"Spotlight"

“But the true abomination…was not that it occurred, but that it was allowed.”

It may seem odd, perhaps even inappropriate to quote from a fantasy game when discussing the Catholic Church’s child sexual abuse scandal, but this line from Dragon Age: Origins concisely sums up the enormity of the crimes, the scale on which they were committed and the collective responsibility shared by authorities, families and communities alike in shielding the perpetrators from justice.

Because media outlets – be they newspapers, magazines or websites – connect us to one another through the sharing of information and opinions, they play a role in the building and cohesion of communities that makes them all the more susceptible to the kind of social pressure that destroyed thousands of lives in Boston, Rotherham, Brooklyn and countless other places across the world where mass sexual abuse was covered up. This is something that Spotlight knows and understands all too well, and this insider’s perspective informs its every creative and storytelling decision.

Co-produced by First Look Media, the news agency founded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar in collaboration with Glenn Greenwald, Spotlight demonstrates a characteristically scrupulous, no-nonsense commitment to restituting facts and hunting for the larger truth they reveal when assembled together. This attitude is reflected by Thomas McCarthy’s straightforward, patiently-paced screenplay (co-written with The West Wing’s Josh Singer) as well as his direction; his camera is laid-back and unobtrusive, content with following dialogue beats and helping the actors get their points across. In an improved demarcation from The Station Agent’s flavourless Jarmusch imitations or the forced whimsicality that impeded The Visitor’s Dardennian ambitions, McCarthy films the unfolding horror with a restrained, sober reliance on the inherent power of the written word and his actors’ capability to channel it.

The downside to this journalistic approach to storytelling is that, like so many written news stories and articles, its focus on the subject at hand is single-minded to a point where the people involved sometimes feel incomplete. Because everything the characters do or say, even in their off-duty interactions, so blatantly relate to the case or its surrounding themes in some way, their functionally didactic nature is not as easy to ignore as it tends to be in pictures of a clearly established genre. This problem finds a correction of sorts in small, sporadic moments usually centered around peripheral characters: The complicated mixture of agony and self-deprecation with which grown-up gay victim Joe Crowley (played with devastating lucidity by Michael Cyril Creighton) speaks of his abuser and the twisted role he played in making him accept his homosexuality; an ex-priest admitting to molesting boys with the defensive embarrassment one might expect from a teenager who got caught smoking pot… In those scenes, the characters’ occupations, guilt or victimhood cease to be singular defining traits and become a sort of framing device from which emerge shadows of a fully-lived life.

The commendable diligence with which McCarthy endeavours to relate the investigation and its discoveries with accuracy and respect occasionally translates to visually unremarkable filmmaking, and knowledge of First Look Media’s role in producing the film makes its didactic aspects all the more evident. Nevertheless, Spotlight fulfills its contract with class and intelligence, thanks in no small part to the efforts of its cast. Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams have gotten their deserved share of plaudits, but it’s the bit players that really ground the film into the dark and shameful reality it uncovers. A reality that continues to persevere wherever institutions and ideologies too confident in their own fundamental goodness prevail in the hearts and minds of the communities they affect.

"The Big Short"

“Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry. – Overheard at a D. C. bar.”

Of all the quotations headlining The Big Short’s segments, this is the only one that was made up for the film by screenwriter/director Adam McKay. Ironically enough, it’s also the only one that describes it with any kind of honesty. Lavishly rewarded by critics and award ceremonies for its provocative wit and financial literacy, The Big Short purports to expose the mechanics of our fraudulent financial system in an entertaining and accessible manner without dumbing anything down; yet for all its cocky bluster and cinematic muscle-flexing, it doesn’t produce a single nugget of truth that couldn’t already be found in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Though it may come as a surprise that Paramount would hire the man behind Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy to adapt and direct Michael Lewis’s non-fiction account of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, it really shouldn’t. McKay’s brand of uber-ironic, wink-wink-nudge-nudge humour is exactly the kind that’s been dominating Comedy Central and mainstream online outlets for the past decade. It is by no means “bad” humour – insofar as there is such a thing – but it does not apply itself easily to a subject matter as complex and impactful as global economics. Too often, the comedy reduces the topic at hand to a series of compartmentalized facts and emotions that viewers may absorb and digest without having to truly think about their relationship with what these facts and emotions signify.

