Lincoln (2012) Review

rating: ***

the story: Lincoln pushes for the 13th Amendment.

the review: Gosh, so I spent a decade fearing I wouldn't like this one.  Sometimes, or perhaps very often, when you think you're going to have a certain reaction, whether good or bad, you end up having it regardless of the material.  In this instance, I ended up with exactly the reaction I always thought I would to Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.

Chalk this up to star Daniel Day-Lewis.  Beloved of Hollywood insiders but rarely outside of it, my first exposure to him was his Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, which was a wildly entertaining performance.  Then it was There Will Be Blood, a film I thought I would greatly enjoy, and was one of my most anticipated experiences of 2007, which instead became perhaps my greatest disappointment that year, when my impression of Day-Lewis greatly soured.  He's the kind of actor who immerses himself in his work, who reinvents himself with every performance, or so the story goes, and yet the disappointment of Blood was how much obvious connective tissue there was to Gangs, and none of it positive.  It was as if he dialed in on the villainous tones but lost all intonation.  Where his Bill chewed all scenery in delicious fashion, his Daniel Plainview was a lethargic inverse whose total dominance of Blood was unearned, with no chance at being checked.  He was among the antiheroes who came to dominate critical taste in the last few decades not because he deserved to, but because critics had fixated on the idea and wouldn't let go.

Lincoln is certainly no antihero, today.  Although in his time he was.  Which is perhaps one of the reasons Day-Lewis ended up playing him.  Spielberg's take is a riff on the popular history book Team of Rivals, which centers on Lincoln's political acumen, which the subsequent film zeroes in on as he desperately seeks approval for the amendment that will guarantee freedom for slaves.  He stoops to all available levels in the process, which is not to say his cause was not worthy nor his tactics justified, but nowhere is the inherent mythic nobility on display, and yes, that clip shown at the Oscars in which Lincoln exhorts his cabinet in an impassioned demand to fulfill the vision "Now! Now! Now!" really the central lasting impression...

In choosing such a narrow focus, and perhaps in selecting (there was much development of the project along the way, and so it really was a choice) playwright Tony Kushner over, say, Aaron Sorkin, who had made politics a truly operatic affair in The West Wing and would later become as well known a screenwriter in film, there is no chance to discover the man even as the myth is gently exploded, so that man nor myth, as the man lunges in one direction or another, receives proper focus.  At times it seems Day-Lewis is up to the challenge, when Spielberg, Kushner, and the actor are up to the challenge of the folksy charm of the man, but in their efforts to wring drama from him, they lose sight of it, and the wrinkly profiles they find of Day-Lewis, which are so often fixated on, are subsequently lost to clearer gazes, late in the film, in which Day-Lewis instead looks like, well, Day-Lewis.

Surrounding this is a host of incredible talent, from Tommy Lee Jones perhaps for the first time sinking into his aging gravitas, Sally Field asking no quarter as Mary Todd Lincoln, David Strathairn doing all the heavy lifting, James Spader playful in all the right ways for a change, Hal Holbrook, and a trio of young actors on the cusp of greatness, if film would let them: Joseph Gordon Levitt, the acknowledged preferential favorite; Lee Pace, so versatile and yet forever taken for granted; and Adam Driver in a thankless glorified cameo, years before anyone truly recognized his talent.

And there are others, curiously the black actors (Gloria Reuban, David Oyelowo) in roles Spielberg has no earthly idea what to do with among them, worth picking out.

The whole affair comes off as more a companion piece to Spielberg's earlier and far more triumphant Amistad, with far less historic grandeur to its credit and yet so much more power and cinematic achievement...This was the point where Spielberg really started to worry about his continued standing in Hollywood royalty, where he stopped trusting himself and instead just started doing what he thought his peers wanted to see, all the more bizarre from a director who had previously made his name on things audiences seemingly demanded...So much of modern film ignores the American heritage so passionately embraced in the past, it's all the more a shame that the most famous recent example has no idea what it's really trying to accomplish, other than demonstrate saintly Lincoln in his last desperate push for history, above and beyond, y'know, ending the pesky war around it.

