Doomed From The Start (The Relationship, Not The Movie): The Last Five Years!

The Good: Good music, Good performances (especially from Anna Kendrick), Interesting narrative technique
The Bad: Characters/relationship
The Basics: On the balance, The Last Five Years is a movie worth watching . . . even if the relationship it explores is not worth it at all!


Anna Kendrick is having a good first quarter of 2015 (she had a pretty good last quarter of 2014 with Into The Woods as well!): the art house films she performed in in 2014 seem to all be hitting theaters now. Following right on the heels of The Voices hitting the big screen, the musical The Last Five Years has finally been released from its dungeon. And it is good.

The Last Five Years follows unfortunately close to Comet (reviewed here!), which was a brilliant presentation of a tumultuous relationship that hit independent cinema late last year (and made my Best of 2014 Move List, here!) and has a similarly rocky relationship that it contains. The Last Five Years is based upon the stage play by the same name and director Richard LaGravenese does a generally decent job adapting it (more on that in a moment!). It behooves me to note that I have not seen the play, so this is just a pure review of the film as it stands on its own.

The plot of The Last Five Years is painfully simple: Cathy is at the end of her romantic relationship with Jamie and is reflecting upon it. Jamie is a novelist in his early twenties who is experiencing a meteoric rise. His novel has gotten the attention of an agent, who has an in at Random House. All of a sudden, Jamie is at Columbia, his first chapter is getting in Atlantic Monthly and he’s on the way to having an amazing best seller.

That’s the death knell of The Last Five Years. Cathy is looking back on the relationship and Jamie is experiencing it chronological order, but his sections are not actually about the romantic relationship. Instead, Jamie hops into bed with Cathy, in defiance of the wishes of all his Jewish ancestors, and seems to only really be taken with her beauty and the novelty of being with a non-Jew. Jamie accepts his otherwise offensive song (it’s basically, “I’ve slept with every Jewish girl thrown at me, but wow, it’ll really piss off my parents if I fuck you and they find out, so that interests me!”) and wants to have a real relationship with him. There are a few moments where it seems like it would be easy to see Cathy’s perspective – Jamie dedicates his book to her, he’s a good looking guy, his success does change their lives. But, from the very beginning, it is impossible to actually believe in the Jamie/Cathy relationship (not just because the film opens with Cathy singing the broken-up song). Jamie does not have a grounded, real, interest in Cathy (her beauty will fade, her non-Jewishness isn’t really enough of a foundation to build a relationship with her, etc.), so the relationship truly is doomed from the start.

That leaves “the journey.” “The journey” in The Last Five Years is hardly pleasant to watch; Cathy might be blind to how Jamie is catting around on her and how he is not actually attentive to her needs (she wants to come home and crash after a day of bad auditions and he just wants to keep her awake and focused sharing his latest story with her), but the audience is not. Anna Kendrick (Cathy) and Jeremy Jordan (Jamie) have little in the way of on-screen chemistry, which only accents how far apart they are from the beginning. “The Journey” is not much of a journey and it feels entirely forced with the players involved.

That said, the music in The Last Five Years pretty damn good. The opening song is appropriately heartbreaking and there are one or two other numbers that are good. The singing by Jordan and Kendrick is well-executed.

What gets The Last Five Years even a mild recommendation from me is the performance by Anna Kendrick. LaGravenese might well be the first director not obsessed with showing Anna Kendrick’s teeth. He captures her smiling, without showing off her teeth; he gets her to look around and emote with her mouth closed and that is something no other director has done all that well or consistently. On her own Anna Kendrick is actually wonderful in the role of Cathy. She opens The Last Five Years with a powerful performance, singing in the opening scene with absolute heartbreak growing in her eyes. In that scene, Kendrick is not struggling to remember lines or hit notes, Cathy is singing her heart out, alone and broken and it instantly sucks the viewer in. She’s fantastic.

