Last week saw the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and for many moviegoers, that’s all that matters this holiday season. But for the remaining minority, rest assured that not every single screen at every single theater will be showing the Tolkien epic; it just seems that way. Here, then, are six other year-end titles that can be enjoyed — or not — in local movie houses.
Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain places a sweeping romance against the backdrop of a major feud that tore a nation apart. Yet this is one of those few times when even pacifists might prefer that the characters refrain from making love, not war. That’s because this major Oscar bait is least compelling when it focuses on the fluttering hearts of its protagonists, a Confederate soldier and the woman he left behind.
For those fine-tuned to its swoony rhythms, Minghella’s The English Patient was a gorgeous, all-encompassing love story, so the fault here may not rest with his efforts as writer-director as much as on the chemistry between the picture’s perfectly sculpted leads. Individually, the performances by Jude Law and Nicole Kidman are fine (though I still prefer her atypical turn in the recent flop The Human Stain), yet their mutual scenes deliver little kick — physically, they seem as compatible as matching His and Her towels, yet the only heat generated during their sequences together comes from candles lighting up the background.
Fortunately, most of the movie keeps the two characters apart, with wounded soldier Inman (Law) electing to ditch the war altogether and make his way back to his North Carolina hometown, where he can be reunited with prim and proper Ada (Kidman). Yet Inman’s trek back to the Blue Ridge Mountains (filmed in Romania rather than NC) is slowed by his encounters with various colorful characters — a randy preacher (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a lonely widow (Natalie Portman) — and these entertaining interludes spark the picture.
So, too, do the sequences back home, as naive, sheltered Ada receives valuable lessons in survival from a human firecracker named Rudy, a down-to-earth pioneer woman who’s no shrinking violet when it comes to plowing fields or snapping roosters’ necks. Renee Zellweger plays Rudy like a person strung out on eight pots of coffee and two hours of sleep, and it’s her tremendous performance — forceful, passionate, funny — that cuts through the movie’s occasional sheen of stuffy self-importance. She keeps this Mountain from deteriorating into a molehill of unrelenting melancholy.
There may have been better individual performances delivered during 2003 (though not many), but as far as tag-team efforts are concerned, there’s no touching Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley in House of Sand and Fog. Even though the pair don’t share that many scenes together, the psychological give-and-take dynamic that binds their characters is so potent, their combined presence is felt even when one or both of them are off the screen.
Based on the best-selling novel by Andre Dubus III, this gripping drama from debuting director Vadim Perelman (a name to watch) casts Connelly as Kathy Nicolo, a recovering drug addict who, because she doesn’t regularly check her mail (thereby missing a bill for a $500 property tax), ends up losing her house. Placed on the market for public auction, it’s immediately snatched up by Massoud Behrani (Kingsley), an Iranian refugee trying to make a better life for himself, his wife (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and their teenage son (Jonathan Ahdout). Kathy wants her house back, Behrani refuses to relinquish it, and the movie’s chess game is set.
But House of Sand and Fog has more on its mind than standard thrills. Among other issues, the movie offers a scathing indictment of an American bureaucratic system that’s become so rigid that it encourages its citizens to trample all over each other in an effort to make their own lives more palatable. Racism rears its head in different forms, and the ideal of the American Dream is bastardized beyond recognition.
The picture’s greatest strength, however, is the way it shifts our loyalties from one character to the next, never allowing us to view either Kathy or Behrani as a villain (or hero) for too long. It’s a brave stance to take, and one that wouldn’t have worked without the magnetic turns by its two shining stars.
An unlikely cross between Dead Poets Society and The Stepford Wives, Mona Lisa Smile belongs to what I like to call the Monday Morning Quarterback class of film. Wielding its knowledge of developing history like a baseball bat, this sort of movie takes the slogan about hindsight being 20/20 to the extreme, using present-day sensibilities to smugly tsk-tsk the attitudes of past eras.
Thus we get thoroughly modern Julia Roberts as an independent, open-minded, bohemian art teacher (we automatically know she’s radical because she’s from — gasp! — California) who arrives at Massachusetts’ Wellesley College in 1953, ready to change the world to the chorus of “Carpe Diems.” Under the impression that she’ll be teaching young women how to take their rightful place in society (read: the workplace), she’s instead shocked to learn that, despite their obvious intelligence, virtually all of her young students plan to never use their education, opting instead to get married, raise children, and have dinner promptly on the table every night for their hardworking husbands.
Naturally, it’s up to Saint Julia to save the stuffy college from itself, by emphasizing contempo artists over the old masters in her classroom sessions, downing shots at the local bar while the other female profs sit in front of the tube watching I Love Lucy, and flaunting her single-woman status since none of the men she loves and leaves can possibly match her sheer fabulousness for long. And like Mr. Chips, Miss Jean Brodie and Robin Williams before her, she’s ready to mold those impressionable young minds, whether they belong to the conflicted intellectual (Julia Stiles), the rich-bitch conformist (Kirsten Dunst), the self-pitying wallflower (Ginnifer Goodwin) or the wise-cracking nymphomaniac (Maggie Gyllenhaal, clearly having the most fun).
Roberts, unfortunately, is a bundle of contemporary tics and mannerisms, as out of place in the movie’s 50s setting as Bill O’Reilly would be at a Marilyn Manson concert. Then again, almost everything feels artificial in this threadbare gathering of rigid archetypes and warmed-over speeches. Roberts’ character may be presented as a breath of fresh air, but the movie surrounding her is the cinematic equivalent of halitosis.