And yet Spielberg's peers have been so driven to distraction concerning political maneuvering, I suppose, in the grand scheme, it's only fitting that such are the results of the effort.

Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

rating: ****

the story: The saga concludes.

review: This will be another film from 2019 I hesitate to call an out-and-out classic.  (True story: when I was picking up the recent home video release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I heard it referred to as the movie where Bruce Lee gets his ass kicked.)  Because I really like Rise of Skywalker, but I'm not immediately prepared to go all in.  Sometimes a movie will leave you with that kind of impression, right from the start.  Sometimes it takes a while.  Some of my all-time favorites are like that.  My appreciation for Tarsem's The Fall has grown even from a hugely favorable initial impression. 

But what you want to read about is Rise of Skywalker.  The Star Wars saga has quite an interesting backstory to it at this point.  I'm not talking about the films but how they've been accepted by fans over the years.  Empire Strikes Back sort of instantly, for most observers, became the franchise favorite, but it didn't make as much money at the box office as A New Hope.  Fans instantly derided Return of the Jedi as a shameless conclusion to the original trilogy, festooned with nonsense teddy bears and sudden revelations like Luke and Leia actually being siblings all along.  But fans forgot these facts by the time the prequels came around.  Over the years, the prequels became pariahs.  But the saga continued.  J.J. Abrams launched the sequel trilogy with The Force Awakens, but it wasn't until Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi that fans, who were already thinking Force Awakens echoed A New Hope too directly, started to grumble loudly.  We live in a #notmy[fillintheblank] era, so of course a fan community already discontent over the prequels had begun suggesting Star Wars was over.

Then of course Rise of Skywalker comes around and is announced as the finale of the Skywalker saga.  Not necessarily Star Wars itself, but the saga as it revolves around the Skywalkers.  (Do you want a spoiler?  By the end of Rise of Skywalker, the concept of revolving around the Skywalkers sort of gets a new definition.  But I think it still technically completes the saga as we know it.)

Now, we also now live in a world where Baby Yoda exists.  Maybe this is enough to bring back some of those skeptics.  I think one way or another Star Wars goes out with a bang, not just in the movie but as a cultural experience.  I don't really care what the public perception is.  I love Solo.  (And still am ambivalent at best about Rogue One.)  But it's nice to think Star Wars can still compete with the MCU.

I think Rise of Skywalker is infinitely better than Avengers: Endgame.  I think it absolutely schools the Thanos finale.  Where Endgame plays at trying to have resonance for a whole franchise, Rise of Skywalker speaks to unanswered questions for eight previous films spanning more than forty years, and does so brilliantly.  It doesn't attempt to resolve everything.  In the finest Star Wars tradition, it introduces new mysteries, that need never be resolved.  I mean, we'll never really know who shot first, after all.  (Thanks, George!) 

If Last Jedi was unconventional, Rise of Skywalker dips immediately and enthusiastically back into A New Hope, and revisits Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.  Fans who only want to interpret things negatively will consider the results as nothing more than the original trilogy in a blender, a shameless rip-off.

But it's so much more than that.  J.J. Abrams is not George Lucas.  He's not Kershner.  He's not Marquand.  His sensibilities are as much informed by Star Wars as they are Peter Jackson and Harry Potter.  He's very much a modern blockbuster filmmaker, and crafts his movie around moments and ideas that didn't exist in the saga previously.  His Jedi have the ability to heal, just as George Lucas eventually built up the Sith to have the ability to create life itself (the disputed origin of Vader).  Rey has powers we've never seen before.  I've seen this sort of thing done with existing mythos before.  Green Lantern comics, for instance, which in the '90s I was thoroughly convinced had all the grandeur of Star Wars, before they ever went full epic in the new millennium.  Again, some fans will have problems with this sort of thing.  I think it rings true.  The Force now resides, effectively, in a handful of individuals at best.  And by the end of the movie, by the end of the saga, has shrunk even further. 