Unfortunately, Richard LaGravenese’s direction is nowhere near as consistent. In the opening scene, LaGravenese is sure to get Anna Kendrick’s eyes as they express all the emotion that would come with tears welling up (no actual tears are evident, but the heartbreak and emotion behind them are clearly expressed). But in the subsequent Cathy scene, where Cathy is trying desperately to reunite with Jamie and he is already gone (more than he was already), Cathy makes a reference to seeing her crying. Unfortunately, LaGravenese has the camera so far back that the viewer can’t see Cathy crying. Things like that and dance numbers that use a smaller cast rotating around (as opposed to an actual bustling crowd) made The Last Five Years feel more like a play than a film. LaGravenese does great using costume changes and location changes in ways that a theater company could not possibly pull off in the space of a theater, but the movie still does not have the scope of a film. He even focuses on Cathy and Jamie's hands holding one another as they walk to make his point clear. LaGravenese does not use the film medium as well as he ought to capture nuance consistently. Instead, sometimes one feels like they are watching a well-crafted film with emotions beautifully focused upon and others, it looks like a play where we’re in the fiftieth row.

The result is a musical that is inconsistent, but not bad, detailing a relationship that is not songworthy at all.

For other films currently in theaters, please check out my reviews of:
To Write Love On Her Arms
The Voices
Love, Rosie
The Seventh Son
Song One
Vice
American Sniper
Project Almanac

5.5/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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R.I.P. Robin Williams: The Fisher King Is Part Of An Incredible Legacy

The Good: Characters, Performances, Direction, General plot
The Bad: Editing
The Basics: One of the most powerful, diverse performances by Robin Williams came in The Fisher King, one of Terry Gilliam’s most profound explorations of human suffering.


Yesterday, the world lost an immense talent with the suicide of Robin Williams. For the past day, my wife and I have been strangely in shock; for her, this is the first celebrity death she has experienced that has genuinely shaken her. For me, I’ve been trying to find a way to commemorate the actor that does not lead me to a rant about how Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote film can never be realized (and fuck you, American financers for not seeing the potential of that a decade ago!). One of my fondest memories of all stand-up comedy was Robin Williams doing Shakespeare: “Look! The moon, like a testicle, hangs low in the sky!” But amid his life of comedy films, what shocked me the most about the life of Robin Williams was how masterful a dramatic actor he was. In some ways, with his range and ability to portray dramatic depth and blistering emotions, the suicide of Robin Williams is unsurprising; such greatness, intelligence and emotional realization seldom comes without a price. So, to commemorate the life of Robin Williams, today I thought to take in one of his films that I had – surprisingly – not yet reviewed: The Fisher King.

Before today, I had only seen The Fisher King once, back when I was in college. I had not been prepared for Robin Williams in a serious, not-funny, role, but his portrayal of Parry caused me to entirely rethink who Williams was as an actor. Rewatching the film now, as an adult, The Fisher King is a powerful film that illustrates the talent Terry Gilliam has for direction, storytelling and getting great performances out of his actors. While Gilliam’s style is evident in almost every single shot of The Fisher King, the story he and writer Richard LaGravenese tell is much more universal than some of Gilliam’s more fantastic works. The Fisher King is intense and quirky and it is unsurprising it was nominated for many awards; perhaps the only real surprise for me was how many of those nominations did not materialize with wins. Given that The Fisher King was up against Silence Of The Lambs (reviewed here!) and that Robin Williams lost his Best Actor Oscar to Anthony Hopkins that year, there was no shame in Williams’ loss and it is all the more surprising that a genre film walked away with the uncommon Best Picture win that year. The Fisher King is a film that does not fit into any easy boxes for defining, though the dramatic elements certainly overwhelm the comedic and romantic aspects, so those expecting a Robin Williams comedy will be surprised.

Jack Lucas is a radio shock jock in New York City who is callous and hates yuppies. On the eve of his breakout from radio to television, Jack makes an offhanded comment to a caller that pushes the caller to go into a yuppie bar where he shoots several patrons and then himself. Three years later, Lucas is stuck working at a video store for his girlfriend, Anne. Drunk, despondent and only marginally functional, Jack pushes Anne away and goes out into the night where he prepares to kill himself. At the edge of the Hudson River, Jack is about to jump when two yuppie thugs come out of nowhere and begin beating him up. Before they can set him on fire, Jack is rescued by Parry, a bum who rallies other homeless people to save man getting mugged. Waking up in Parry’s home – the boiler room of an apartment building - Jack learns from the landlord that Parry’s wife was one of the victims in the shooting and his sense of guilt overwhelms him.