The Big Short, sadly, only tends to confirm this trend. Through the interconnected paths of misunderstood financial geniuses and outsiders who predicted the crash of the housing market and tried to make money off of it, McKay and co-screenwriter Charles Randolph congratulate their audience for feeling as smart, shrewd and cynical as the characters they project themselves on, moving the pace fast enough so that the inevitable moral “pay-off” registers them as victims of the system rather than the complicit perpetrators they are. Because the audience is too busy chuckling at the zingers, listening to celebrity lectures on economics and nodding at the sly in-jokes (want a crash-course in financial jargon? Here’s Margot Robbie from The Wolf Of Wall Street!), they don’t have time to ponder their own participation in such systems and nothing of any lasting value is truly gained, save perhaps the knowledge of certain facts – but as Werner Herzog once said, “facts do not illuminate; they create norms.”¹

It’s ironic that McKay should use Wolf Of Wall Street as a reference point – not just for the Margot Robbie cameo but for the irreverent, fast-paced, fourth-wall breaking humour – while ostensibly presenting itself as its more overtly critical cousin, and yet prove substantially less informative. As outrageous and profane as their comedy was, Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter never used it to keep the viewer at a safe, comfortable intellectual distance from the plot and characters – on the contrary, they pulled them just close enough for the appeal of easy, immediate pleasure to touch their mind before the next gag pushed them back. McKay and Randolph’s humour is too self-satisfied to ever risk leading the viewer too far from their comfort zone.

This pervasive smugness consistently undermines the tragicomic nature of the enterprise; as in The Revenant, fine acting is wasted by a director who seems more interested in using it for effect than in forging any rapport between character and viewer. No matter how assiduously Christian Bale commits to giving financial whiz Michael Burry a thoughtful and accurate portrayal, McKay rarely sees him as anything more than a Sheldon Cooper clone. Conversely, he embraces Ryan Gosling’s self-consciously amoral trader/audience host Jared Vennett² with no critical distance whatsoever, as if his cool machismo was inherently subversive.
 

Only Steve Carell’s implosive portrayal of troubled hedge fund manager Mark Baum³ fits in harmoniously with McKay’s style and tone. Like an unwitting reservoir for all the frustrations and mistakes borne by Carell’s past comedy protagonist, Baum burns with an unfocused righteous indignation and helplessness that the film seems reluctant to acknowledge as its raison d’être. Carell’s sincerity complements McKay’s irony well enough to offer tantalizing previews of a better-told story.

And yet, despite her role barely amounting to 10 minutes of screen-time, it is Adepero Oduye who leaves the strongest impression of all, as Baum’s long-suffering advisor Kathy Tao. In the virtuosic brew of big names, cutaway jokes, news footage and big names concocted by McKay and editor Hank Corwin, Oduye’s humanity stands out with discreet grace. Her silent response to Baum’s enquiry about the seriousness of his firm’s situation outshines even her distinguished colleagues’ entire performances.

Nothing The Big Short tries to say about Wall Street finance and capitalism matches the eloquence of its unintentional demonstration of infotainment’s appeal and limitations: Visual prowess, self-aware humour and the unquestioned certainty of its target audience’s political virtue may provide satisfactory entertainment on their own, but they do not necessarily create any meaning on their own.

¹http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/interview-with-director-werner-herzog-i-am-clinically-sane-a-677631.html

²Based on real-life trader Greg Lippmann.

³Based on real-life hedge fund manager Steve Eisman.

"Room"

Is there any significance to the fact that the two female-centric Best Picture nominees of 2015 were both directed by Irish men and are both about the search for home¹? Probably not, although the coincidence is interesting enough to warrant a brief comparison. Each film’s plot is structured around progressive revelations experienced by the protagonists over their identities and connection to their social network. But whereas Brooklyn’s classical aesthetic upturned its protagonist’s American dream to reveal the conflicting struggles against both alien-ness and familiarity behind it, Room’s tale of sequestration and liberation runs on a constant game of contrasts: Contrast of social and physical environments, contrast between the viewpoints conveyed by the soundtrack and the visuals, contrast between adult and childhood reception of painful realities, contrast between mother and son.

