Sully review

Both as an actor and as a director, Clint Eastwood has explored his fascination with the conflicted hero narrative. World weary and downtrodden seems to be the resting constitution of most of his protagonists and their stories usually test their personal doubts with a greater conflict that effects the good of their environments. In this year’s “Sully” Tom Hanks takes on this position as the real life commercial airplane pilot Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who in 2009 safely landed an American Airlines jet of 155 passengers along the surface of the Hudson river with no casualties. The story caught the aged, life-long pilot in the middle of a media storm where he and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) was crowned heroes by many, while simultaneously enduring pressure and scrutiny by the organization investigating the crash.  

Using Sully’s tested psychosis as the story’s framing device, much of the story is told in flashback, as well as the occasional PTSD-induced nightmare sequence. Hanks plays Sully with a lot of insular angst and quietude and uses his eyes to convey his character’s discomfort and mounting self-doubt. It’s not a particularly showy performance and it leans further into Hanks’ transition into that of a senior performer. Eckhart is then given more room to be vocal and expressive about the nature of their character’s odd position within the media and their stressful behind-the-scenes case.  

The film is also interested in the notion of experienced intuition verses blind empiricism, as the board of investigators keep telling both pilots that every simulation demonstrates that they should have been able to safely make it back to the tarmac without risking a dangerous water-landing (as well as destroying expensive company equipment.) This argument, as presented by the film, could be read as a condemnation of expert analysis and a celebration of blue-collar, folksy instinct but the conclusion to this case wisely factors in human experience and emotional error as a variable itself, saving the picture from slipping too far into an anti-science, finger-wagging appeal to the viewer’s emotions.

 The special effects and the flight recreations are both familiar to the experience of flying and the fear that comes with its risks.  The daydreams and nightmare sequences are  realistic and spiked with harrowing 9/11 imagery, which ties in subtly with New York and America’s exaltation of Sully’s rescue landing.

“Sully” is a competent drama. Hanks is a professional, Eastwood knows exactly how to tell this story and the screenplay aims low enough for both of them to hit their intended marks. If the film does have a flaw it’s Todd Komarnicki’s successful but safe adaptation of Sullenberger’s book “Highest Duty.” Kormarnicki tries to weave in Sully’s past as a war pilot and crop duster to show his experience and his relationship with the air, but that gesture is never really paid off or integrated well enough to fully inform the character or the plot. While studied and precise, the screenplay lacks the amount of narrative ambition it needed to propel the picture from good actor’s showcase to being truly great film.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - Sep/2016

American Sniper review

              Like any movie that embraces the moral ambiguities of a particularly controversial war, Clint Eastwood's “American Sniper” is a difficult film to discuss without drifting into reactionary politics or blame-game finger pointing. It becomes all the more difficult when the movie breaks all kinds of records for a January release—infamously understood as an seasonal lull for Hollywood economics—and the public figure who inspired the story, U.S. Navy Seal Chris Kyle, had an equally divisive past that challenges the very ethics of the film's supposed hero. An easier admission to make is that on a technical and aesthetic level this is Eastwood's sharpest and most accomplished film in almost ten years and contains hair-raising sequences that rivals just about anything from his past catalog.

            Based on his autobiography, this movie recounts the life of Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), a good ol' boy from Texas who was raised on God, guns and girls, and was personally drawn into military life in 1999 after witnessing on the news the loss of American soldiers overseas. Because his daddy taught him that there are only three types of men, the sheep (the weak and the stupid), the predators (the aggressors) and the sheep dogs (protectors of the weak), Kyle makes it his personal mission to keep his fellow soldiers on the battle field safe, creating a superman complex that would increasingly haunt his psyche once America was called to action in the middle-east. His wife Taya (Sienna Miller) does her best to raise their children alone while Chris does four successive tours in the war-torn streets of Iraq, leaving the bulk of their relationship attended over voice mails and the occasional phone call.

            Locked within a distinctly American depiction of a troubled war started on shaky reasoning and based on a book that was written by a man who posthumously lost a defamation case against a blow-hard Minnesota wrestler turned governor, this film struggles to be everything for everyone. It wants to do right by the now deceased soldier, who, while protecting the lives of his fellow troops was responsible for the deaths of over 160 enemies, including women and children. At the same time, while never showing his duties as anything but well-intended and heroic, the film also surrounds Kyle with multiple characters who question the logic of the war their fighting and their value within it.