Parry is convinced that billionaire Langdon Carmichael’s house has the Holy Grail and he tries to enlist Jack to help him break in. But when Jack tries to pull Parry into the real world, Parry has a hallucination of the Red Knight, who makes him flee. When Parry calms down, he reveals to Jack that he is smitten with a woman he follows daily. To alleviate his guilt, Jack (with the reluctant aid of Anne) helps Parry woo the woman, Lydia. But after their successful first date, Parry’s feelings for Lydia cause him to remember the incident and he runs off into the night, where hoodlums beat him nearly to death. With Jack’s career restored, he begins to cut his ties to Anne and the comatose Parry . . . until his sense of guilt moves him to take up Parry’s quest!

The Fisher King is a character-driven story and unlike so many of Terry Gilliam’s works where Society is the villain, most of the conflict in this film comes from internal sources. Parry is an obviously tortured character from the beginning, but what makes Jeff Bridges’s Jack such an interesting character is that his humanity is evident from almost the first scene. While on his radio show, Jack is abrasive and dislikable, but the moment the news breaks about the shooting, he is shocked and culpable. The consequences of his indifference to Edwin (the shooter) breaks Jack much the way the shooting destroys Parry’s life. So, despite seeming at times like an asshole, Jack is a character who is surprisingly easy to empathize with and the viewer wants to see him grow through his interactions with Parry.

Parry is appropriately shellshocked by the night at the bar where his wife was killed. The Fisher King smartly rounds out Parry’s story with a smart backstory and a solid basis for the character to be both lost and found through his interactions with Jack. The process is not simple, nor is it easy to watch, but the film is rewarding if for no other reason than it captures both the resilience of the human spirit and a revival of the fantastic. While mythological imagery acts as a plague to Parry, the desire to take up a quest and do a good thing becomes an inspiration for Jack and plays well for the viewer.

Jeff Bridges plays both the wounded and reborn versions of Jack very well. Robin Williams gives one of the best performances of his life as Parry, credibly playing the dignified professor in flashbacks and loopy, heartbroken man for the bulk of the film. Williams plays the erratic nature of Parry well and he was obviously cast, in part, for his mastery of comic timing. But more than just being comedic relief in The Fisher King, Williams is able to capture strong emotions and Terry Gilliam captures an exceptional performance from Williams where the actor uses only one side of his face in one of Parry’s first breakdowns in the film. Williams and Amanda Plummer play off one another well-enough for Parry and Lydia to be a credible romantic couple.

What surprised me was the range actress Mercedes Ruehl brought to the supporting role of Anne. Ruehl was only familiar to me from her role of Kate Costas in the third season of Frasier (reviewed here!) and in The Fisher King she plays virtually every emotion possible as Anne. The role could be an erratic one if delivered by a less-gifted actress, but Ruehl nails every beat, easily earning her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the role. While Williams is an actor I’ve come to expect some range from, Ruehl ruled every scene she was in in The Fisher King.

Depressing without being overbearing, The Fisher King holds up remarkably well (despite some troublingly skippy cuts in the film) and is a masterwork for Terry Gilliam, Mercedes Ruehl, and Robin Williams. Now, it stands as one of the crown jewels in the legacy of Robin Williams.

For other works with Robin Williams, please visit my reviews of:
The Big Wedding
Old Dogs
World’s Greatest Dad
Night At The Museum
Happy Feet
Man Of The Year
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
Bicentennial Man
What Dreams May Come
Jumanji
Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest
Awakenings
The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen

8/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Yearning To Be The Next Fantasy Film Franchise, Beautiful Creatures Starts Fair.

The Good: Good pacing, Decent effects, Social conflict
The Bad: A lot of unconvincing acting, Lack of on-screen chemistry between the leads, Fairly predictable
The Basics: Beautiful Creatures looks good, but is melodramatic and unfortunately more stiff and familiar than it is daring.


