Won’t Back Down Stumbled Into The Start Of Oscar Pandering Season.

The Good: Decent concept/message, Moments of character
The Bad: Unimpressive acting, No new information/approaches, Nothing at all superlative.
The Basics: Won’t Back Down has good intentions and a lot of heart, but is essentially a reform story that most viewers have already seen before.


Each year, there are two seasons I look forward to as a film critic. I love Summer Blockbuster Season, even with the schlock, because it is so delightfully mainstream and sometimes a truly great film slips in between the massive budget popcorn flicks. And then there is Oscar Pandering Season. Oscar Pandering Season is what I call the movie releases that have – in the last few years – been dropped in September and late November/all of December. If you look at the history of Oscar nominations from the past three or more years, you might note that the majority of the films nominated for Best Picture are released then because, apparently, Academy nominators are too stupid to remember great films they saw earlier in the year (at least, that appears to be what the studios believe). Oscar Pandering Season is marked by serious dramas that use impressive actors and actresses in roles custom-tailored to get them an Oscar nomination. After a summer of vacuous special effects films, followed by a brief lull populated by all the horror and comedy movies that could never compete with the massive advertizing campaigns of Summer Blockbuster Season, the studios push forth the films they hope will earn them a Best Picture nod and Oscar.

The first such film for Oscar Pandering Season is The Words, but I wasn’t able to get into a screening of that! Instead, last night I attended a screening of Won’t Back Down, a pseudo-controversial education drama that will only open the eyes of the truly ignorant or utterly misinformed. In other words, for those who work in education or who advocate for their child in the public education system, Won’t Back Down offers no new information or approaches.

Malia is a girl who is failing in school because she is unable to read. Her mother, Jamie, is convinced that her daughter can learn, but that the school she attends is not taking the time to actually educate her. When she learns how Malia is being isolated and punished for falling behind, instead of being given opportunities to catch up, Jamie takes matters into her own hands. Her complaints lead her to Nona Alberts, a teacher who spends much of her off-time teaching her own son because the school is failing him as well, despite Nona's marriage falling apart over education-related issues.

Together, Jamie and Nona team up to remove the worst teachers from Adams in an attempt to transform Adams. As they try to unite the neighborhood parents, they run into resistance, though it is nothing compared to the hostility they find at Adams among the teachers, administration, and school board. Fighting for change takes a toll on Jamie personally and Nona professionally, but the pair works to change one failing school in Pittsburgh, against all odds.

Won’t Back Down is not bad, but it is marred by being That Kind Of Movie. From the moment Jamie begins her quest to change Malia’s school – as opposed to giving up and moving Malia to a different school, which is not really an option for the poor mother - Won’t Back Down trends into territory that is far more obvious than audacious. This is not going to be the type of movie where halfway through the film, Jamie gets hit by a tractor trailer truck and the film turns into a euthanasia debate. It’s not the type of movie where the protagonists are going to try, fight the good fight, and fail with no results.

What is frustrating is that Won’t Back Down dilutes its focus with Hollywood clichés. There is a very minor romantic subplot that puts Jamie and one of the teachers in a near-relationship that seems pointless. Won’t Back Down has many of the clichés of the buddy drama as the common struggle between Jamie and Nona leads them to take risks together that are atypical for two people who have known one another so briefly.

On the character front, the title says it all. Won’t Back Down is the story of determination with two women who overcome their frustrations to take on an unjust system. Jamie’s working class background makes her a slight foil to Nona, but makes her determination that Malia will have a better life than she does make sense. Won’t Back Down does this without any real flavor or pizzazz. In other words, Jamie is a pretty generic determined single mother, without any quirks to make her different. Nona is a similarly determined woman whose only real differences from Jamie are the gender of her child and her education level.