I think the mythology is given its due.  I think the characters introduced in Force Awakens are given fitting roles to play, and have fitting arcs.  Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and even Domhnall Gleason turn in trilogy-best performances.  Original trilogy actors abound!  And deliver.  Everything delivers.

Even though I didn't like the movie itself, Return of the King had a killer, memorable climax when Sam tells Frodo that even if he can't carry the ring, he can carry Frodo.  I don't know if Rise of Skywalker has a moment like that.  I don't know if it needs to.  Last Jedi had a rousing moment, when Rey and Kylo Ren strike down Snoke unexpectedly, and that's a tough moment to beat in this trilogy, and so it's not really worth trying to compete against.  Instead, Rise of Skywalker is filled with reflecting back on everything we've learned, everything we've experienced over the course of three trilogies.  There isn't a Vader who seems far from redemption, or two Jedi being torn away from a treasured brotherhood at stake.  Rey and Kylo spend the entire movie going over their Last Jedi experiences.  Kylo's best moment is a direct riff on a scene in Force Awakens, a quieter and perhaps as a result, more affecting echo.  And that's sort of the whole movie. 

It knows, as with the best stories, that the ending reflects back on the beginning.  We last see Rey in the most perfect place possible.  I think if the results aren't perfect, they're as perfect as they could possibly have been, especially since George Lucas isn't at the helm, and because Abrams sort of swooped back in at the last minute.  That's some kind of magic.  And that's always been Star Wars in a nutshell.  You don't have to worry about what the fans think.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2019)

rating: *****

the story: A young director finds himself thrust into the world of Don Quixote.

review: By some fortuitous twist of fate, I ended up reading Don Quixote by Cervantes, for the first time, not long before finally getting to see Terry Gilliam's torturously-gestated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  I don't think it's necessary to have read the book recently, but to have read it at all surely helps explain many if not most of Gilliam's subsequent creative choices for the film.  You might even say that Gilliam's film is a modern updating of the book.

I think the reaction of most critics to the film owes to their ignorance of the book.  I think the reaction of most critics owes to the fact that they really only know the story from the musical Man of La Mancha, whose fifty year existence is something of a drop in the bucket of the four hundred years the book has been in existence (Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare).  Those critics may not know how much the musical departs from the book.  They might not even care.  They might really be convinced that Don Quixote is the story of an irrepressible dreamer.

It is, in fact, Sancho Panza's story.  Sancho is Don Quixote's squire, a peasant from the same neighborhood as the lord whose fortunes have been declining.  Most of the misfortunes that befall Don Quixote, in their subsequent adventures together, fall on Sancho more harshly.  Sancho spends the book doubting Don Quixote's sanity and going along with his flight of fancy mostly because he believes he'll end up with a higher station in life.  At one point he gets to play governor of an "island," something Don Quixote has been promising him as the most likely outcome of their time together.

But what is Sancho's story?  Well, it's much like Toby's.  (Meanwhile, the name of this character in Gilliam's movie is most likely derived from a namesake character in Tristram Shandy, a book inspired by Don Quixote and much later adapted into Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, which takes a much more literal metafictional approach to adapting the source material.  Toby is also a supporting player in that story, and at least in the book, steals attention as shamelessly as Sancho.)

Toby is the young director played by Adam Driver.  Toby's career sort of peaked early when he made a student film, called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  He discovers a DVD copy of it by chance, in the present, and he decides to return to the village where he filmed it.  There he comes across the cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) he'd convinced to play Don Quixote.  Only now, the cobbler believes he is Don Quixote.  It's a comparable development to how Cervantes first set Don Quixote on his path of knight-errantry.

