Blu-ray Review: A Most Wanted Man (2014)

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Unable to weave its overwhelming number of characters and conflicts together into a solidly crafted dramatic tapestry, director Gavin Hood's otherwise ambitious 2007 effort Rendition was one of several pictures to address the moral and ethical pros and cons of life in the post 9/11 landscape that ultimately crashed and burned at the box office.

Tackling similar terrain by way of a completely different throughline, The American helmer Anton Corbijn turned to fictionalized nonfiction while bringing former real-life spy turned Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy master novelist John le Carré’s exploration of extraordinary rendition to the screen with this tautly stylish adaptation of A Most Wanted Man.

And since it takes a certain degree of performance to pull off life as a secret agent, it’s perhaps (tragically) fitting that the film features what wound up to be the last starring role for the late great thespian Philip Seymour Hoffman who heads up the Oscar caliber cast for Corbijn’s strongest character driven nail biter since his directorial debut via the Ian Curtis biopic Control.

A German intelligence agent, Hoffman's Günther Bachmann relies on tried-and-true Cold War era information-gathering techniques (such as turning sources, person-to-person observation, and sturdy shoe leather) to “make the weather," as he explains in a key meeting with representatives from other governments.

Radiating power and integrity while striving to retain control over a questionable situation involving a recent foreign arrival, as the film gets going, Bachmann must identify the real motives and missing pieces in the mysterious back-story of a half-Chechen, half-Muslim young man who’s arrived in Hamburg seeking asylum and his father’s willed fortune.

Still stung by the time he got it wrong before 9/11 (which the viewer gradually learns may have had more to do with foreign blame-shifting versus actual error), it’s up to Bachmann to ascertain whether the man is a genuine threat or someone whose innocence is being clouded by circumstance and the ever-changing weather of the political climate Bachmann’s team specializes in forecasting.

Hoping to catch a shark he’s had his eye on long before he was tasked with sizing up the newest on the scene as a minnow or a barracuda, the spies zero in on Rachel McAdams’s refugee rights activist and Willem Dafoe’s private banker – angling to turn those whose paths the man has crossed into bait.

Desperate to run the operation his way, Bachmann finds himself butting heads with an American agent (played with commanding presence by Robin Wright as the type of operative that her House of Cards alter ego would probably have on speed dial).

Claustrophobic and complex, while admittedly it is slanted more one direction as a work of liberal humanism indicative of le Carré's ouevre (and given the author's own admission), Man still admirably implores viewers to see both sides of the story by layering it with shadows and light.

Largely subtle on the whole, although it doesn’t tip its hat quite as noticeably as, say TV’s Scandal does with its over-the-top speechmaking, the success of this approach is both hit and miss, however.

Harking back to Corbijn’s past as a music video director, Wanted struggles at times with stagy “see it from the cheap seats” visually dominant character blocking, ignoring organic movement in favor of landing a few cool frame-within-a-frame shots of structural symbolism.

While thankfully minor, certain sequences weigh a little too heavily on the film’s otherwise impressive commitment to realism via foreshadowing that's obvious to everyone except for the super spies on the screen (such as in a critical moment during the penultimate scene when they fail to notice a suspicious car that calls an unbelievable amount of attention to itself).

Nonetheless still on par with the suspension of disbelief demanded during the thematically similar Showtime series Homeland, in the end the complete conviction of the ensemble cast keeps us firmly rooted to the yarn being unspooled in A Most Wanted Man.

Bringing all of the players together in a final sequence that hits us like an emotional tidal wave and also reaffirms the author’s point better than any one monologue or individual frame, the work captured by ace cinematographer Benoît Delhomme looks and sounds as lifelike as a documentary thanks to Lionsgate’s stellar high definition Blu-ray transfer.

Boasting a terrific behind-the-scenes featurette with former German-stationed British spy turned The Spy Who Came In From the Cold scribe John le Carré himself, the highly recommended extra takes you on a biographical, historical, and topical tour of the work, the man, and its political terrain.

Not shying away from sharing his own views on the issues that inspired le Carré and the film, the informative bonus material also invites you to compare and contrast other works about extraordinary rendition, while encouraging you to do some information-gathering of your own.

An excellent companion to the main attraction, the author hosted walk-and-talk is as engrossing as it is compelling – making me wish that somebody would take the time to bring the author’s own story to the screen as a superior saga of extraordinary espionage both on and off the page.

