Knight and Day (2010) Review

rating: ****

the story: A CIA operative has been set up, and in the process of clearing his name his life becomes entangled with an unlikely accomplice.

review: I will readily admit, until a rewatch a few weeks back I was as convinced as anyone that Knight and Day was nothing much writing about. In 2010 Tom Cruise was scrambling to put his career back on track, and when I saw this particular effort in theaters I thought it was a particularly desperate byproduct. I even dismissed costar Cameron Diaz, who has been a favorite since her film debut in The Mask, as forgettable.

I don’t believe any of that anymore.

If anything, Knight and Day has the potential of being a modern classic. It’s lighthearted and flippant concerning its surface action elements. The whole point is calculated screwball, which in older Hollywood days was the holy grail of romantic comedy. It’s a unique movie in Cruise’s career, which has in the decade or so since its release relied ever more heavily on straight action.

It’s really a waltz between Cruise and Diaz; eventually the tables are turned and it’s Diaz in control rather than the character who seems to have been one step ahead and her to be dozens of steps behind. 

And there’s plenty of support around them, too, something of an embarrassment. Maggie Grace, officially wrapping up her time on Lost, is there in one of her many tiny supporting roles (she’s also in the Taken movies, although you’d be forgiven to assume they’re all just Liam Neeson brandishing his action jones). Peter Sarsgaard (nearly always a villain, alas!), Viola Davis, Paul Dano actually feeling like he’s perfectly cast for a change, even Gal Gadot!

The director in charge of all this is the perennially criminally underrated James Mangold, who has proven himself a master of modern cinema. In fact, restoring Knight and Day, and this is not why I choose to champion it now but it’s a nice benefit, as a treasure would add an additional feather to his cap (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, Logan, Ford v Ferrari).

Too often today we reduce the art of moviemaking to…whatever’s not the box office blockbuster. There’s a huge tradition and a wide range of material out there. Recognizing achievements is a fine way to encourage the breadth of the medium to continue pursuing that range, rather than allowing it to narrow to “blockbuster” and “art film.”

That and acknowledging that movie stars continue to deliver, regardless of whatever happens in their personal life.

Vanilla Sky (2001) Review

rating: *****

the story: A perfect life goes off the rails in disorienting ways.

review: I just watched Vanilla Sky for the first time. It’s one of those films that took on instant notoriety, so that if you never saw it all you knew was that it was probably problematic at best, incomprehensible at worst. It could not have arrived in theaters at a better, or worse, time.

It’s a remake, but that didn’t help anyone make any better sense of it. It was just weird. 2001 gave us two other, similarly complex films at even more diverging ends of the spectrum. One was A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a Spielberg movie that was also a Kubrick movie, and no one knew what to make of that. The other was Memento, the movie that made Christopher Nolan’s career. With Vanilla Sky, this was a mind-bending confluence of films that seemed to try and reconcile the cerebral injection of M. Night Shyamalan into the language of American cinema. And of course only one of them survived in the popular consciousness, the new voice.

Ten years later Nolan had reprocessed it into Inception, of course, but that was well after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had already gotten there, a critical favorite but a box office dud.

Funny enough, but Vanilla Sky might almost be termed an earnest remake of another Jim Carrey film, The Mask. Cameron Crowe seems to go out of his way to evoke the comparisons early in the film, from the casting of Cameron Diaz herself to Tom Cruise aping Carrey’s cartoonish antics for a brief but memorable moment.

And, I gotta say, I really wish anyone remembered any of this.

Crowe was a Hollywood golden boy for a split second. He had a huge success with Jerry Maguire, and then followed that up with the well-received Almost Famous, a version of his own origins. Then he made Vanilla Sky and suddenly could do nothing right.