But Toby is driven, like Sancho, mostly by ego.  Going on the road with Don Quixote has nothing to do with believing in his quest.  As with Sancho, Toby doesn't believe for a minute that the cobbler is really Don Quixote, and the audience is given a concrete reason to sympathize with him.  As in the book, the character of Don Quixote becomes the very colorful window dressing the story uses to follow Toby's doubt, and how by the end he begins to believe.

So in short, the musical is about belief, while the book and this new movie are about doubt.

Toby's life is complicated by the fact that the main producer (Stellan Skarsgard) of the commercial he had set out to make when he becomes plunged into the world of Don Quixote, is something of a tyrant.  (A character no doubt inspired by Gilliam's ridiculously complicated production history.)  And the producer's wife (Olga Kurylenko) keeps trying to have an affair with him.  And the girl Toby cast as Don Quixote's beloved Dulcinea has reentered his life as well, and keeps instigating him to look beyond his cynical outlook.  She disagrees that his student production ruined her life.  But their further relationship clarifies around the cobbler's adventures, and the story ends up coming full circle.

As I've said, most of the story beats in Gilliam's film come directly from Cervantes' book.  Most of Gilliam's films throw their main characters into bewildering journeys, and sometimes the bewilderment becomes the viewer's as well.  I think Toby provides a clear center, his perspective easy to understand, whether or not you see all the parallels with the book, the departures and many elements missing from the musical. 

It actually becomes ironic, that we're once again living in an age like Cervantes'.  A real argument could be made that what Don Quixote was really about was Cervantes complaining that his contemporaries no longer valued or understood the literature that he himself still cherished, which in his case as with his main character was chivalric fiction.  Critics today, by their bewilderment of this film, admit that they have no real knowledge of the book itself.  (Makes you really wonder when you read any review that claims, "the book was better.")  Gilliam's instincts are well-established.  His last movie, The Zero Theorem, was pretty straight-forward but a lot weirder by design.  He never sets out to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote weird for the sake of being weird (probably Tideland is the benchmark in Gilliam's work for that).  It's probably his most straight-forward movie ever!  Even The Fisher King makes you wait to find out what happened to Robin Williams.  Here you know everything you need to almost right from the start, and the story becomes, as with most stories, waiting to see how things turn out.

Driver is perfect as Toby.  I know there were many actors cast to play the character, and Don Quixote for that matter, over the years, but in the film as it ended up, it's difficult to imagine anyone else being able to lose himself in the role.  Johnny Depp, at the time he was cast, had yet to break out as a true character actor, and so still retained his dreamy persona, when not sporting scissors for hands.  Don Juan De Marco is an excellent example of Depp in his prime at that point in his career, and is similar to Don Quixote (a man who believes he is in fact the celebrated lover).  Driver is able to sell the ego-driven Toby, the would-be lover, and the man who becomes completely overwhelmed by his later experiences, and finally someone capable of taking on, yes, the impossible dream, without ever making any of it feel like a caricature.  It's a performance that needed to be grounded.  By all rights, it's a career-defining performance, in Gilliam's, at long last, career-defining film.

My favorite Gilliam movie, before this, was The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  I'm still working on fully appreciating Brazil.  Arguably The Fisher King will remain his most accessible movie, and Twelve Monkeys will be the one the cool kids like.  But The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie he tried making for a quarter century, is quite literally a movie only he could make, in a career of movies only he could make.  We live in an age where the idea of the remake is anathema, even as we never quite scoff at mere adaptations.  But storytelling is always about retelling stories.  The best stories are those that continue to resonate, even if a few details have to be updated every now and then, because they are continuously relevant.  Gilliam includes Muslims and even Russians in his version. Muslims were in fact integral to Cervantes' version as well, and that's just one of the many ways Gilliam helps resurrect it.  I think Toby's arc, from being lost in his own life to allowing himself to be lost in someone else's, is the whole point.  In the movie, as in the book, there are characters who think they'll make things better by attempting to do so cynically, mostly so they can mock Don Quixote.  But what Toby discovers is that the better version of himself, the one he can live with, has finally cut himself free from doubt.  He no longer views Don Quixote as crazy.  This isn't an impossible dream.  It's about finally refusing to make compromises, and just doing something.  Somewhere along the way, the spontaneous Toby who made the student film stopped existing.  The course he set the cobbler on was the opposite one Toby took.  This is a story of how they meet up again.