   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: God's Pocket (2014)

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In God’s Pocket, the mourning mother played by Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks relies on her maternal instinct in trusting that there’s much more to the “accidental” death of her son than the yarn being spun by his coworkers.

Moreover, just like the character embodied by Hendricks, her onscreen Mad costar (and occasional TV episode helmer) turned offscreen Pocket director John Slattery calls upon his background as an actor to construct several compelling scenes throughout his feature filmmaking debut, which he also co-wrote.

And fittingly not only are these moments masterfully crafted – paying homage to the works that had inspired him in the past on both stage and screen as Pocket salutes everyone from Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller to John Huston, Brian DePalma, Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes – but Slattery also infuses each with the opportunity to showcase the talents of his gifted ensemble cast.

Set in the eponymous working class Philadelphia neighborhood that’s tight-knit for all expect those who weren’t born and raised there – Pocket’s cast is headed up by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (who also served as a producer on the project) in one of his final performances.

A low level hood, Hoffman’s Mickey Scarpato can’t seem to please anyone regardless of how many shortcuts he takes and how hard he tries to fit into the surroundings he adopted when he married Hendricks’s local girl Jeanie.

A natural beauty that’s not unaware of her effect on men, Jeanie’s ability to use her feminine wiles to get her way and intuitive talent for reading people seems to stop right at her own home as she fails to see the sweet boy she raised for the bigoted, angry, violent young man he’s become.

In this saga filled with otherwise less than beautiful losers, the pulse of “the Pocket” is kept in check by the beautiful yet unapologetically blunt prose penned (and performed in a moving bookended voiceover) by Pocket native turned part-time newspaper columnist and full-time drunk Richard Shellburn (embodied by Richard Jenkins).

Anchored by Shellburn as the God-like narrator of God’s Pocket, Slattery’s character driven film gets the Dennis Lehane-like atmosphere, lower class accents, and pointless arguments of overworked working class residents right in what is ultimately a throwback to ‘70s blue collar era antihero cinema filled with men who looked more like your neighbors than matinee idol movie stars.

Unfortunately the decision to focus strongly on a writer as the voice of the piece only magnifies the problems of Pocket that started in the writing stage, given the way that from a narrative standpoint everything else goes utterly wrong.

While that alone shouldn’t have been enough to lose the audience as the ‘70s were filled with existentially ambiguous scripts handled with a greater understanding of what the filmmaker wanted to say, perhaps Pocket’s greatest problem is the absence of a traditional character arc in offering any sort of emotionally satisfying (or merely complete) follow-through for the grieving Jeanie.

Of course, the pointlessness of the actions of the Pocket natives near the end of the picture does leave us with philosophical idea that – like most of life’s “accidents” even ones wherein the nature of just how accidental they are is up for debate – there’s no rhyme or reason to the who, what, where and why other than just to be present in the here and now.

However, this thesis could’ve been proven in a far more compelling way than what’s presented on the screen since as it is, we’re puzzled what it was about Peter Dexter’s novel that made Slattery so eager to adapt it for his cinematic debut.

Despite this, with the cast in question, the character-driven action is enough to distract and even entertain its viewers here and there – particularly when you evaluate certain moments separately from the overall production.

But ultimately you get the sense both in the director’s commentary track as well as while watching the tonally uneven, structurally aimless feature that Slattery was so caught up by each dramatic moment on a performance level that he didn’t stop to question how well the sum of so many disjointed parts flowed together as a less than cohesive whole.

Often contradictory, Pocket confuses us as to what – if anything – it’s trying to say given how little sense the actions of its characters make. And this shortcoming is particularly disappointing given how otherwise effective a more coherent dialogue rewrite could’ve been in one of the film’s otherwise most ambitious sequences.

In a climactic Do the Right Thing fueled standoff, a key argument about the newsman’s right to generalize (and potentially trivialize or stereotype) the people he spent his life with is questioned by a man who will suddenly hold the opposite view he had two acts earlier in a scene of Mean Streets charged justice.

Namely, in public, Hoffman’s Mickey doubles back on a statement he made in private at a moment where everything that has happened screams for him to feel the opposite. And while admittedly on the one hand, I applaud Slattery’s refusal to signpost Pocket with an overt message, on the other, memorable performances by his charismatic cast of character actors isn’t enough to save this otherwise meaninglessly melancholic slice-of-life mixed with macabre dashes of dark humor.

