End of Watch (2012) Review

rating: ****

the story: Partners on the police force find themselves embroiled in trouble.

review: Here’s another movie I was initially wowed by but eventually took for granted until a rewatch. Especially in 2020, in which End of Watch suddenly seems impossible. 

This is actually a cop movie in which the cops themselves decide to record their activities. This is after they have already been involved in a service-related shooting incident. And they can’t stay away from trouble. Imagine recommending this to someone outraged this past summer. I don’t understand why End of Watch was so easy to take for granted in 2012, never mind, part of the shift movies started taking, toward almost exclusively blockbusters for audiences and art films for critics. From that vantage point it’s inevitable for everything else to be lost in the shuffle.

And in the process Michael Peña’s career becomes narrowed down to a caricature. Peña is now that motormouth from the Ant-Man movies, which is a great spot, sure. Who else can pull that off? But Peña has so much more to offer. Between this, World Trade Center, Lions for Lambs, there’s a whole alternate film history where he’s a major star of great acclaim. Just not this one.

Jake Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, has a movie star career, but likewise if any of his films at all were better appreciated, he would himself be better appreciated. This is a guy who consistently makes good choices, some of the most interesting choices of any modern actor, and yet he gets little enough attention for any of it.

Combine both with the gritty tendencies of David Ayer, who soon enough for pigeonholed as the “urban chaos guy,” and easily enough dismissed, that he doesn’t get any love either. There are few enough directors whose work is distinctive enough, consistent, that you know what you’re going to get, that it is always going to be interesting. Ayer is one of those.

Frank Grillo is in the supporting cast. Eventually he found himself typecast as a thug, so it’s good to see him as an outright good guy. Anna Kendrick, David Harbour help round out the cast, among others.

But this is really a showcase for Peña, Gyllenhaal, Ayer, and a look at how wonderful, and awful, it is to be a cop.

Lions for Lambs (2007)

rating: ****

the story: Two conversations tackle the state of America in 2007.

review: From the vantage point of 2018, the conversation in America sucks.  Lions for Lambs captures perhaps the last real opportunity the nation had to correct this before it became impossible for differences to be set aside and people to be civil about their political differences.  At the time of its original release, it was dismissed as talky, academic.  I always found the results, all the same, to be fascinating.  Today they're downright essential.

A political science professor played by director Robert Redford and a brilliant but disenchanted student played by Andrew Garfield form one of the conversations.  A hotshot Republican played by Tom Cruise and a liberal reporter played by Meryl Streep form the other conversation.  Soldiers played by Michael Pena, Derek Luke, and Peter Berg participate in military maneuvers, illustrating the realities of what their talking about.  I love the idea of Redford, Cruise, and Streep converging on something.  I love Garfield already submerging himself in vital material.  I think few actors today have chosen as interesting material, as consistently, as Andrew Garfield.

Cruise was still working at winning back his credibility after his affiliation with the Church of Scientology had become toxic.  Today he subsists mostly on Mission: Impossible movies.  The opportunity has definitively, it seems, been lost.  Back in 2007, though, Lions for Lambs is a kind of latter-day answer to Born on the Fourth of July, the Oliver Stone movie where Cruise plays a real-life veteran who after having become paralyzed in Vietnam becomes disenchanted and begins protesting the war.  Garfield's role is the complete opposite of that role; he never even signs up.  That's exactly the legacy of the Vietnam era right there.  I saw it myself on campus in the early part of the century.  Garfield doesn't believe he can affect change, despite his passionate, well-considered opinions.  Today we see students protesting...everything.  But we don't see them inserting themselves into the process.  We've collectively decided the process is broken, just as Garfield's character does.  But Redford challenges Garfield to choose a different path.  He admits he was a Vietnam protester, too.  But to motivate Garfield, he tells him about two other students he had, Luke and Pena, who chose very different paths, enlisting in the army.  They give a brilliant presentation in his class explaining exactly why.

It's the juxtaposition of their thought process, Garfield's, and the fact that Redford is willing to support all three of them despite having other ideas.  He sees it as essential that participation, not protest, is chosen as a reaction.  When Obama was first elected, he was called a symbol of hope, that the system could still work.  After the Bush presidency, voters wanted to believe in positive change.  Yet Obama ended up presiding over a further polarized culture, not because he was black but because protest became a permanent way of life, disengagement, cynicism.

And that's what Cruise and Streep's conversation reflects.  Meryl Streep's career fascinates me.  At this point she hadn't yet chosen to represent the protests of Hollywood.  That was still reserved for documentary filmmakers.  She was only a few years removed from portraying a pastiche of Hillary Clinton in The Manchurian Candidate.  Later, she'd rocket to new levels of acclaim playing all sorts of morally superior figures, and be rewarded with a staggering array of Oscar nominations.  She'd become a figure out outrage.  Her character in Lions for Lambs ultimately decides on that path.  She opts to give up the idea of dialogue with the other side, after sitting through the conversation with Cruise.  Her producer begs her to keep trying.  She decides it isn't worth it anymore.