Anyway, it's also a damn good film, beyond anything else.  You don't need to try and take life lessons from it.  Things work out for Toby.  The end.

Silence (2016)

rating: *****

the story: Two Jesuit priests investigate the disappearance of their mentor in 17th century Japan.

what it's all about: I almost regretted having read the book before watching the movie, this time.  Usually, I can't abide people who suggest such things, because the two mediums are two very different creative expressions, and there's no reason to split hairs between them.  They have their different strengths.  But Silence is a particular story, in both prose and film form, where the same thing seems so similar in both forms, you begin to wonder what's lost in translation.  In the book, it's very important what Andrew Garfield's character thinks, and not so much only what he does or says.  Martin Scorsese, surely now and forever a master of filmmaking, knows this, and so there are a few voiceovers meant to fill the void a little, but he also knows that the story means the same thing, in the end, regardless of what is lost along the way.

That's what's truly remarkable about Silence, that it tells such an unexpected story, one that seems totally contrary to established narratives.  It seems to be a rebuke of criticisms on two scores, both in the context of the story, and what commentators today have attempted to say about the Christian faith, too.  It runs counter to everything Hollywood has been attempting to do in recent years.  Scorsese is a famously pragmatic Catholic, and that makes him the ideal adapter of such material.  It abhors mindless reverence, but it also embraces a level of faith totally unknown to most adherents.  How's that for a paradox?

Garfield, whom I know from a few movies (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the two Amazing Spider-Man films), emerges as a new breed of lead actor in it.  At first he seems like the last actor capable of pulling off the "Jesus look," the long hair and beard.  He's made a career of looking young, right?  He doesn't seem to possess the right amount of gravitas.  Yet he and Scorsese use these apparent limitations to their advantage.  His character is meant to be totally self-assured and yet naïve at the same time.  After watching Silence, you'll be convinced that Garfield has found a new archetype.  He seems to have played something similar in Hacksaw Ridge, also released last year, but the results couldn't seem to be more different.  Mel Gibson's movie (it's funny, Garfield starring in the films of two Catholics) is pretty straightforward, when it comes down to it.  Silence is anything but.

Adam Driver continues to be a fascinating discovery in his own right.  My personal experience with him had previously been limited to The Force Awakens and Midnight Special.  Almost more than Garfield, he manages to bring a mature presence to his role, so effortlessly that again you aren't surprised in the least that he and Garfield are leading a new generation of actors.  Liam Neeson, meanwhile, in a supporting role again confirms that he's capable of anything.  Here he seems to contradict everything you might have seen him do previously, in a long series of mentor roles he's done over the years, and no doubt that was a deliberate casting effect. 

Even if you don't care for the religious elements, Scorsese still presents a look at life in Japan in the century before the world had finished expanding.  Japan, in fact, was in the midst of shrinking back, headed toward a period of isolation that would have a perilous effect not just on itself but many other countries besides.  Silence becomes a story of self-justification, the things we tell ourselves to try and make sense of the irreconcilable.  If you find yourself siding with the Japanese over the priests, which is valid, you may still end up wondering if you were right, knowing what was to come.  This doesn't even mean the priests were right, either, but that this was an untenable situation, which Scorsese no doubt meant to parallel secular matters in today's world, too, of Muslims and the West and where things continue to stand between them.

I chose Arrival as my favorite movie of 2016 before having seen Silence, but I'll still stand by that now.  The two movies, however, stand together as among the smartest filmmaking I've ever seen, and that's extremely good company.  Both came from books.  What does that matter?  The story resonates.  That is all.