In addition to visualizing the characters’ sensorial experience of the worlds they abandon and discover, these contrasts also underline and challenge socially-constructed norms. In the closed confines of “Room”, which Joy (Brie Larson) and her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) refer to without an article as if it were a fellow family member, all the care and emotion invested in cooking, TV-watching, bathing, bedtime stories and other such daily mother-child activities become more apparent to us – so much so that the reality of their situation takes a good ten minutes to truly hit us. By the time Jack has tucked into bed just in time to watch Daddy come home and have an argument with Mum over the lack of birthday candles and presents before resuming his usual routine of raping her, the macabre caricature of heterosexual patriarchy is complete.

It would be tempting, based on the above description, to concentrate on Room as a feminist text, but doing so would run the risk of missing the forest for the trees. By transporting these behavioural patterns into a context of abduction and captivity, screenwriter Emma Donoghue (adapting her own 2010 novel) isn’t just criticizing enforced gender roles; she’s opening up new possibilities for us to re-examine the bonds we form with our surroundings.

Director Lenny Abrahamson makes this especially evident in the many scenes of the first half that concentrate on Jack and Joy’s dynamic. Keeping his subjects close with a long-focal shot/countershot system that reflects their respective points of view with every change of angle, he subtly brings out their reflections within each other even as they clash – most notably in a brief shared bath scene, in which the quick cuts unassumingly blend their identities together. Jack’s androgyny, heightened by his long hair and high-pitched voice, makes him look like his mother’s childhood self – and thus more representative of childhood as a whole. As a daily reminder of his mother’s precipitately lost innocence, Jack is an unwitting one-person imperative for her to symbolically redeem her parents and fix her abductor/rapist’s damage. As a fresh five year-old, he’s at a stage where many of his gender characteristics are more or less indistinguishable from a girl’s and, more importantly, where long-term memories begin to durably implant themselves in his mind.

Given the complex maze of truth and falsehood that Jack has to make sense of for most of the film, this is a very promising psychological set-up indeed, so it’s a shame that Abrahamson’s stylistic choices take so long to amount to little more than a modernized retelling of Plato’s Cave. Despite the astonishing chemistry between Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, the strength Joy draws from her son’s resourceful imagination and yearning for fantasy never quite translates to any truly revelatory visuals. Appropriate though they may seem, Jack’s innocent fairytale voiceover – strongly reminiscent of Hushpuppy’s narration from Beasts Of The Southern Wild – and the many point-of-view shots that fill the screen after his daring escape cannot help but feel like crutches used for want of more original ideas.

Room works best when its characters’ wounds, fears and conflicts are left unspoken, hidden in plain sight for the actors to pick up on and run, with Abrahamson’s camera (handled by This Is England’s Danny Cohen) providing discreet support. As filmed from a perspective similar to Jack’s own, the outside world and its benevolent adults look much stranger, more threatening than the familiar boogeyman that was Old Nick². Patient, supportive step-grandfather Leo (Tom McCamus), with his dark eyebrows and craggy face, instills unconscious fear within us because we associate him with the film’s only other semi-functional paternal figure (a haggard William H. Macy briefly appears as Joy’s broken, defeated father) and his features communicate information that isn’t always easy to decipher. Compared to the much more nakedly evil Nick, he may as well be an alien. It is thus quite fitting that his eventual connection to Jack should result from his nurturing and playful side, rather than any display of authority on his part – paternity undercuts patriarchy.

But the idea Abrahamson and Donoghue’s adventures in unfamiliarity explore most successfully is the complicated, half-articulated cocktail of love, fear and resentment that drifts from parent to child. Such tension is visible in Joy’s interactions with Jack, but bleeds out more explicitly whenever she shares the screen with her mother Nancy (Joan Allen, excellent as always), most memorably in an argument scene in which each actress seems to involuntarily regress back to a kind of unresolved youth, as if this were simply the delayed continuation of a fight Joy had started as a teen. While never as powerfully evocative as the Essie Davis/Noah Wisesman duel from The Babadook, these moments magnify the characters’ emotional prisons without sugarcoating or exploiting them.

