Interstellar (2014) Review

rating: *****

the story: An astronaut goes on an epic journey.

review: Outside of Memento and The Dark Knight, my favorite Christopher Nolan film has long been Interstellar. That seems like weird wording, but they are three distinct achievements, and so at least for me it makes sense. The conventional logic always picks Inception as Nolan’s best high concept, but for me Interstellar is infinitely better. It’s not just a piece of clever filmmaking. It may be Nolan’s best emotional investment.

2001: A Space Odyssey effectively began a whole new genre. It’s often overlooked as such but Star Trek: The Motion Picture pioneered efforts to solidify the astronauts in trouble genre. The Hollywood Solaris remake revived it, and of course in recent years there have been so many that many of the more recent ones, including worthy contenders like Ad Astra and High Life are actually obscure. But the best of them, arguably the best overall, is Interstellar.

This is Nolan reaching as far into the profound as he has so far been willing to go, at least as far as the sweep of history 2001 meant to be, toward Terrence Malick, Tree of Life territory. A lot of Nolan’s movies are allegories for his criticisms of conventional modern thinking, what we keep telling ourselves we shouldn’t be doing, what’s so wrong with the world. Here he aims himself at the abject nihilism of our future prospects, chief among them what happens to a planet pushed to its environmental brink, and whether or not humans are capable of adapting.

He pursues this by telling a story about a man and his daughter, a man who goes on an epic quest, and the daughter who doesn’t want him to go, a man who sees wonders, and a daughter who sees wonders, too. About how these wonders are strangely interconnected. 

Matthew McConaughey had just reached his peak of critical approval. He had a one-two punch with True Detective on TV and Dallas Buyers Club in the movies. Suddenly he had his choice of the best material. His charisma has often been taken for granted, his stereotype seen as a big dumb hunk of beef. Yet the career I see is one filled with fascinating choices, full of unbelievable diversity. That’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say, but out of all that Interstellar, for me, somehow stands heads and shoulders above all of it. And his best scenes are wordless, are McConaughey crying at seeing his children, growing up, on a screen.

The bond he shares with his daughter, in particular, portrayed at three different ages, Jessica Chastain in the middle, is of course the heart of the movie. The message their bond sends is often overlooked. Especially if it’s a Disney movie, we’re often told the younger generation has all the answers, but this is a movie that acknowledges how progress can be made through generational ambition, how the dreams and the bonds forged between a father and daughter can change the world.

The splendor of movie magic finds its poetry in an infinite bookshelf that allows them to communicate through time. It feels like Nolan channeling Shyamalan, and maybe this is the precise moment in which they finally meet. I love them both. They are both treasures of the medium. I don’t mind observing this.

The sheer spectacle of the cast alone is worth noting. There’s McConaughey and Chastain, of course; Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Matt Damon! Topher Grace, John Lithgow, Ellen Burstyn, Timothée Chalamet, David Oyelowo, Wes Bentley...I officially ran out of space in the number of labels Blogger let me add, that’s how rich this cast is. Some roles are larger than others. Every one of them is worth admission.

It is a transcendent experience. For me, that’s the height of cinema, the ability to reach well beyond the normal, not merely some beautifully told tale, but one that’s a truly singular experience, that could not be duplicated in another medium, that uses all the available tools to maximum effect, a convergence of epic talent and vision.

The very strange thing is that Arrival is very much at the same level and tells much the same story and is as tall an achievement, and I don’t much think of them as rivals, and they were in theaters within two years of each other. That’s pretty stellar.

Ava (2020) Review

 rating: ****

the story: A hitwoman is targeted for elimination by an associate who views her as a liability.

review: Here’s a movie I felt compelled to review based on the idiotic reviews I’ve so far seen for it. They seem fixated on its familiar plot. You can boil even the most innovative plot to something familiar. In this case the selling point is absolutely Jessica Chastain as the title character. Of course it is. To even begin to suggest anything else is to completely fail to comprehend the art of filmmaking.

But if you really want to boil it down, Ava could be called the Jessica Chastain John Wick. What made John Wick so much fun was how it helped viewers see Keanu Reeves as exciting again. Reeves has been pretty good at finding defining roles over the years. He’s got three recognizable franchises under his belt at this point. Ava was never going to be as popular as John Wick, for the same reason that Chastain doesn’t have the same kind of career as Reeves. It’s arguably tougher now than in Hollywood’s golden age for actresses. When it’s gotten tougher for actors in general to stand out in a blockbuster-saturated era (which has actually made 2020 refreshing, with so many blockbusters relocated away), women will especially struggle for attention. You have a few that critics can’t seem to get enough of, and then you have ones like Chastain and Cate Blanchett who more often than not are taken for granted.