In the wake of the completion of the cinematic rendition of The Twilight Saga, Hollywood has been desperately looking for the next cash cow to exploit for years to come. It seemed like The Hunger Games (reviewed here!) would be a sure-fire hit, but that did not quite work out for the producers of the film – it was the only film in the highest-grossing films of 2012 that did not make more in the world theater than in the U.S.! – and the surety of the pulp teen fantasy romance genre novel to translate into successful, critically well-considered films was very much in doubt. Enter Beautiful Creatures, 2013’s second of several such franchise-builders (Warm Bodies beat it to market by two weeks!).

I’ll admit; going into the screening of Beautiful Creatures, I had some trepidations. When I recently considered The Twilight Saga (reviewed here!) as a whole, I was forced to acknowledge that the individual films were probably rated higher than I would regard them, especially when viewed one after another. While each film has to stand on their own, I found that my own enthusiasm probably led me to rate the films higher than I might have objectively considered them. I was determined not to make the same mistake with Beautiful Creatures. Fortunately, I had absolutely no preconceived notions of what the film would be before I saw it. I have not read the book and so, this is a very pure review of the film itself; I can offer no comparison to how it stacks up against the novel. That said, Beautiful Creatures feels very much like a beginning . . . and it is.

In the small town of Gatlin, South Carolina, Ethan Wate is shocked when change comes to his school on the first day of his Junior year. The change is a new student, Lena, who is remarkable in that she is identical to the girl Ethan has been dreaming about. Soon, the school is abuzz about the strange new girl and her family, who – rumors are – have supernatural abilities. Ethan, however, feels drawn to Lena and almost immediately begins helping her and learning about her. Lena, lives with her Uncle, a recluse on the outskirts of town and was related to the founders of Gatlin. Ethan lives with his virtually absent father and is cared for by Amma, who speaks to the dead.

Lena is living with a weight; her impending sixteenth birthday will see her own magical powers come into bloom. At that time, purveyors of the dark arts and the forces who fight using good magic will both attempt to make her part of their ranks. Ethan suddenly finds himself immersed in a world of magic, women who look shockingly good (especially for their ages!), and powers that should be out of his understanding. But, while the rest of the town follows a mob mentality to rise against Lena and her family (which her mother, the dark Caster Serafine uses against her), Ethan gets closer to Lena and discovers that her struggle involves him more than he ever thought it would.

Beautiful Creatures is well-paced, but it feels pretty familiar in terms of plot. It’s like I Am Number Four (reviewed here!) had superpowers and aliens replaced with magic and supernatural beings and was blended then blended with Twilight and Frankenstein (or, I suppose, The Crucible). Lena is a classic character in the process of becoming and her story quickly dominates Beautiful Creatures. Unfortunately, as far as the character’s journey goes, Lena is at an unfortunate stage in her journey and one that makes her more of a tool for the whims of others than a realized character of her own. Lena quickly falls into the role of a rope in the tug-of-war between Serafine and Macon.

As is the conceit of all of these new genre pieces, there is a romance plot/subplot to Beautiful Creatures. Ethan and Lena move toward a romance with one another with all the subtlety of a thunderstorm in the Southern flatlands. It’s obvious and Beautiful Creatures adds nothing new, special, or different to the concept. In fact, this might be one of the more insulting outings in recent memories as it works to restore the notion that the female protagonist is a damsel in distress who might be saved by love (though Macon’s take on it is that the burgeoning relationship might be a distraction which causes Lena to lose her way, much the way an overprotective father clings to his daughter’s chastity in the antiquated notions of the “good girl”/”dirty girl” dichotomy).

The relationship between Lena and Ethan is hampered on screen by actress Alice Englert and actor Alden Ehrenreich. I promised myself that for the film Beautiful Creatures I would not comment on the blandly, obvious, stereotypical good looks of any of the performers, so to keep focused: Engler and Ehrenreich are fine on their own and they get some decent banter off one another. However, they have less than zero in the way of on-screen chemistry. The characters play off one another well, but when it comes time for physical intimacy or the implication of genuine affection between the two character, both actors seem unusually, tragically, stiff. While such things seldom last, there are innumerable movies where the stars hook up and have off-screen relationships during the filming of their projects and fans invariably respond with, “I’m not surprised!” It would be a shock if Ehrenreich and Englert had any sort of friendship, much less romantic involvement outside the filming, based on how stiff they are in the scenes where the deliver dialogue regarding their character’s emotions for one another.