It may tread more familiar ground than the plot’s sensational coups de théâtre let on – think of François Truffaut’s The Wild Child – but Room’s vision of motherhood as both an inescapable connection to past pain – as well as a possible way out of it – is rendered with enough poignancy and insight for its missed opportunities to be forgiven.

¹Barring Mad Max: Fury Road, unless one excludes the idea of Max and Furiosa as equal protagonists.

²A nickname that, in a touch that hits just the right point between subtle and on-the-nose, happens to be one of many used to describe the Devil.

"The Hateful Eight"

All art reflects the culture and society in which it is created. Trite though this axiom of film criticism may have been rendered by single-minded bloggers and pop culture commentators, it remains nonetheless true, and few western filmmakers have built their careers out of it with as much consistent skill and gusto as Quentin Tarantino. Who else could have so expertly synthetized Generation X dreams and self-projections into the post-modern cocktail of violence and irony that was Pulp Fiction? More than his verbose, rhythmic dialogue or his skill with actors¹, Quentin Tarantino’s true gift has been his acute understanding of the way we perceive and build our identities and values through audiovisual fiction. Pulp Fiction arrived at a time when the American independent film movement of the 1990s was reaching a cultural turning point, after which it would gradually seep into mainstream Hollywood cinema and inaugurate the current era of standardized “Indiewood” filmmaking. For better and for worse, Pulp Fiction helped ensure that transition by distilling his generation’s pop culture influences into a highly stylized language accessible to all audiences.

If, as feminist scholar bell hooks so neatly put it, “pop culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where the learning is”, then Tarantino can surely count himself among its most ardent students. As an artist, his system of values and perception of the world are built exclusively out of the films, TV shows and songs he loves. It’s an outlook that has served him well in his efforts to expand, obliterate and/or restructure the codes and confines of film genre, but struggles to operate outside of them. So far, Tarantino’s recent conscious attempts to connect his fantasized pop constructs to Big Issues from the real world that birthed them have produced good films, but at the cost of exposing his language’s political limitations. That The Hateful Eight is a more successful commentary than Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained has less to do with any kind of growth on Tarantino’s part and more to do with the consistency of his aforementioned gift for expressing – and contributing to – cultural zeitgeist. Simply by staying true to himself, Tarantino illustrates the sorry state of American political discourse and pop culture’s insufficient response to it more eloquently than he ever could have by design.

While not the direct sequel to Django Unchained it was initially envisioned as, The Hateful Eight nevertheless retains stylistic and narrative choices marking it as such: The time gap between the two films is matched by the difference between the former’s Spaghetti Western aesthetics and the latter’s 70s-era revisionism. In between each gap lies a corresponding conflict over black human rights: The Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.  Once again, the Old West is used as a backdrop through which past and present racial injustices are compared and equivocated. If we accept Django Unchained’s eponymous hero as a white boy’s oppression/emancipation fetish, then The Hateful Eight’s vicious, cunning, Confederate soldier-raping Major Marquis Warren (a brilliant Samuel L. Jackson) represents the next step – a fully-realized embodiment of socially-constructed racial fantasies turned against those who conceived them as justification for their oppression.

A sociological subtext that adapts itself well to the story’s Agatha Christie-like structure, which traps Warren, fellow bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in a blizzard-struck haberdashery, along with an assortment of respectable-looking miscreants. As with all Agatha Christie stories, the purpose of the mystery is to unmask the immorality that operates under the camouflage of civility. As Warren’s failure to obtain social recognition for his officially-sanctioned dignity (symbolized by a forged Abraham Lincoln letter) gradually contaminates his supposed equals, the façade of civilization begins to crumble. Not one character escapes with their dignity – or their life – intact.