Simply put, if this were an earlier era, it’d be a lot harder to say “blah, another Katherine Hepburn movie” (fully aware as I am that even Hepburn could be taken for granted, but the greater point here being Hepburn is a widely acknowledged cinematic treasure, and Chastain is not). The fact that Ava is a Chastain movie is absolutely itself a good enough reason to pay attention.

It’s like the John Wick version of her best movie(s) The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, if anything. As much attention is given to her professional problems (and prowess) as her domestic problems. This is a good year, if anything, for human women action stars, counting Blake Lively’s Rhythm Section. And while Lively is very human in all aspects, Chastain is given no room for doubt in her ability to survive a brutal fight, even if little space is even given how much her background hurts her, and the family she had to leave behind.

So the perceived limitations critics see in Ava are quite calculated. It’s a movie bold enough to let us know what we need to know but not dwell on it, and have flashy elements but not dwell on them.

The other reason I had to catch it was Colin Farrell, who costars as the guy who decides Chastain has become a liability. He shows flashes of real passion, something Farrell usually keeps below the surface. It’s one of his villainous roles, and yet another that also proves his utter lack of vanity, which is what has continually cost him mass appeal (early in his career, for instance, Farrell exhibited few qualms to looking less obviously heroic than his more famous costars, Tom Cruise in Minority Report and Bruce Willis in Hart’s War). It’s a great role at this point in his career.

Chastain’s ally against Farrell is John Malkovich, who gets to have an epic fight scene but also the kind of death that leaves you guessing until the end. Her mom is Geena Davis, and the one weak acting link is Common as her ex-lover. I don’t know why Common is so common.

If the problem is that it confounds expectations, then that’s a very good one for Ava to have. When people get around to appreciating Chastain, it ought to be remembered as the kind of thing only she could pull off.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2014)

rating: ****

the story: A marriage is interrupted by the death of their child.

what it's all about: I will admit, the thing that originally brought me to The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby was the fact that there were three versions of the movie: Him, Her, and Them.  Technically, Him is the original incarnation of the movie.  Director Ned Benson conceived of Her when his one-time girlfriend Jessica Chastain asked for her character's backstory to be fleshed out.  Then Them was created by combining the two other versions.  I would submit that Them is the best version of the story, the most artful, but it's certainly worth watching all three, and for different reasons.

The wife, the eponymous character, is played by Chastain, while the husband is James McAvoy.  The three versions of the story are best described this way: Him is by far the most open, viewer-friendly one, while Her is much more of an indy film; Them, by combining both, turns it into an art film.  Him has Bill Hader as its best selling point, broadening the story with his casual irreverence, and making it a fun experience.  Her has Viola Davis and William Hurt (Davis doesn't really appear in Him; clearly she's heard in her classroom mostly thanks to her prominence in Her; Hurt doesn't appear in Him at all), who ground Chastain in challenging conversations, the only way we get a sense of how she views the world.  McAvoy also has Ciaran Hines, in much the same role as Hurt, and in that way we get a sense that what originally brought McAvoy and Chastain together was running away from their lives, so that it's the same problem, in reverse, that they're dealing with throughout the story.  And why that ending is so appropriate.  (Katherine Waterston, later featured in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, has a small role in Her.)

It's a poetic, elegiac experience, concerning how we struggle with life, how it sometimes impossible to truly understand someone else, how flippant and rude behavior is sometimes not what it seems, more of a defense mechanism, something we know intrinsically but can rarely admit.  It's a long series of awkward conversations, either happening or being avoided, and the struggle to comprehend either how we grow or that we're still doing it.

So it's fascinating to me on many levels.  Most often, when there are multiple versions of a movie, it's because of studio interference.  Benson chose this risky, deliberate path for his first and to date only film.  No doubt it was asking a lot for audiences to try and choose between them.  Even critics would've had to demonstrate unusual levels of concentration to have understood the scope of his achievement.  I think everyone came out looking good having decided to make this movie, in all its incarnations.