More Likely to Get Cut: “Skyfall”

James Bond is old. Bond is old. There are streaks of grey in his whiskers (Daniel Craig looks like he dipped his chin in silver) and a credits-ending announcement proudly celebrating “50 years.” So you’d be forgiven for thinking, when Bond’s body first appears before the camera in jackknife silhouette, that this latest entry would be necessarily rusty, too. Which it is and it is not: any hint of real rust is purely theoretic. Bond, this Bond, our Bond (which Craig is and is not; he’s always been a better spy than the series deserves) still Bonds: bullets, women, whiskey-colored alcohol — the whole thing. But Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes from a screenplay written en troika, has a tendency to move in oblique ellipticals. That’s fair, to a point: everything comes back to something else. But it has the unfortunate side-effect of making the film interesting only by degrees. Too often, Skyfall seems like the working out of a problem: What next?

The answer is death. Bond’s (maybe), in singularity, but also of a way of life, en extremis: the murder of belief, or at least of the past which held it. There is a gathering gloom between the joints of the film’s sequences of a sort that creases foreheads and knits eyebrows. A lot of British spies (Craig’s, but also Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes and Naomie Harris) spend a lot of time looking worried, harried and hounded. Skyfall isn’t a chase film, but it feels haunted nonetheless, by a featureless existentialism. Have I lost you yet? If not, you may make it through this 150-minute narrative with adrenal glands more-or-less intact. But if you waver, you waver, I think, wisely: after four years away from theaters, following the cramped and ornery Quantum of Solace, the Bond series is richer, or more jagged, than its creative output had foreshadowed. But it’s less likeable — gorgeous (during a high-rise fist fight in one scene, or at an Eastern bar in another) but remote.

So anyway: Bond dies (or not), returns (or does he?) and works with Dench’s M, the stooped headmistress of Britain’s MI6. For a while, they chase after the loss of a crucial intelligence document, lost before the start of the film in a seamless and ridiculous McGuffin. Later, they do battle. But against who?

There’s a lot of plot to Skyfall, and a lot of tense shoulders. Dench is at the forefront, like never before in the series, but she does a lot of the same thing instead of many different things, one after the other. This is either by design or folly, but the performance limits the psychological scope of the narrative; and the narrative, by turn, lacks edge.

Is it worth seeing? Bloody hell, yes. Stick with Skyfall; I never warmed up to it, not quite, but I got hooked on its tin-flinty themes and on its insistence on linking Craig and Dench in a quasi-mythical charade.

Beyond all of that, of course, is this: Javier Bardem, as the film’s fanged boy wonder, its malevolent pack of dogs (he’s the one doing the hounding) and the centerpiece of the movie’s standout scene, which rests on the one-two punch of strong writing and queasy misdirection. (What is he saying and why is he doing?) It isn’t great, or doesn’t seem that way on first viewing. But it eats at you.

On a re-read, I realize that all sounds like abstraction. Well there it is.

Heart Made of Parts: “The Amazing Spider-Man”

It’s weird, realizing that watching The Amazing Spider-Man takes almost three hours because a lot of things take three hours — a week’s worth of cardio; a soufflé; Titanic — and most of those things have very little in common with Marc Webb’s tremulous, woobie-wonder reboot. (A woobie, for the uninitiated, is also known as an Andrew Garfield.)

Boy has parents who leave, then die. Boy grows up, gets bitten. Gets powerful. Boy angsts.

The film, much like its hero Peter Parker (that’d be Garfield, beneath a storm of hair), is capable of both outsized dramatic gawk and small epiphanies, and Webb enjoys himself while rolling through the origin story (it’s a reboot after Sam Raimi’s five-year-old trilogy, but also one that actually goes back to the beginning, Batman Begins-style). But his determination to bend the Marvel material to his own inclinations — less superheroic than super-adolescent — has its own casualties. The structure is a patchwork that keeps slamming audiences into small climaxes that never, themselves, quite climax. Perspective is flipped inside-out: Webb projects every moment through the prism of Garfield’s adolescence.

