Timeline (2003)

rating: ****

the story: Modern archaeologists time travel to the 14th century.

what it's all about: This is the kind of movie that ages well.  I remember watching Timeline on home video soon after its release, and not thinking too much of it.  Like a lot of people I mostly thought of it as a Paul Walker movie, which in 2003 didn't mean as much as it does in 2018.  Not so much because Walker went on to have a brilliant career, but because the Fast & Furious franchise exploded, and that alone increased his significance over time.  2003 also saw his turn as the lead in the second Fast & Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, but that was hardly an indication of where Walker, much less the series, was going to go. 

Oh, and by the way, watching Timeline again, Walker isn't really the star of the movie anyway.  That's the biggest irony, right?

Instead, hindsight really helps make obvious that Timeline is a Gerard Butler movie.  What a fascinating career Butler has had.  He made his name in 2006's 300, and his subsequent career has been a tug-of-war with whether or not audiences actually can think of him for anything other than 300.  Which means in a lot of ways, his career hasn't actually changed all that much.  But what always fascinates me about movies is the constant discovery of it.  Movies are a curious medium.  You can follow them any number of ways, and certainly actors are one of them.  To the general public, it's always about the present, or if the past is revisited at all it's mostly to do with movies that are already well-known or random ones that have developed cult followings.  It's rarely about revisiting movies for the sake of revisiting them.  And yet, Butler is as ripe for that as anyone.  Was 300 truly a fluke, or did he have anything that might have helped indicate such a development?

You can guess my answer already.  Timeline would certainly been a strong indication.  The whole point of his character can be summed up by attempting to answer whether or not Butler's type of hypermasculinity can best be acclimated in the past.  Every character in the story struggles with fitting in.  It would've been cheap storytelling to have Butler just slip into it, and maybe because he was still a relatively unknown element, his arc develops the way it does, but precisely because it works out that way, it works extremely well both for the story and to illustrate both where Butler was at this point in his career and where he was headed. 

Bottom line, if I had been paying attention, I would've recognized back then that I had just seen a star be born.

There's a ton of great talent worth relishing around him, beyond Walker.  Billy Connolly, obviously, and also Michael Sheen, another actor years ahead of be "discovered" as a star.  David Thewlis, meanwhile, puts on an American accent, and I assume in 2003 I had no idea who he was, much less that he would become a favorite.  My big draw, back then, was actually Neal McDonough, who never quite found his sweet spot, following the early demise of Boomtown.  Matt Craven is always worth noting.  Anna Friel, meanwhile, plays French and quite convincingly, even though she's clearly British in real life, so when I saw her again (and in 2003 I had no idea I was supposed to care about her, either), I initially wasn't even sure she was someone I knew, just that she looked familiar. 

This is also the penultimate film directed by Richard Donner, which in 2018 sounds ridiculous, especially when his last movie was 2006's 16 Blocks.  Not that 16 Blocks was a bad way to go.  It was an excellent way to go.  It's just sad to see a talent retire, especially when he was still firing on all cylinders.

The story was based on a book by Michael Crichton, whose professional height was in the '90s, when he was riding on the success of the Jurassic Park film and ER, plus his continuing string of blockbuster thrillers.  I've read him off and on for years, and every time I remember all over again how much I appreciate what he brought to the culture.  In a lot of ways, Jurassic Park distorted his appeal to a fairly cartoonish degree.  And in a lot of ways, Timeline is Jurassic Park minus the cartoonish distortion, an attempt to revisit the past in a way that spectacularly backfires.  Crichton more often tried to resolve real world misconceptions than went for sensationalism, which Jurassic Park the movie was at least wildly accepted to be.  I mean, it single-handedly revived popular obsession with dinosaurs.  But it was also about hubris run amok, as Crichton often explored, totally misjudging when a gamble has been miscalculated.  That's Timeline, the role Thewlis plays.  It's a shame Crichton died just at the start of an age when hubris has exploded, when a little perspective is most desperately needed.