Fortunately for viewers, the pace picks up from a walk to a jog through the seedy side of town roughly 35 or 40 minutes into the second half of the otherwise succinct 89 minute movie. Yet here’s hoping that the otherwise talented Slattery will take a cue from his Mad costar Hendricks’ character in his next time at the helm instead of serving up a cut-and-paste character study centered on less than beautiful blue collar losers (which in and of itself borders on the same generalization of which Jenkins’s reporter is accused).

Building off the strengths evidenced here in some dynamically staged moments, Slattery should trust in his role as a cinematic storyteller to paint us a complete and thorough picture rather than simply spinning a diverting yarn where the memorable scenes fall through its many loosely woven holes like change in a ripped pocket.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Doubt (2008)

Without a Doubt...
One of the Best Films of 2008
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“When everybody assumes that they share the same values, they share also a certain blindness. I think the utter lack of vigilance and profound credulity of people of that time [the 1960s] was what allowed the church scandals to ever happen in the first place. It was too obvious if you were paying any attention whatsoever to the amount of it taking place. It calls for a kind of cultural blindness. I was reminded in more recent times of the time I was living in a few years ago -- let's say in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq -- that again there was this kind of certitude and blindness, and it had echoes for me in this earlier time.

“I found myself living in an era of extreme advocacy... I felt surrounded by a society that seemed very certain about a lot of things. Everyone had a very entrenched opinion, but there was no real exchange, and if someone were to say ‘I don't know,’ it was as if they would be put to death in the media coliseum. There was this mask of certainty in our society that I saw hardening to the point that it was developing a crack -- and that crack was doubt.

“I thought that doubt was a hallmark of wisdom and an active and ongoing enterprise…. So I wanted to write about those issues … that celebrated the fact that you can never know anything for certain. I wanted to explore the idea that doubt has an infinite nature, that it allows for growth and change, whereas certainty [‘and dogma’] is a dead-end. Where there is certainty, the conversation is over, and I'm interested in the conversation, especially because another word for that conversation is ‘life.’ We've got to learn to live with a measure of uncertainty. That's the silence under the chatter of our time.”

-- Writer/Director John Patrick Shanley
(As Quoted in Miramax's Press & Production Notes for Doubt)

And although he began with the idea for a work that would simply be called Doubt, Shanley is careful to explain that he wasn't necessarily inspired or overly fascinated with the revelations about the global Catholic Church scandals that were featured as a regular nightly news story over the past few years. For, as he and the Oscar nominated four cast members state-- the film can resonate with anyone, anywhere, and within any given situation.

However, with the ultimate goal “that the sense of doubt belongs to the audience,” as he was determined to avoid telling “them what's right and wrong,” in lieu of making them ultimately “think and feel something, rather than tell them what to think and feel,” by centering the action for the Pulitzer Prize winning first play--in a prospective trilogy-- in a 1960s Bronx Catholic school and church with the subtext of a possible scandal, was precisely the right combination needed to ignite the audience.

Ideally Shanley knew that the decision to set his work in this particular “polarizing situation, one in which most people would brook no hesitation in condemning a person -- and then throwing those assumptions back at the audience in a different light,” would eventually cause-- what he shares on the stunningly transferred Blu-ray edition of the film-- the “final act” of Doubt to occur after audience members walked out as each person saw it in a different way.

Set in 1964, just one year after John F. Kennedy's assassination at St. Nicholas school—Shanley’s Doubt occurs just before the pivotal change for Catholicism that would eventually find nuns being able to go without the habit with the recent reformations and decisions made by 1962’s “establishment of Vatican II by Pope John XXIII” as well as encouraging “much less formality between priests and their parishioners.”

Representing the new breed of familiar, direct, and personable priests, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s affable Father Flynn tries to shake up the overly strict surroundings much to the chagrin of the equally stubborn but old-fashioned school principal Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) who is a taskmaster that preaches not on the pulpit but in the hallways and offices enforcing discipline and order to the utmost extent.

Caught in the middle between the old-fashioned values of her superior Sister Aloysius and the likable and far friendlier Father Flynn-- the young, quiet, shockingly innocent, and sweet Sister James (Amy Adams) finds her loyalties tested even more when she witnesses a few too many peculiar moments and strange behavior shared between Father Flynn and the school’s first black student, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II).

Not quite sure what it is she has seen but feeling in her gut that it was inappropriate, Adams’ Sister James dutifully informs Streep’s Aloysius who-- much like the allegorical cat brought in to kill the mice in another scene—tells Sister James “that we have to take care of this ourselves.”