            During the emotional climax, when Kyle finally faces off against an Iraqi sniper who killed many of his best friends, the battle field is struck by a blinding sand storm, which seems to suggest a divine or natural dissension over the mounting violence justified by earthly ideologies... Or maybe it doesn't mean that at all, but because of the movie's vague and waffling point of view it only augments the individual viewer's political leanings. Whether you walk into this thinking it's a pro-war propaganda piece, an anti-war character study, or a patriotic tribute to a lost American folk hero, you'll ultimately leave with your original judgments and expectations intact.

            Questionable thematics aside, nobody should deny Eastwood's return to form here, as he demonstrates that he can carefully and sensitively build tension within each high-stakes shootout and create a palpable haze of paranoia over the final scenes where Chris Kyle can barely make sense of his civilian life after returning home to raise his family. Likewise, Bradley Cooper is fully committed to the role and plays the charismatic sniper without any apology and bravely lets the audience into the mind of his character's fractured world-view. Unfortunately we can never truly know if the internal struggle that complicates the ideological mine field exists outside of the dramatic padding of this movie universe.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2015

Jersey Boys review

                Both as an actor and as a filmmaker, director Clint Eastwood has become synonymous with working class, blue collar American romanticism. His best movies are no-nonsense genre staples that give actors enough room to breathe and explore their characters, in stories that vibrate in the margins between Speilbergian optimism and the darker shades of the types of 70s films in which he once stared.  It’s a tricky balance to strike every time and as he grows older, struggling to differentiate a chair from a responsive human being, he also seems to have a harder time distinguishing the good cinematic ideas from the bad.

                In his most recent offering, “Jersey Boys”, based on a Tony award winning Broadway production, Eastwood curiously tries to ape Scorsese’s greatest hits, as he portrays the popular soda-shop pop-rock band Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons as self-made wise guys, struggling to keep their egos in check long enough to make the money and get the respect they never had growing up on the streets. And in attempting to bridge the tone of a Broadway musical with the grit of something like a “Mean Streets” or “Goodfellas”, the movie never finds a comfortable identity of its own. Instead, the whole thing wobbles around like a confused drunk prostitute, trying on styles she can’t afford in stores she doesn’t belong in.

                With that said, Clint likes his actors and his movies always accommodate their needs and talents, and even here newcomers like John Lloyd Young, as the passive Frankie Valli, fills the role with earnest desire and interior complexity while his character is passed around and forced into crime and/or fame by his frienemy Tommy DeVito, played by “Boardwalk Empire” actor Vincent Piazza. Piazza channels a youthful De Niro as the selfish but charismatic guitar player and lights up every scene he’s in with familiar, yet effortless energy.  Other characters, such as Christopher Walken as the mobster kingpin Gyp DeCarlo and Mike Doyle as the band’s flamboyant producer Bob Crewe, keep things light, even as the messy screenplay attaches more and more narrative weight.

                Unfortunately, performances alone couldn’t save this movie from its inherent problems. The plot skims the specifics of the band’s rock and roll history during the 50s and 60, instead focusing on the “Behind the Music” gossip of interpersonal tensions, affairs and legal scuffles, before eventually downing in 20 unearned minutes of drama between a washed up Vali and his teenage daughter that we never got to know as a character up to that point. Stylistically, Eastwood oscillates between stagey camera set pieces and blocking that resembles edited close ups on the proscenium and distractingly unoriginal tracking shots where the characters break the fourth wall by addressing the camera directly.

                The one thing that could have saved this Broadway adaptation--the music-- is far too understated and sometimes just avoided to make room for the multi-stranded plot and the shifts in character perspective. When we finally do get barely contextualized performances of Four Seasons’ standards such as Sherry and Big Girls Don’t Cry, it only underlines the movie’s missed opportunity. There’s no lack of ambition in “Jersey Boys” but it what it does lack is the discipline and finesse required to keep a biopic of this scope from tripping allover itself.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2014