What’s especially fascinating here is the double-subversion Tarantino pulls off with this set-up: With the exception of Ruth and unfortunate coach driver O. B. Jackson (James Parks), none of the main characters are exactly who they say they are, and yet the audience’s initial impression of them is mostly correct. Concealed though some of their motives and past actions may be, they are all as cruel, duplicitous and, well, hateful as they appear to be. What passes for redemption – which was Pulp Fiction’s overarching theme – is hate’s remarkable ability to adapt and change targets when need calls for it.

It’s a facilely cynical, nihilistic worldview too many mistake for sophistication, and one that Tarantino is all too eager to perpetuate. Embracing his characters’ sadism with adolescent delight, he uses his indisputable command of mood and coverage to turn his hermetic set into a map of American societal ills, in which racism, misogyny and greed are contained within their own personal cells until individual machinations bring them out into the open. The resulting cannibalistic clashes allow Tarantino to fully revel in his characters’ depravity. Far from the cartoonish hemoglobin-soaked geysers of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 or the cathartic blood ballets of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, the violence is crude, messy, up close and personal. Because almost all the involved characters, even (especially) the “lawful” ones, are unambiguously unpleasant people, we feel confident in our superiority to them and can safely indulge in the transgressive thrill of their bloody gun battles and racial slurs without being challenged or questioned over it. Unlike Sam Peckinpah, whose bloodbaths were primarily the expression of a fatalistic view of masculine urges, the physical and verbal violence Tarantino puts on display here is designed to shock us purely on a surface level.

The snowy, isolated setting, paranoid atmosphere and Ennio Morricone score, as well as the presence of Kurt Russell, are all designed to evoke John Carpenter’s The Thing but the continuous barrage of beatings and “bitch” insults thrown at Daisy instead recall the intolerably dull Vampires, Carpenter’s own attempt at a fantasized western, which saw Sheryl Lee’s prostitute turned vampire similarly subjected to horrific violence from macho protagonists in charge of guarding her. Daisy – whom Leigh plays like The Exorcist’s possessed Regan reimagined as a sneering old crone – is a more fleshed-out character, but the potential challenge posed to the audience by her dual nature as both an unrepentant racist murderer and a cunning anti-heroine manipulating her tormentors’ antagonisms to her advantage remains largely unfulfilled.

The Hateful Eight is at its best when Tarantino dials down some of his affectations (which include a jarring, out-of-nowhere voiceover from the man himself) to let his story play out as the grindhouse mystery-thriller it truly is. When the characters speak and act in their own names, they convey and illustrate ideas with greater cogency than they do as walking metaphors. On the subject of racism alone, the vision of Michael Madsen serenely humming his way across the bloody footprints of the terrified young black man he just shot before finding and executing him is far more evocative than any of the film’s many utterances of the N-word. Quentin Tarantino is an intelligent and erudite filmmaker who still has yet to make a bad film longer than his 30-minute segment in Four Rooms, but his most recent efforts point to a serious deficit in political maturity on his part. As a post-modern genre mashup, The Hateful Eight is smart, suspenseful and engrossing. As an artistic comment on current issues, it is bogged down by its own self-satisfied pseudo-liberal nihilism.

¹Which my younger, less experienced self foolishly mistook for his greatest strength while reviewing Django Unchained.

"Brooklyn"

At first it all seems a little too pretty and idyllic to be true. An almost note-perfect immigration fairy tale, in which a brave young heroine overcomes homesickness and culture shock to become a hard-working citizen, meets a charming man from a different background and cements her integration into the American melting-pot by marrying him. An optimistic, rose-tinted vision of the American dream whose coincidence with the nativist reawakening spearheaded by Donald Trump is bound to cause discomfort, all the more considering the heroine in question – like most 1950s immigrants – is a white European.

Like so many people, it is ostensibly the opportunity for a better job that draws Ellis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) to the USA. But the film’s opening scenes, set during her last days in Ireland before her departure, point to another, more difficultly articulated reason: It’s not just her employer’s snide condescension towards customers and workers alike; it’s not just her open disdain for the local greasy-haired, blazer-wearing rugby players that pass for town hunks. As read in the lines of Ronan’s soft, pudic face, what’s eating Ellis more than anything is displacement. Even in a free, peaceful and relatively prosperous country she has known all her life, she still doesn’t feel quite at home.