The real scene stealer is Emmy Rossum (Emma Thompson and Jeremy Irons easily falling into the realm of predictable greatness as their powerful characters Serafine and Macon), who explodes onto the screen with an energetic sexuality that reminds one of the potential she had in The Phantom Of The Opera (reviewed here!). Despite her exuberance and the way she oozes sexual energy as Ridley, she never makes it seem cheap or easy, like her Shameless character.

But what truly sunk Beautiful Creatures into the realm of average for me was the mood as it related to the plot. Beautiful Creatures is supposed to be a tense film that has viewers wondering which way Lena will go. Will she fall to the forces of evil or become a tool of great good? The last time the choice was so utterly unconvincing was Return Of The Jedi (reviewed here!), where it took until I watched it on DVD with the commentary track on that I realized that George Lucas wanted the scene with Luke on the second Death Star to have fans on their edge of their seat believing he could go over to the Dark Side (for at least one hundred viewings over my lifetime before that, I never got that – it just didn’t land, it wasn’t going to happen). In a similar way, Beautiful Creatures throws out the ideas of destiny, the angry mob, and precedent (in the form of a number of very evil Casters related to Lena and a curse involving a Caster who fell in love with a mortal) to try to sell the viewer on the idea that this girl whose angst seems entirely to be about the possibility that she could be sucked into the dark side will go there.

Viewers are too smart for that. But, as Beautiful Creatures is the first of what is sure to be several movies based upon the books that spawned this series, not all the answers are contained in this film and there are seeds laid for the subsequent volumes. One hopes they will rise to something more remarkable than this.

For other fantasy films, please check out my reviews of:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Warm Bodies
The Harry Potter Saga
Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Labyrinth
Just My Luck

4/10

For other film reviews, please check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Living Well Through Living Out Loud

The Good: Actors and acting, Strong characters
The Bad: Weak plot
The Basics: An easy recommendation for women looking for a film to bond together during. There's a lot for thinking men as well. A must for Ally McBeal fans.


What happens if you took two great actors (Danny DeVito and Holly Hunter) and one of today's better newcomers (Queen Latifah) and put them in a weakly scripted character driven film? You'd have Living Out Loud which was met with generally high critical acclaim, but failed to produce at the box-office mostly because word of mouth on the film was less supportive.

Living Out Loud is uniquely narrated, much in the way Ally McBeal was originally, with thoughts being presented immediately in such a way that it is difficult for the viewer to tell that they are not real. Some of these are done with humor and pulled off effectively. It may take a second viewing for the casual watcher to pull the real out of the unreal.

So, we're left with a film filled with excellent characters doing . . . well, not much. Danny DeVito portrays Pat Francato, a lonely man whose family life is turmoil, Holly Hunter's character, Judy Moore, is getting over being left by a man and Queen Latifah plays . . . here's a surprise, a nightclub singer, named Liz Bailey. Latifah does a good job and one of the funniest scenes is easily the fictional meeting between Liz and shy Judy.

While Pat interacts honestly with Judy, it becomes clear that she's the exception in his life. Pat's brother, Phil, appears for a few scenes where he alludes to past failures. But Pat has real tragedy; his daughter Liz is not well. His earthy empathetic condition roots the film as he plays elevator operator to the out of touch Judy. Pat - via DeVito, gives the audience some grounding.

The movie is good in that it teams the mousy Hunter up with the more substantial Latifah and mixes in DeVvito in a pretty lonely experience. This is not a film to see when you're depressed. Why? While the characters overcome - generally - the depths they sink to en route are not much fun. In fact, some of the best moments - on a human level - are as DeVito's character is being berated for his ideas by his brother.

More substantial than your average "chick flick," this film has greater endurance and depth than your average women's empowerment film, too. And I'm someone who despises the whole group dance scene thing, I find the scene wherein Judy and Liz go to a club to dance surprisingly relevant.

At the very least, it's well acted and interesting! At its best moments, it says something wonderful about the way people think when they are burdened with emotions.

For other strongly romantic movies, be sure to check out my reviews of:
One Day
Kama Sutra: A Tale Of Love
Friends With Benefits

7.5/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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