It’s smart filmmaking, because Garfield is a fleet, emotive charmer and because fleet, emotive charms can sustain pretty much any movie, for any length. But his front-and-self-centeredness hasn’t been built into a strong storytelling strategy: every emotional obstacle is actually just one emotional obstacle (Peter feels fatherless and abandoned, didn’t you hear?) that The Amazing Spider-Man keeps ramming back into, without new nuance or fresh developments.

Or put another way: count the number of on-screen adult males at the beginning of the movie. Count them again at the end. The difference is the film: one note distended to fill a symphony.

Are there villians? Sure. And Garfield battles them, in-between a romance with Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy. Is there spandex?  Sure. And Garfield wears it, when he isn’t agonizing over his place in the city as, y’know, a teenager and citizen and, yes also, a superhero.

But is Peter agonizing, really? Garfield strikes a posture of agro-angst but his journey is done in comic-book bright letters. And Webb, as he proves on the heels of (500) Days of Summer, is more clever than he is incisive; quick with empathy — everything is feelings all the time — but little else. He presses forward heart-first.

All around this is an actual, panel-to-screen story, with blocks of acrobatic city destruction and speeches about the moral obligation of citizenry — not to mention Stone, curt and pop-eyed vulnerable, who plays an effervescent romantic duet with Garfield.

The Amazing Spider-Man is a slim, attendant film about adolescence.

Too bad that it’s also about superheroes.

This Tornado Loves You: “Moonrise Kingdom”

Wes Anderson is showing off a new kind of Wes Anderson in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom — an Andersonian model of Anderson-ness that’s been both updated and revamped. There are many wheels spinning in his latest movie; few of them spin for no reason.

There is an island, first. Or, rather, first there is Bob Balaban, carrying on here in a voiceover tradition that has also included Alec Baldwin. We, he tells us, are on New Penzance Island. It is 1965. A storm approaches “in three days’ time.”

The islanders scramble in the calm, including: a troupe of khaki scouts, so-named for their beige hegemony, led by Edward Norton; a pair of maligned lawyers (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) and their four children, led by the eldest, Suzy (Kara Hayward), whose favorite movie, I suspect, is all of Gwyneth Paltrow’s scenes from The Royal Tenenbaums.

There’s a policeman (Bruce Willis), who seems sad, a woman in blue (Tilda Swinton) who doesn’t seem to have a name and khaki’d scout Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) who is sad, angry and deeply strange.

He’s also — and this is the film’s biggest, broadest mistake, and also its central hinge — a solipsistic romantic who turns every wounded-ego overture into the signs of a fragile emotional interior.

I didn’t buy it, and I’m not sure most audiences will either. Unlike Suzy, who runs away with him at the film’s beginning, kicking off a days-long search that steers the plot, Sam is featureless in his angst: an old-Anderson ideal. It’s a shame, because new-Anderson sustains the major majority of Moonrise Kingdom with a gorgeous sense of Romantic (capital-r) comedy. His characters — all sketches done with a steady hand so that they shade around the edges, suggesting depth without revealing it — woo and wound each other around an idyllic illogicality: the older you get, the harder it is to find and fall in love.

Writing with Roman Coppola, as he did last with The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson has tapped into a peacefully jarring version of how peace can jar un-peaceful people. He still shoots in rigid perpendiculars, as if the world were a dollhouse that was missing its fourth wall, but there’s more flexibility, more sweetness here, than in anything he’s done before. That buoys his humor, all sight gags and ironic improbability, and gives him new emotional headroom. Suzy and Sam are in love, a ridiculousness which so doesn’t stand much scrutiny that Anderson sugarcoats it, but theirs are not the only spirits of romance and whimsy. Even in the face of gathering blackness and rising floodwaters (remember the coming storm) Moonrise Kingdom is too chipper to cop to ennui. It’s irascibly sentimental.

There are few strands of the Anderson-Coppola partnership that made the freeze-dried The Darjeeling Limited, an international farce so heartless-hollow it echoed. This is more the Anderson who made the fantastic Fantastic Mr. Fox, though this lacks that film’s outrageous detailing, and it is miles away from the Anderson of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums.

Moonrise Kingdom isn’t great, as those were, but it’s also not quite so chilly-hip. There are fewer quirked eyebrows but there is more open laughter and open sadness: orphans get what they want and what they need. The sky breaks open — but in the downpour, no one drowns.

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.”