Would the critical darling Memento have been nearly as acclaimed had its story not been told in reverse order? Would The Usual Suspects have pulled the wool over so many viewers’ eyes if it hadn’t jumped around between flashbacks and the present? Is this popular form of moviemaking, the ability to tell stories in non-linear fashion, a sign of genius or a sign of desperation on the parts of the filmmakers?
Advocates and adversaries alike can probably debate this for hours, but in the meantime, here’s 21 Grams to serve as the latest piece of evidence in the case. Played straight, the movie might come across as a dour version of Return to Me, that dopey film in which Minnie Driver ends up with the heart of David Duchovny’s dead wife. But by whiplashing between past and present, writer-director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (making his first English-language film following the success of his Oscar-nominated Amores Perros) has fashioned an absorbing drama that’s as much about loneliness, retribution and redemption as it is about matters of the (literal) heart.
Much of the movie’s potency comes from audience members being allowed to slowly connect its pieces — many of which seemingly don’t fit until it all comes together — so suffice it to say that the story centers on three individuals — a gloomy college professor (Sean Penn), a suburban mom (Naomi Watts) and a born-again ex-convict (Benicio Del Toro) — whose lives are all affected by the same car crash. As narrative fragments bombard us and the storyline circles back on itself repeatedly, it quickly becomes apparent that the melodramatics are merely a necessity to forward the movie’s exploration of the manner in which life and death are constantly stepping on each other’s toes.
Penn’s work here is arguably even more powerful than his recent turn in Mystic River, while Del Toro impressively demonstrates that his Oscar win for Traffic wasn’t a fluke. Yet it’s Watts who’s most commanding, unleashing a whirlwind of emotion as a former party girl whose complete transformation into a model of upper-middle-class respectability is cruelly upended by a loss that leaves her trapped in her own purgatory. Between Mulholland Drive and now this, it’s clear that Watts at least deserves a crack at the scripts that real-life best friend Nicole Kidman is constantly being handed on a silver platter.
It’s time to reveal my own Grinch-like secret regarding popular children’s entertainment: I’ve never been a big fan of Peter Pan in any of its numerous incarnations, including the 1953 Disney cartoon version that’s regularly described these days as a “masterpiece” (and the less said about Hook, the better).
So imagine my surprise as I fell victim to the rapturous spell of the new live-action Peter Pan, which rivals A Little Princess and The Secret Garden as a prime example of bringing artistry and adult sensibilities to a family project without placing it out of reach of the younger audience members.
Certainly, the small fry will enjoy watching Peter Pan (Jeremy Sumpter) sailing through the air or the slapstick shenanigans involving either Tinkerbell (Swimming Pool‘s Ludivine Sagnier) or Nana the nanny dog. But this PG-rated adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s original tale often adopts a darker tone that may cause some parents to shuffle uncomfortably in their seats. The sense of burgeoning sexuality between pre-teens Peter and Wendy Darling (newcomer Rachel Hurd-Wood) has never before been this pronounced, while the dastardly Captain Hook (Jason Isaacs) isn’t presented as a buffoon as much as a cunning warrior with an especially sadistic bent (he kills his own crew members with wanton disregard). And having the same actor play both Hook and Wendy’s father adds a Freudian subtext that perhaps even its makers didn’t intend — at least not to the degree exhibited on-screen.
Kids, of course, won’t pick up on these psychological subtleties, so the adults should relax and enjoy the eye-popping world that director P.J. Hogan and his team have created. The cinematography by Donald M. McAlpine (Moulin Rouge) and sets by Roger Ford (Babe) deserve serious award consideration, immersing us in a dream state in which mermaids are depicted as dangerous sirens and even the pirate ship’s token parrot sports a peg leg.
For a film about a boy who refuses to grow up, this Peter Pan proves to be one of the year’s more mature endeavors.
The original version of Cheaper By the Dozen, a sizable hit in 1950, isn’t readily available on video (and has yet to be released on DVD), so side-by-side comparisons between that film and the current remake are momentarily out of the question. Yet something inside me — call it my sixth sense for cinematic sacrilege — tells me that the 1950 model didn’t feel compelled to include a sequence in which a fat kid slips in the puddle of puke that his brother produced moments earlier in the hallway.
Sure, it’s a gut-buster for the under-12 set, and had the movie limited its idiocy to merely including yuck-o moments like this one to appease the crusty-snot-noses in the audience, it might have been mildly tolerable. But this dirty Dozen is incompetent at every turn and shameless on every level, with its heartwarming moments more likely to cause heartburn and its comedic bits about as funny as a mad hornet in the mouth. And the movie’s morals — that there are no compromises in life, and that a parent’s happiness means absolutely nothing — may even have family advocates raising their eyebrows.
As the dad forced to baby-sit a houseful of kids while Mom (Bonnie Hunt) tries to make it as an author, Steve Martin continues to fritter away a once vibrant career. Lizzie McGuire star Hilary Duff appears as a daughter who acts, talks and walks just like, well, Lizzie McGuire. And the film’s writer (Sam Harper) and director (Shawn Levy) have enlisted their overexposed Just Married star, Ashton Kutcher, to appear unbilled as an annoying model-actor who realizes his looks are his meal ticket and who even admits that he has no acting talent whatsoever.
Sometimes they make it too easy.
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2003.
