victims to have any reason to be any good at slaughtering them but slaughter the film does, with a fleet menace that is archetypally generic. It’s a film that burns the rulebook after memorizing it.

All a lot of saying about something that should be seen, first, before being dissected and judged. It’s a bit of a lie, the idea that’s spreading that The Cabin in the Woods is a freak out of spectacular surprise. Its twists build off a preexisting foundation, equal parts Raimi and Whedon (no wonder about the latter: he’s a co-writer and producer along with director Drew Goddard), instead of braving new ground. But, yes, the plot is a tunnel of warped mirrors. Beneath its façade of college kid killings — indeed, on top of and around and beside — Goddard’s movie is all loosey-goosey cinematic metaphysics.

These five kids have been written into being and then pushed and prodded and punished toward disarray, death, dismemberment. Goddard and Whedon make them up, and make them well, only to tear them down. That meta-ness is, no spoiler, the center of the film’s conceit and its criticism of the genre it also adores. Horror is voyeurism and victimization. But who is satisfied? Or, rather, what?

The best part of The Cabin in the Woods honors these questions while keeping them at elbow’s length. It relies, instead, on the certainty of its own cleverness: the script’s sharp teeth; Goddard’s keen eye (look close: there are one or two ingenious framings); the performances. The first and second acts are made of this stuff: it’s tongue-and-cheek carnage with a pulse.

The third act, where the slaughter leaves the structural comfort of the cabin, jumps the tracks. The filmmakers are more unsteady charting a new path through the madness and Goddard can’t sustain the world-rending nature of the Big Picture: neither its jokey-ness nor its soul. It becomes carnage with more carnage.

Talk of Escaping: “We Need to Talk About Kevin”

Red is everywhere in We Need to Talk About Kevin: it colors frames, splatters windows, cakes in hair. It slips and sticks and oozes. It covers over.

The color is important because, to an injudicious or less sympathetic viewer, it appears that Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) is losing her mind. And well should she, living alone in a squat house by a road surrounded by neighbors who grimace at her in passing, down the street from a job that she barely survives, dodging catcalls from children and angry verbal — and physical — assaults from townspersons.

How did Eva get here? What did she do to deserve this? What has gone so terribly, awfully wrong?

It’s neither the question nor the answer that really fascinates director and co-writer Lynne Ramsay, adapting Lionel Shriver’s chilly epistolary novel. Instead, Ramsay is after something more slippery and, as a result, more unsatisfying.

The conventions are all there in the script, stark as thin daggers of meaning, jutting out to cut passing characters. But the film doesn’t pursue them, not quite. Euro-chic mother raises demonic spawn child (that’d be Kevin) to be a sociopathic slaughterer. Child is imprisoned. Mother suffers.

Child suffers.

The loop repeats, suffocating those within it — and us, the audience. Because what Ramsay is after is that, there, the mood of endless unending repetitious hell. That outletless guilt. That impotent remorse. That ness.

This is where the red helps, as a manifestation of Eva’s own psychic prejudices — her son’s room is surrounded by walls of navy — and of Swinton’s endlessly diligent method performance as a manfiestor of those manifestations.

It’s to Ramsay’s credit that Swinton is successful, partially, amid the half-hidden truths and that what is frenetic is also penetrating. Partially.

But it isn’t to Ramsay’s credit that she has made the sweeping, auteurist gesture of turning Shriver’s novel inside-out, so that we look at Eva instead of with her. That novel, structured as a series of letters, was drenched in language. On screen, We Need to Talk About Kevin is drenched in red.

The words say more.

Sad Little Hill: “The Descendants”

The Descendants is a lovely film: sharp, sure and wholly autonomous, as if its characters existed before the film and all possessed of a seesawing heartache that stabs at you in many minor ways.

The film — the writer-director Alexander Payne’s fifth feature, and by far the best of anything last year — is, like the Hawaii island chain on which it’s set, a paradise gone to seed: between its frames and characters are glimpses of what could have been and was instead.

Matt King (George Clooney) is the father to two troubled daughters (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller) and the husband to a comatose wife (Patricia Hastie). The wife is comatose because of a boating accident while out with another man who was not her husband. The daughters are troubled because their father is terrible — father, not person. (Clooney-as-Matt is more seawater-scraggly than you’d expect, though. He keeps revealing salty bottom layers.)

King is also cousin to many other Kings, all — yes — descended from Hawaiian royalty generations ago, although so many years now stretch between them that all their nobility has been bred out. Only thrones remain.

Or, at least, one throne: the King family claims one last vast tract of land, worth one last vast sum of money, to be divided up between them if and when it’s sold.

There, in the middle of all of this, is Matt; and Payne pulls the strings around him tight in ways that keep probing and forcing him to feel. Payne stages the narrative of self-revelation as an act of slow, sweet torture: like pulling out a very large, broken splinter.

