Movie Review: Ithaca (2016)

             

Filmgoers who enjoyed their trip to Brooklyn last winter should be sure to seek out actress turned filmmaker Meg Ryan's directorial debut Ithaca this fall.

Set in the summer of '42, this lovingly crafted coming-of-age odyssey based on William Saroyan’s semi-autobiographical, semi-Homeric film treatment turned screenplay turned classic novel The Human Comedy is centered on fourteen-year-old Homer Macauley (Alex Neustaedter).

With a smile that was described by Saroyan in his novel as saying "yes to all things" (in a line Ithaca's production designer pays homage to as the title of a faux retro movie in the background of a beautifully bittersweet scene), Homer likewise soaks up everything around him.

But with his older brother (Jack Quaid) off to war and his father (Tom Hanks) recently deceased, Homer takes it upon himself to help his beloved mother (Ryan) make ends meet as the new man of the house.

Promising that he can pedal fast enough to beat Western Union, Homer convinces Tom Spangler (Hamish Linklater) to give him a job as a bike messenger for the town's local Postal Telegraph office.

 
Occasionally tasked with sobering up Sam Shepard's world-weary telegrapher William Grogan with an express delivery of a cold cup of water across the face followed by a hot cup of coffee from across the street, Homer soon discovers the reason for Grogan's stress.

Learning that a majority of the telegrams he carries come from the Secretary of War with dire news, Homer quickly becomes aware of the world in which he'd been a child while realizing just how much of an impact his job can have on someone's life.

Revealing the power of the written word both in bringing people closer together as well as tearing them apart, Homer's unease about his new familial role and messenger position is pushed aside by the series of letters he receives from his brother that we hear Quaid read over the course of the movie.

A fittingly age-old storytelling device that not only harks back to the films of the World War II era but also cleverly reinforces the film's Homeric themes, Band of Brothers scripter Erik Jendresen bridges together what could've been an overly episodic narrative by way of Quaid's moving voice-over, thus enhancing Ithaca's refreshingly understated charm.

Seemingly inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird in terms of its old-fashioned foray into adolescent centric coming-of-age storytelling, at less than ninety minutes, Ithaca nonetheless settles a bit too easily for the familiar taste of a comfort food-like recipe.

Fortunately however, by drawing heavily on her background as a versatile performer, Ryan inspires strong turns from her affable cast both newcomers and veterans alike.

From the fearless nature of Homer's four-year-old brother Ulysses (played by scene-stealer Spencer Howell) to MVP character actor Hamish Linklater as Homer's hurdle-jumping boss Spangler who's much deeper than he seems, the ensemble driven effort is bursting with three dimensional characterization.

Though its female characters feel a bit one note – most likely due to the film's limited point-of-view which focuses heavily on the evolution of our young main character on his path to adulthood – with Ryan at the helm, it does feel like a missed opportunity to delve deeper into an often overlooked perspective in order to help Ithaca push past its formulaic shortcomings.

Yet similar to her Ithaca (blink-and-you-missed-it) co-star and executive producer Tom Hanks' own '60s set directorial debut That Thing You Do, Ryan's first foray into filmmaking is steeped in period authenticity in terms of storytelling, style, and spirit.

Alternating between the sun-drenched innocence that opens the film and the uncertainty of dusk which closes it, Ithaca's largely two tone color scheme from Gosford Park cinematographer Andrew Dunn calls to mind the predominantly black-and-white lensing of early 1940s, WWII motion picture photography.

Filling Ithaca with unexpected flourishes including a surprisingly subtle yet effective score from rocker John Mellencamp, Ryan keeps viewers from focusing on her otherwise beautifully rendered Saroyan adaptation's structural predictability.

A humanistic, well-acted ode to those that say yes to all things, in this World War II battle of hearts and minds being waged by a young boy on the home front, Meg Ryan turns a timeless tale into a timelier than ever directorial debut.

Text ©2016, 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: Out of the Furnace (2013)

Now Available to Own
   

“Let me make this right,” is more than just a line uttered by one of the main characters near the end of writer/director Scott Cooper’s feature filmmaking follow-up to Crazy Heart. When it comes to the core ensemble of individuals that populate the unforgiving terrain of a blue collar coal town in Pennsylvania, the desire to make things right is more than just something to say – in Out of the Furnace it’s a way of life.