It's the kind of conclusion you can either agree with or find unsettling.  I find it the latter, and I see that as exactly what happened, over the past decade, and I think that was a massive mistake.  This is a movie that reflects what could've been.  And now it stands as a testament to what didn't happen, and why.

Maybe it's a little hard to watch, because it is talky, but sometimes that's exactly what's necessary.  Arguably, more than necessary.  And now it serves as testament to what should have happened, and why.  The sad part is, we know it was rejected at the time, as well as the idea it represented. 

Collateral Beauty (2016)

rating: ****

the story: A man struggling with the death of his child comes across unlikely support.

what it's all about: In recent years it's become fashionable to put the cart before the horse, when talking about movies.  It seems to matter less what a movie actually accomplishes and more a very thin impression of maybe one element (if you're lucky) that becomes distorted in order to form a basis of rejection.  Collateral Beauty became an egregious example of this. 

For the first decade of the 21st century, Will Smith was virtually untouchable.  He made smash hit after smash hit, and critics felt comfortable elevating him from movie star to respected actor.  Awards chatter followed him when he chose a role that fit the criteria (Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness).  Eventually, though, the streak ended, more or less when he released Seven Pounds in 2008.  In a lot of ways, Collateral Beauty is a sequel to Seven Pounds.  They both feature Smith as a troubled individual struggling to reconcile himself to a horrible new truth in his life.  Actually, even a lot of his blockbuster movies feature him in this mode, notably I, Robot.  What Seven Pounds did was scrub away entirely his crowd-pleasing image, so that only the actor remained, and the role and the story around him becomes an outright tragedy.  Known for a fairly comedic approach otherwise, this might be considered Smith doing what most comedy actors do, seek out dramatic work now and then, which Robin Williams in particular accomplished to great success.  But where Williams waited years to go dark, and met with similar results, Smith attempted it at the height of his success, and plunged right into it.  So to see him return to that mode, after a near decade of struggles, is to see that it truly is his choice and not a creative gamble. 

After an opening scene that casts Smith in a similar vein to George Clooney in Up in the Air, he virtually retreats into the background, so that for most of the movie, it's not really Smith's movie at all, but the wonderful supporting ensemble's around him.  But watching him interact with them, and seeing his relationship with Naomie Harris in particular develop, is to see how all the pieces fit together.  The scenes and the arc with Harris in particular evoke Seven Pounds, a movie that builds in its impact until it hits an emotional crescendo, in a way that few movies I've seen have been capable of delivering (Warrior is another, and a true master class in that art).

Now, that supporting cast is involved in an elaborate plot of several layers.  Detractors mostly fixated on two of its three essential layers, the ones present in the trailers that became soundly misunderstood.  What detractors above all these days love to do is declare something creepy.  They did it with that year's Passengers, too, complaining about a plot point that was in fact the entire plot of the movie, that the plot meant to resolve.  Smith's business partners, portrayed by Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, and Michael Pena conspire to demonstrate that he's been permanently compromised by the death of his daughter.  They hire an investigator to find dirt on him, and discover that he writes letters to Love, Death, and Time.  In the original trailer, it seems actual personifications of these concepts visit him of their own accord.  Then it was discovered that Norton, Winslet, and Pena hire actors to play them.  It seemed like gaslighting.  Like Passengers, this is directly addressed in the movie.  But the real twist, which is presented so that the characters Smith, Norton, Winslet, and Pena play never find out, is that the actors really are Love, Death, and Time.  This essentially makes a complete mockery of that criticism, and exposes it for never having bothered to see the movie.

And it's to the loss of those detractors, because the result are extremely edifying.  Few movies, few observers in general, are interested in looking at humanity as a whole these days.  They pick elements here and there and offer defensive looks.  A movie like Collateral Beauty is designed to shatter these defenses.  That may be its greatest accomplishment, or would be if more people were aware of what it actually accomplishes.

Anyway, the storytelling is one thing, but the incredible assemblage of actors is another.  Norton's career stalled when his reputation as being troublesome on set overshadowed his talent.  In recent years he's had supporting roles that have allowed him to once again assert that talent.  In Collateral Beauty he seems to get a chance to be the troublemaker he's perceived to be, and to have a redemptive arc, too.  Out of Smith's three business partners he has the biggest role.  Winslet and Pena's arcs are more subtle, but equally essential.  The three actors, meanwhile, are arguably the best reason to watch the movie.  Keira Knightley is another actor who's struggled in recent years to sustain a once-popular career, and seems to have found a role that commentates on perception.  Jacob Latimore is the only unknown actor in the ensemble, but is a true revelation.  But the real discovery here is Helen Mirren, who finally has a role that pierces her armor, even in a career that has taken every opportunity, likely and otherwise.  Which is to say, she finally lets loose and just has fun.

This is a must-see movie for a lot of reasons.  Hopefully I've helped clarify that.