But to watch something like Timeline, and to see how effortlessly, finally, it straddles escapist storytelling and the classic cautionary tale, is to see Crichton's genius all over again, and how Donner brought together a rich host of actors to tell it.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

rating: ****

the story: A Hollywood screenwriter working on his first book imagines life was idyllic in 1920s Paris, and then somehow ends up there.

what it's all about: Admittedly, my experience with Woody Allen is still shamelessly incomplete, loaded to a generous portion of his recent work while leaving his earlier films mostly unexperienced except for a so-long-ago viewing of Annie Hall that I have no clear memories of it now, but I would have to say Midnight in Paris is one of my favorites, and I think it will stand as one of his signature artistic statements.

Owen Wilson grafts his natural charm to the classic Woody persona of the anxious would-be lover seeking answers to life's questions.  I never really get why critics complain about the Woody persona.  I loved Kenneth Branagh's take in Celebrity.  Technically, Will Ferrell plays it in Melinda and Melinda, although it might be difficult to see as he takes a backseat to Radha Mitchell.  You might even say Colin Farrell plays it, in tortured fashion, for Cassandra's Dream.  Wilson is such an amiable talent it's sometimes easy to take him for granted (apparently about a decade past he struggled with real despair for perhaps that very reason), but Midnight in Paris owes a huge debt to him.  It wouldn't work nearly as well without him accepting the lunatic premise that never really attempts to explain itself, and is all the better for it.  Who else could sell it with such casual acceptance?

The show is stolen, however, by a pair of supporting performances, of diverging length.  Adrien Brody, who ended up being taken for granted after his Pianist breakthrough, is a hugely amusing Salvador Dali (!), who seems to have stepped out of a Wes Anderson movie, maybe.  You can watch the movie for the pleasure of Brody's Dali alone.  You can do that, but you'd be missing Corey Stoll's breakthrough performance as Ernest Hemingway, who is basically the exact opposite of Woody Allen.  The sheer bravado of it is breathtaking.  Stoll, who has continued supporting and television roles since giving us his Hemingway, commands the screen and translates all over again the charm of a writer almost better known for his personality than his prose.  But he'll make you want to read the prose, too.

Together, Brodi and Stoll make mincemeat of Michael Sheen's blowhard intellectual, who's so busy trying to impress everyone, including Wilson's would-be bride Rachel McAdams, cast in the classic Allen archetype of the lover who just doesn't understand and doesn't even care to try, that it's kind of tragic for Sheen, and McAdams, because they continually disappoint through no fault of their own, because they can't possibly hope to contend with them.  Isn't that kind of the point?  Wilson thinks life can't get any better than his romantic notions of the past, and so to have the two most important figures of the present be so utterly charmless in comparison, that's storytelling.

So ironically, Marion Cotillard leads the rest of the cast as the would-be replacement lover Wilson discovers suffers from the same pains he does, only she's from the 1920s and wishes she were some thirty years earlier still...Cotillard is a master of fading into her mysterious beauty (there's a great bit about that and Pablo Picasso in the movie), ethereal, the elusive connective tissue that holds the whole thing together.  Toss in Kathy Bates and a pre-Loki Tom Hiddleston, and you have a cast that's rewarding on every level, that knows exactly what it needs to accomplish, and rewards repeated viewings.  I mean, Hiddleston in 2011 had Midnight and Thor released within weeks of each other.  He plays F. Scott Fitzgerald in Midnight, the first famous face Wilson meets, handily introducing him to Stoll's Hemingway.  Hiddleston's scenes are also stolen by a crackerjack portrayal of Zelda Fitzgerald, but watching them again, knowing what was about to bloom for Hiddleston, is to love the quirks of fate. 

It's a movie that's ridiculously easy to like, and the more you watch it the more you like it.  And it's got a big statement to make, too, about living in the past, and how it's both not as good for you as you might imagine, and that it is as good for you as you might imagine.  Wilson undeniably benefits from his experiences, even as his personal life crumbles, and he learns there's a limit to the experience.  But then, he also meets a local Parisian, a contemporary who shares the more grounded outlook he cobbles together, or perhaps was always there.  I mean, he remains enchanted by Paris itself throughout the movie.  Ironically it's Steen and McAdams who keep presenting a warped view of Wilson's fixation on the past.  That's another reason Wilson is perfect for this movie, because he's able to let their negativity slide off of him without unneeded drama to further complicate things.

And that's really the spirit of Midnight in Paris, the ability to  enjoy itself, say something profound, and move on.