Filled with men who long to right wrongs, regardless of the cost – what the characters onscreen realize far too late is that even if they have the best of intentions, sometimes scores simply cannot be settled since every single person has a slightly different definition of right and wrong in this gritty, existentially driven revenge picture.

Bogged down by wrongs right from the start following the film’s horrific introduction to Furnace’s embodiment of pure evil as played by Woody Harrelson as the unmercifully twisted, sadistic Harlan DeGroat, we encounter a pair of brothers whose lives will be forever changed once they cross his path.

With the deck stacked against them right from the start, it isn't too long before we realize that although they're related, we've been introduced to two very different brothers with two very different ways of coping with the hands they’ve been dealt.

The older of the two, Russell Baze (Christian Bale) keeps his head down and shovels coal in the very same factory that put their father on his death bed. Willing to risk the same fate (before he realizes, the plant is inevitably closed in favor of cheaper foreign labor) in order to put food on the table and pay his bills, Russell has unofficially taken over his father’s role as the family patriarch as the dutiful, good son.

Unwilling to do the same, his restless younger brother Rodney (scene-stealer Casey Affleck) took the first opportunity he could to get out of the dead-end town. Enlisting in the military and stop-lossed into a total of four tours before he finally returns home to stay, Rodney has tried everything to sublimate the pain and reproduce the primal adrenaline rush of battle.

But when gambling only leads to debt (which in the past Russell worked double shifts to keep at bay without informing his prideful, troubled brother), before long Rodney begins taking part in underground fights as an agreement with his money man John Petty (Willem Dafoe).

Tired of the minimal paydays, Rodney forces John to arrange a higher stakes match in order to resolve the outstanding debt once and for all that he not only owes John but John in turn owes to Harlan, which leads to a fateful meet that has a domino effect on every member of the ensemble cast in unimaginable ways. And it’s this key decision that winds up forcing Russell out of his daily grind, leaving him no choice but to put down the shovel and pick up a rifle to fight the war that has been waged in his own backyard.

Incredibly downbeat and emotionally exhausting, although Cooper’s take of brotherly vengeance was initially planned as a vehicle for actor Leonardo DiCaprio and his Body of Lies director Ridley Scott (both of whom still serve as producers), it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Bale in the role, given the way he once again manages to disappear completely into the role.

Filled with character actors as opposed to A-listers that stand out too conspicuously as DiCaprio may have done (through no fault of his own given the way it’s hard to forget who you’re watching in a number of his films), Out of the Furnace is therefore helped by the lack of obvious megawatt star quality. Likewise, since the work owes a great deal to its ambient surroundings which help convey mood and atmosphere, the Pennsylvania town becomes a character in its own right.

While the main theme of the film as well as the arc for our lead character is incredibly straightforward, Furnace makes one fatal mistake along the way by working one too many dubious contrivances into the film’s plotline that call attention to themselves amid the simplicity.

From a cell phone call that transforms into a digital recording at the exact right moment in order to capture audio of a murder and a few too many cruel twists of fate that intersect at the exact same time for Russell with regard to his brother, his girl etc. (that seem better suited to a bad country song), when Furnace tries to get too complex, it loses its way completely.

And with so much affecting Russell, you begin realizing that plot might have been strengthened considerably by sharing some of the wealth of the storyline among the rest of the cast to build up the back-stories and characters played by Zoe Saldana and Forest Whitaker in particular in order to adequately pay off on a narrative revelation that is revealed in the film’s second half.

These shortcomings aside, overall Cooper proves to have an even greater cinematic handle on filmmaking his second time around and uses the various resources at his disposal to rich effect. By calling on multiple senses at once, this technique particularly stands out via a symbolic hunting sequence that is echoed in the movie’s penultimate sequence.

From the effective use of Pearl Jam tunes and Dickon Hinchliffe’s understated score to help punctuate the mood of vital moments to a terrific visualization of the darkness of the color palette (which is virtually free of bright colors) to transport you to the setting, Cooper does an admirable job of externalizing the internal struggle of the characters through the cinematic medium. It’s these smart, subtle touches that stand out even more in Fox’s flawless Blu-ray transfer.

A deceptively simple tale of vengeance, in Out of the Furnace, Cooper weaves a multi-layered tapestry that reinforces at every turn his characters’ desire to try to make things right, even if they risk getting burned in the process.   

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.