Both Maggie Gyllenhaal (Jamie) and Viola Davis (Nona) do a decent job of balancing the two halves of their characters. They are supposed to be both determined and beleaguered and Davis, especially, utilizes her body language to convey exhaustion exceptionally well. Gyllenhaal sells the spunk and determined aspects of Jamie, but does not so much land the gritty qualities one might expect out of a woman of her socioeconomic status. Too often while watching Won’t Back Down, the viewer is aware they are watching Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jamie, as opposed to Jamie. There are moments when Gyllenhaal smiles, for example, that seem oddly out of character for a character as single-minded and focused as Jamie usually is.

The supporting cast in Won’t Back Down is good and Holly Hunter’s antagonistic role might be one of the only ones I have enjoyed her in. The child actors Emily Alyn Lind (Malia) and Dante Brown (Cody) hold their own well in a cast of seasoned adult actors. As Malia struggles with literacy, Lind is convincing with her eye movements and body language in addition to the delivery of her lines.

But ultimately, Won’t Back Down is unremarkable and unsurprising and the struggle in the film is one far too many people live day to day as it is. Like Blood Diamond or V For Vendetta (reviewed here!), Won’t Back Down might be extraordinary if it had the ability to wake up the sleeping masses. But, unlike the characters in the film, I have lost the faith that movies in the United States will actually accomplish real change, or else this problem would have been solved by Waiting For Superman years ago.

For other films about educators, please check out my reviews of:
Here Comes The Boom
Finding Forrester
Easy A

4.5/10

For other film reviews, be sure to visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Beastly Lives Down To Its Reputation As A Problematic Reworking Of Beauty And The Beast.

The Good: Moments of performance, Make-up effects
The Bad: Terrible editing/directing, Moments of character, Many of the plot contrivances
The Basics: In retelling the story Beauty And The Beast for the Twilight audience, Beastly makes for a problematically unhip cinematic outing.


My wife loves Disney’s Beauty And The Beast. She loves it so much that when she needs emotional comfort food, she’ll put it on and watch it several times in a single day. She loves Beauty And The Beast so much that despite seeing many previews for Beastly, she really wanted to see it. So, after months of being on the waiting list at our local library to get the DVD in, last night we took in Beastly.

And even my wife thought it was terrible.

Beastly is a modern-day reinterpretation of the classic story Beauty And The Beast. It is clearly attempting to tap into the audience that Twilight (reviewed here!) pioneered a few years ago. Designed to appeal to the teens who have outgrown the Disney Channel, Beastly attempts to tell a fantasy romance story, but never quite lands it. In fact, the film is so choppy in its narrative techniques and direction that almost any chance the movie had to succeed is leeched out of it.

Kyle is an arrogant student at an exclusive school who is running for the President of the Green Committee. He appears to be running unopposed, with only Lindy running for a Green Committee position as Treasurer. At a rally for the election, Kyle promotes himself as simply a good-looking, popular guy who wants the position simply to pad his resume. Kendra, the school witch with a tattoo near her eye, is irked by this and storms out to vandalize Kyle’s campaign posters. Nevertheless, Kyle wins the election and Lindy becomes the Treasurer and the two converse for only the second time in their high school experience at the victory party. At that party, Kyle mocks Kendra, who bewitches him.

Robbed of his good looks, Kyle discovers he is now balled, tattooed and has open sores over several parts of his body. Rejected by his father, Kyle goes into isolation only to walk the streets at night, hooded and hidden from the world. After stalking Lindy for a little while, Kyle follows her on a night when her father gets in trouble looking for a fix. After killing a drug dealer, Lindy’s father is distraught and convinces him to have Lindy move into his apartment for her safety. Hidden from her most of the time, Kyle (going by the name Hunter) still tries to interact with Lindy by bringing her nice things. Despite the efforts of a tutor (Will) and the housekeeper (Zola), being nice does not come easily to Kyle and he works to soften, to break the curse. As time runs out, he tries desperately to get Lindy to fall in love with him, disgusting visage and all.