Since-- as the film and Miramax’s Notes inform-- in the unequal gender divide and “power gap between the priests, who could wield their complete authority in church matters, and the nuns who had to eek out power in very different and subtler ways,” the Sisters of Charity at St. Nicholas had no men to whom Aloysius felt they could go with the information.

As Streep reveals in her research, commending the nuns’ “sense of great capability,” she also confides in the Production Notes that she “also got… a sense of their hierarchy in the church, how they were always second-tier to the male hierarchy of the priests and how some chafed against that. All of that was very valuable for Sister Aloysius. And all that drives the narrative.”

And indeed that it does as the film which changed from a four person theatrical production morphs into a fully-realized living and breathing work. Shot at the same corner and neighborhood where Shanley grew up as he dedicates the film to nuns as well as the real Sisters of Charity including the woman who inspired Sister James—he manages to make it a personal affair as the real sisters were brought on as consultants and the children he attended the school with now have cameos as parents in the church scenes.

Transporting the dialogue driven play in which Streep called one of her truly "great nights in the theatre” that she’d ever had where she said there were “two audible gasps [from the audience] as one voice,” as well as Hoffman who saw it countless times and Adams who fought hard for the role—Shanley decided to “utilize the conventions of [the mystery] genre—to provide a propulsive energy to the narrative.”

Of course, the lingering question that he begins with that’s starting to divide the audience from one of the earliest scenes in which Hoffman is caught in a single frame with the children is “did he or didn’t he?” [regarding Father Flynn’s "relationship" with Donald] but knowing that he would go against the one hundred plus year tradition of filmmakers who “have tended to ask a question and at the end of the movie... answer it,” this mystery evolves as Aloysius confronts Flynn directly and the three characters go around in circles without a shred of proof.

By constantly switching gears and changing your impressions, at times I felt the work recalled David Mamet's Oleanna and Arthur Miller's The Crucible except Shanley's is much more fine-tuned and speaks softly where the others shout--instead, building up tension by what isn't being said, shown, or somehow otherwise revealed.

Knowing that he was going to—similar to the play—“leave the audience at the end not with an answer, but saying rather ‘What a beautiful question’… [so] in that way, it becomes the audience’s story,” which grows far more complicated when the boy’s mother (played by an unbelievably effective Viola Davis) arrives with a rather unpredictable reaction to Aloysius and several new facts that must be taken into consideration.

The type of film that manages to somehow break through the screen and pull you inside its claustrophobic setting of Elia Kazan East of Eden like slanted cinematography by master lensman Roger Deakins to weigh possible balances of power, a clever usage of color, an emphasis on the visuals to punctuate a line or what’s not being said in a large amount of stillness and silence-- Doubt is that rare film that must be viewed more than once and is best done so along with others as each individual will make up their own mind on what has happened.

While the film’s conclusion of uncertainty and further confusion works incredibly well on the stage, even the actors admit in one of the Blu-ray’s outstanding featurettes in a discussion with Entertainment Weekly, that movie audiences (including Meryl Streep who admits to the practice herself) are far more likely to make a snap decision about something and this one doesn’t play by those expectations in the least.

Quite daring and provocative because the very nature of the story at its core is in everything we don’t see—while as Hoffman has admitted, he privately came up with his own decision as to Father Flynn’s guilt or innocence (but never shared it)—I was fascinated by Amy Adams’ unique take in challenging viewers to watch the film a number of different ways, trying to shut out one entire side and say “yes, he did it” and then “no, he did not,” to understand the complexity.

However, at its core, we soon realize that the guilt or innocence is only part of the story for as soon as Viola Davis enters the film, that simplistic of a question (no matter how devastating it is) is tossed aside to one that’s so filled with gray areas, it’s almost that particular fiery exchange that will affect you even more than the “yes” or “no” and suddenly make us second guess all snap judgments… at least for a few days after you see it.

Including feature length commentary from writer/director John Patrick Shanley as well as a few mini-documentaries and featurettes—the quality of the Blu-ray for a work I now consider as one of my Top 5 Best Films of 2008 is first rate, bringing a theatrical experience right into your home and one in which the sharpness of high definition actually makes the film and characters (especially Aloysius) bring anyone who attended Catholic school right back to that surrounding. So hide your rulers and be prepared to challenge yourself with the idea of embracing Doubt (both the film and the state of mind) instead of arithmetic and school uniforms.