The viewer is no better off. The Descendants, from a script by Payne and Jim Rash & Nat Faxon based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, exists in a suspended bubble of despair whose redemption is its fragility. Indeed, there’s even humor, when every character slips out from the burdens of their situation. Certainty, though, is the thing: and what sustains the film is its surefooted handling of many tricky tones at once, allowing them to layer instead of clash so that the comedy echoes with sadness.

That’s quite a feat for any year of filmmaking — let alone one dominated by symbolic prestige. Payne’s The Descendants is a reclamation of the power of poignancy, and of playing moments out only until their ending and no further. (It gives nothing away to say the ending is exactly as it should be and as you would expect, even from the first scene.)

It’s one feat yes, doing what Payne has done — and it’s supported by many others, including the supporting casting (including Woodley, who triumphs when she tries, away from the set of TV’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager).

But The Descendants rests on the strength of its keenness and generosity, its relentlessness and sorrow — the story of one life when everyone else’s lives get in the way.

Beneath the Music: “The Artist”

The Artist lies — but well, and is incredibly clever in doing so.

Maybe my soul is too shriveled, or my eyes too big, to appreciate the film’s sleeveless, soul-bearing silent black-and-white. Or maybe I am just no longer nostalgic for a style that died for a reason.

Michel Hazanavicius has written and directed an ode to movies that did not speak. So his does not. He has gathered a pan-national cast of actors to perform in a form that required great timing and concentration. So they have that. And Hazanavicius and his stars have worked together on something that does not much want or care for dimension. So there is none.

It plays that there is a man (Jean Dujardin), a star of the system, and he is great and glorious and everyone loves him. His career rises with no ceiling. And, also, there is a woman (Bérénice Bejo), a veritable no one, who is determined and plucky in the face of her own obscurity. She works without ceasing.

They meet. They spark.

And The Artist traces the flickering — sees, in their slight romance, a larger mirror for the death of silence in the face of sound. It’s a metaphor too heavy for Hazanavicius, but at least he carries it with a film student’s purpose, and that playful solemnity of purpose buoys the film almost far enough: see, look, a dog who does tricks! — and a tall straight butler! — and a house fire! — and a coat rack!

Separated by intertitles and strung along by a cranking piano score, The Artist gets right at the pleasure center of silent cinema, nailing its notes of physical comedy, melodrama and romance. Hazanavicius knows just what he wants from each reference or sidelong glance and the cast is happy to follow; and Dujardin and Bejo know just what to do with their di-dimensional roles — indeed they seem to glow with their own goodwill — and Hazanavicius is happy to indulge them. They’re all just so proud of themselves.

Maybe I am a scrooge, then, or an un-bought one, at least: I enjoy, but am not seduced by, the nitrate sheen of the film. Its novelty cannot also mask its essential thinness: how those notes of comedy, melodrama and romance are as overplayed as they are played well — functional flourishes of a form that improved past itself into something eventually more effective and then, yes, more talkative.

With every swooped hand and sigh of The Artist, I waited for a fuller, stronger moment: a Sunrise for the 21st century; and with every pantomime of emotion, every character’s lunge toward another or the audience, I waited for the whisper of a sound.

Hands on You: “Shame”

Just how unsexy is Michael Fassbender as the sex-addicted Brandon in Shame? Well … he mopes a lot. And he dresses well. And he likes to sleep naked. If it sounds like there isn’t much more to his character, that’s because we don’t ever really learn if there is.

In this, Steve McQueen’s second film and second collaboration with Fassbender, there’s more to be learned about wardrobing and the art of tasteful orgies than there is about studying a psyche or breaking down a life.

But the orgies are tasteful, this is true. And the wardrobing is chic, in its cascading shades of slate and cool blues. Brandon, we can see, is a refined man, a man who refines: he has a nice high-rise apartment and a nice high-paying job. But Brandon likes sex. A lot. With anyone: coworkers, prostitutes, men. He’s an addict, the life he’s built around his addiction a sham, and the endless illicit thrill has hollowed him out from the inside.

That’s a nifty thesis and a good starting place for a nifty, off-kilter art film, flush with touches of destabilizing sexual energy: Bertolucci by way of Buñuel. But McQueen is no Bertolucci — and he’s certainly no Buñuel. Here, instead, his work is oversatisfied and underdone: appetizing right until you bite into the center. There is little humor and no tension, no sense of sequence as narrative or of the mood in a moment; everything is all arid pauses as if conversations were happening over telegraph.

There are flavors around the edges, however, worth teasing out and tasting, even as the majority of Shame remains a sad little sex movie longing for a spark. Certainly there is heat in Carey Mulligan, who shows up as Brandon’s sister and flits about for the majority of her screen time as an elusive, waifish presence: either she’s a crackpot baby doll or a crackpot baby doll who speaks truth. The film doesn’t know — and you end up so wishing it would.

Instead, Fassbender — dutiful, somber and incredibly inelegant in the way he traps his emotions behind his Neander-jaw — writhes and weeps. He gets off, and off and off and off, but you end up wishing he would just get out.