So simple and obvious are these conflicting emotions behind the film’s theme of belonging that they almost slip past the viewer’s attention, registering for a flicker of a second before dissipating into the aether. Although Ellis does go through the hostility, confusion and dizzying feeling of disorientation so common to the human migratory experience, Nick Hornby’s screenplay – based on a novel by Colm Tóibín – softens these hardships by reducing them to a series of simple puzzles to solve: how to gain access to the toilet on the ferry, how to entertain customers with small talk, how to eat spaghetti when meeting her boyfriend’s parents. Assimilation is turned into a competitive game whose rules are fully in line with the individualist ethic at the soul of American capitalism.

Accordingly, John Crowley’s direction follows a classical tradition that sometimes threatens to veer into the kind of Anglo-Saxon academicism that has been developed and perfected on British screens for the past decade. It’s especially noticeable in the recurring dinner scenes involving Ellis’s comically crusty conservative landlady Mrs. Keogh (Julie Walters) and her fellow tenants: Close shots of Walters are invariably followed by reverse shots of either Ellis or her catty mentors in American femininity Patty and Diana, with the occasional long frontal shot showing them at the table. He finds more inspiration in the romance between Ellis and Italian-American working class heartthrob Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen), which blooms in slow tracking-out shots that gently guide them from home to home. A beach outing on Coney Island, during which the colour variety of both clothes and skintones¹ leap out with the vibrancy and freshness of contemporary home movies, is a particular highpoint.

Yet even in those tender moments, anchored so pertinently into the time period’s zeitgeist by Cohen’s matinee idol appeal, Crowley and Hornby keep the emotional dangers and mysteries of young cross-cultural love to a minimum: A premature “I love you” blurted out by Tony after a successful meet-the-parents dinner is as close to discomfort as they are willing to take us. Ethnic divisions are briefly alluded to during said dinner when Tony’s annoyingly precocious little brother remarks on anti-Italian police brutality committed by Irish-American cops, but it’s treated as little more than a humorous temporary derailment – one that ironically improves Ellis’s rapport with the family instead of complicating it.

As the unexpected death of Ellis’s younger sister Rose transports the narrative back to Ireland for the final act, all the emotions Crowley and Hornby have been dulling and diverting for the past hour or so come creeping back in to hit the audience from behind. Slowly, the idyllic worldview conveyed by their past choices takes on an unexpectedly poignant new meaning, as the town and people that had previously seemed so alien to Ellis become anchors to an identity she never truly knew she had until she left. Her growing attraction to wealthy but colourless Jim Farrell (Domnhall Gleeson) provides suspense for the third act’s dramatic mechanisms, but above all it gives Crowley and Ronan the chance to underscore the fleeting, distant nature of their heroine’s goals and desires.

It’s a pity then that these openings into a world of strange, rarely-examined impulses and feelings have to be closed so quickly in order to grant the audience its happy ending. Through the Nolan-like parallel cross-cutting of Ellis’s reunion with Tony and her mentorship of a new fellow Irish immigrant, every psychosocial loose end is tied up, leaving only the lingering effects of the emotional time bomb whose quiet detonation defined the last half-hour.

At a time when ethno-cultural tribalism and knee-jerk identity politics have thoroughly undermined the mythology surrounding immigration to the U. S., Brooklyn’s outlook initially comes across as a quaint anachronism. The fact that this apparent idealism is eventually revealed as a conduit for more complex ideas may not entirely justify Crowley and Hornby’s occasional shortcut or cop-out, but it does elevate their film above the middlebrow crowd-pleasers it so closely resembles. As relevant as it is old-fashioned, Brooklyn is at its best when its contradictions echo those within its protagonist’s heart.

¹Credit must be given to Crowley and his director of photography Yves Bélanger for trying to subvert their story’s inescapable whiteness by blocking and composing crowded shots with strategically placed black extras.