This is easily his most ambitious film. Anyone, regardless of how they view the merits of the end result, should be able to admit that. Heck, it’s arguably Cruise’s best spotlight, too, at last willing to let it all hang loose. And it’s fascinating. And it spins its web about as seductively as any film appearance Penelope Cruz has ever made, so human and yet so very intoxicating at the same time. And the big twist, even if you know the source material, works, too, for all the subtle setup put into it. The results never lose sight of the end goal, and never wallow in misery. (The only real comparison I have to that is Steven Knight’s brilliant Serenity.) Cruise always has something interesting to work off of, a different character, whether Diaz, Cruz, or Kurt Russell or Jason Lee. There’s even Michael Shannon in a small role for future-proof credibility!

Having now seen it, and maybe it’s the subsequent history of film, and even the equally ambitious TV show Lost I have the pleasure to draw from, but I’m so, so glad to have done so. The history of film in the 21st century falls a little more clearly into place, and a classic takes its place in history.

Hopefully other viewers catch up at some point, too.

American Made (2017)

rating: ****

the story: Based on a true story, an airline pilot finds himself drafted into the Iran-Contra Affair.

review: Tom Cruise was one of the biggest movie stars of the '80s and '90s.  At the turn of the millennium his reputation took a big hit due to his increasingly visible affiliation with the Church of Scientology.  Subsequent film projects had to compete with this reputation, and he's never been as popular since.  All that being said, his career remains fascinating.  He starred in Born on the Fourth of July in 1989, a drama that helped define his career.  Suddenly Cruise wasn't just a hotshot playboy but someone who had something to say about the state of the country, even if he was commenting on the war in Vietnam, already fifteen years in the past by then.  It wasn't until Lions for Lambs in 2007 where he offered a true follow-up.  This was a movie about the increasingly toxic cultural divide that had resulted in part from the Vietnam era. 

And then in 2017, he gave us American Made.  Unlike his earlier efforts, this one doesn't attempt to lecture about what's right or wrong.  The whole point of the movie is that Cruise's character has no idea, and never really cares, about the implications of his actions, which involve the CIA hiring him to take reconnaissance photos in Central America, and then to deliver drugs to revolutionaries in Panama, including future dictator Manuel Noriega, and finally guns to the Contras in Honduras.  Director Doug Liman's whole approach to the movie draws on Cruise's charisma and recent reputation as an action star, and turns all that on its head.  This is a movie to be enjoyed with irony.

Late in the film Cruise has been arrested and charged for his activities, but the sequence feels more like Jack Reacher, in the second movie Never Go Back, explaining to authorities that he's going to walk away from the situation.  For a split second he has to worry about actually facing consequences, going to jail, but then he hears his sentencing as community hours.  But he begins worrying about real ramifications, from something worse than a trial, expecting his car to be laced with explosives, after a car his brother-in-law has just gotten in blows up.  It's really a movie that understands tone, and its message about what these events really signify doesn't need to be hammered as a result, and that's refreshing in an era where everything is delivered with as much bluntness as possible.

Domhnall Gleeson, appearing in just about everything these days and constantly changing up his persona, is Cruise's CIA handler, depicted much as CIA handlers tend to be (similar to how they're depicted in The Hunting Party, for example), but elevated thanks to Gleeson's uncanny ability to be fascinating in the most mundane ways possible (his scene-chewing snarls in Star Wars films notwithstanding).  Jayma Mays plays the prosecutor who thinks she's nailed Cruise; ever since her breakthrough in Red Eye I've been waiting for something worthy to fall in her lap, and this is it.  Caleb Landry Jones picks up another scene-stealing supporting role as the ill-fated brother-in-law.  For me, it was fun seeing Star Trek: Enterprise standout Connor Trinneer in a small role as a young George W. Bush.  His character isn't identified, but Trinneer certainly looks the part, and his scene adds a nice additional irony to the proceedings. 

Given his lowered profile, Cruise can no longer count on his projects landing the way they once did.  More often than not his interesting work is slipping through the cracks.  It'd be a shame if American Made did.

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.