First, I wanted to like Beastly, I honestly did. I sat down to it with fresh-made popcorn excited because it meant spending more time with my wife, which does not seem to happen as much as it ought to. But, it didn’t take very long before elements of the story, characters and editing began to grate on me so much that I could not stand what I was watching any longer. For me, the editing and direction was what initially made the film unwatchable. Daniel Barnz, who adapted the novel for the screen, directed Beastly and I can only assume he figured his audience was either dumb or so thrilled by the book that they wouldn’t notice how poorly the movie was put together. Beastly features cuts between scenes that leave little concept of time or place and frequently cut out the reactions of characters, so the film fails to breathe and live. Instead, the movie cuts roughly between scenes and events and characters who we are supposed to care about never truly come alive as a result.

That said, initially Beastly grabbed me with the enchantment scene. As Kyle becomes Hunter, the blurring camera work, the use of Kendra’s face all over, made it very clear what was going on. But that might have been the last moment the movie captivated me. Even as I watched the scene, I postulated, “This would have had a lot more emotional impact for Kyle if his hair was falling out or he was inadvertently pulling it out as opposed to it simply disappearing.” But, the movie is hardly about emotional resonances.

Beastly ought to be about connections and chemistry, but it falls dramatically short of that. Kyle and Lindy slowly get to the point where they are spending time with one another – Lindy oblivious to Kyle’s true identity – but the two never click. Throughout, Kyle confers with Zola and Will, which makes it seem like his character is not truly growing. In fact, in a pivotal scene near the end, it seems very much like Kyle is just trying to get Lindy to say the words “I love you” to break the spell, even though there has not been enough in the film to actually make it a credible emotional reaction to him. Given that the end of the movie comes only a few scenes later, Beastly is hardly a great romance.

And, I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s nitpicky; how the hell did Lindy get into the school Kyle goes to?! Her father is a junkie who has no clear career and she does not seem to fit that world (when she arrives at Kyle’s apartment, she only has the two suitcases). That sort of attention to detail seems to be lacking from the movie, so it seems like Beastly is more preoccupied with reinterpreting Beauty And The Beast on as many fronts as possible without actually telling an enriching or interesting story on its own.

This comes through especially with Will. Will arrives, supposedly to tutor Kyle, as a blind sage. But what he actually does in Beastly is deliver incongruently funny lines whenever the movie gets into a rut. There is not enough Will in the film for the number of ruts the movie descends into. Will is played well by Neil Patrick Harris, who seems more the victim of an underwhelming part than anything resembling bad acting. While I was thrilled when Peter Krause’s name popped up in the credits, he was woefully underused as Kyle’s too-busy-for-the-kid archetype father.

Actually, the best acting arguably came from Lisagay Hamilton. Hamilton performs the role of Zola with a strong Caribbean accent. This is entirely unlike anything else I have ever seen her in and is a far cry from the articulate, easy-to-understand performances she gave in her role on The Practice. But even her part is designed more to make a point about Kyle than to truly embody an interesting character whom one wants to watch.

I came to Beastly with limited knowledge of the film’s two big stars. Alex Pettyfer appeared in I Am Number Four (reviewed here), which I enjoyed. While Sucker Punch (reviewed here!) did not grab me in any meaningful way, Vanessa Hudgens was not bad in that. As Lindy, though, she underwhelmed me. Hudgens, at least as directed in Beastly, seems to be working from the annoying trend pioneered by Mary-Louise Parker whereby women never close their mouths. That’s not a comment on how much they talk; it’s an actual problem with how they hold themselves. Their lips do not touch as they look at people and this concerted effort is not sexy. These women do not look like they are smiling, nor like they have something to say; they look like they are grimacing and it is unfortunate that Hudgens is going down that path, at least as Lindy.

The make-up effects in Beastly are interesting and Kyle’s transformed self looks pretty cool. Ultimately, though, they are not enough to recommend and Beastly falls – as many fantasy movies do these days – into a category of predictable, unimpressive films that simply failed to wow me.

For other fantasy films, please check out my reviews of:
Tangled
Labyrinth
Red Riding Hood

3/10

For other film reviews, please be sure to visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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