Here is Where You’ll Stay: “Like Crazy”

Like Crazy is about love, but I wouldn’t call it romantic. I wouldn’t call it precisely anything, which is part of the problem.

The other is that, in Drake Doremus’ sweet-and-sour rubber band drama, there is far too much, and also far too little, show.

There is a girl (Felicity Jones) who likes a guy (Anton Yelchin) that she goes to school with. She tells him. They go on a date. They smile. They fall in love. She leaves back to London for the summer, with her parents. She does not come back.

There are other things going on at other times in Crazy, but the crazy thing is that the whole sum of them never quite sparks. Jones’ Anna and Yelchin’s Jacob go back and forth and forth and back across two continents, separated by time and space and other people. And they just want to be happy, man. But Doremus keeps picking away at their domesticity, wanting to track not just the way that love infects them, but also the way it spreads out into their lives until it sucks everything else out, so that that first-date rush becomes a high they’re always desperate to get back to. It’s a fascinating idea, but it hasn’t been done fascinatingly — leaving the film inaccessible even to itself, as if every hot-and-cold emotion were being acted behind glass.

The acting, for what it’s worth, tries hard to break through. Indeed, reportedly, the star pair worked through a lot of improvisatory exercises to get just at the rhythm between their characters — and, indeed, that work is clear in the many fluid gestures between each: a downcast eye or an insult that skews two degrees left of the heart. They make the act of mopey hipster love live, alive.

The rest of Like Crazy, however, is a little hippy-dippy. Beautifully shot and sharp — with a hundred different emotions running along its skin — but also overlong and bipolar and formulaic, leaving you longing for a moment that never comes: when one of them will just look at the other and say, “I’m just not that into you.”

Laugh Into the Storm: “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol is spectacular. That is, the film is full of spectacle: scenes and sequences of shimmering ingenuity, timed so that they keep slamming into one another as if the whole thing were strung along the same line of adrenaline. But this, the latest M: I film, is also a really, really good movie — and a great thriller, and a great action film, and a nifty puzzle box of technological tripwires and ominously cascading countdowns — which is a spectacle unto itself: after all, Ghost Protocol is the fourth in a franchise that is more than fifteen years old, outcropped from a ‘60s TV series. So how now and why here is it that director Brad Bird has been able to set a decades-old top madly spinning again … and to get us chasing after it?

First, as to the why: Ghost Protocol, when ripped to shreds, has all the old trappings: a prejudice for European terrorists, a penchant for global visions of nuclear war, and a preference for linking them both, so that one causes the other. But that plot, the causal hinge of Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec’s otherwise lively and textured script, isn’t exactly what it seems: the Europeans aren’t Russian; the nuclear warhead is no MacGuffin; and that vision of world destruction has more to do with peace than war — and in these several, minor variations are glimpses of the larger reconstituency Bird and his team are after: they have not just redone the typical tableaux. In some ways, they have undone it, cutting up the series’ arthritic mask-ripping, ceiling-rappelling twists and retying them in sharper, shinier, funnier knots, so that now the whole thing dashes, breathlessly, with a smirk.

And as to the how? Several signs point several ways, with credit marshaled out in proportion. First, an approving applausal round for producers Cruise and J.J. Abrams — back, one assumes, to re-launch a franchise he already tried to re-launch, with his own noble, not-bad M: I III five years ago — for hiring an atypical writing duo in Appelbaum and Nemec, and for trying, really trying, to test and throw out those pieces of the machine that had aged, and not well.

And a hearty bit of enthusiasm for Cruise and his cast, including Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, and Jeremy Renner (accessorized, with flair, by one or three small, bright cameos), as the small group of disavowed IMF agents, out to save a world that no longer wants anything to do with them, following one mysterious bombing and the threat of others. As Ethan Hunt, Cruise remains stalwart: a compact and nimble lupine presence — but his supporting team is just as sharp, all given wrinkles of distinctive traits to riff and build on. Renner, in particular, deserves a small bowing mention for his rascally aplomb in mixing the film’s new balance of adrenaline, angst, and wry self-acuity

Last, an ovation for Bird — who has made the jump from animation, where he wrote and directed The Incredibles, Pixar’s greatest work, with a terrifically prepared finesse. In his vision of the M: I world, where stunts have scope and size as well as sweat and stealth, and where a narrative is only as capable as the awareness it has of itself, is the vision of a filmmaker who sees how time and tempo and texture can make even the story of a race against the clock — or, rather, several races against several clocks, all stacked end-to-end — feel tick-tockingly urgent. There are handfuls of individual moments to savor, like a scale up-and-down-and-up the world’s tallest building, shot, wide-angled, from the outside, or a set of dueling handshake meetings built, precipitously, on a set of slowly revealing lies, or a late-game soiree that sizzles without a single shot, or or or…

And then there is the biggest compliment I can pay Ghost Protocol, which is that as soon as it was over, I was dying for the next one.