Directed by Sean Penn

Starring Emile Hirsch, Hal Holbrook

Into the Wild is based on the true story of Chris McCandless, a college graduate from a posh family who abandons his privileged existence for a life of hitchhiking, living off the land, and go-with-the-flow spirituality. He sends his life savings to OxFam, scissors his credit cards, and burns his identification. He’s reborn as “Alexander Supertramp;” lone wanderer of the American landscape.

Chris is an intelligent and earnest young man. Sick of modern civilization and its crass materialism (he rejects his parents’ offer of a new car as a graduation present), he finds inspiration in the pages of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Jack London. The holy grail of his quest for spiritual enlightenment is Alaska, a place where he can be alone to “just be out there in it. You know, big mountains, rivers, sky, game. Just be out there in it, you know? In the wild.”

Along the way, Chris encounters a series of people who help and encourage him in his goal. They become like an adoptive family; replacements of the damaged family he was born into. Indeed, as the film progresses, it becomes clear that Chris’ relentless pursuit of a new identity in an empty landscape has as much to do with his broken family life as with naïve idealism. As the audience gains insight into the trauma of his childhood—the lies, the deceitfulness, the abuse, and the rancor—his rejection of worldly things begins to look more and more like a sadistic revenge on the parents who poisoned his childhood. He takes off “into the wild” to get away from human contact without ever telling his family what he’s done or where he’s going.

Sean Penn’s lyrical and intimate directing style owes a debt to Terrence Malick, who directed Penn in The Thin Red Line. The lush images of sunsets, soaring birds, and falling water seem to reinforce Chris’ Romantic vision of man’s spiritual relationship to nature—the movie even opens with a quote from Byron—and when Chris says, “You don’t need human relationships to be happy, God has placed it all around us,” you wonder if Penn perhaps endorses this reductive view of life.

Then something happens in the second half of the film that casts Chris’s journey in a new light. In the final chapter of the movie (Penn, adapting the screenplay from Jon Krakauer’s book, structures it like his source material) Chris meets Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook), a retired Army man and devout Catholic. They develop a quiet, unassuming friendship based on sympathy and understanding. Ron, having heard of Chris’ family troubles, tells him: “When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.” This chapter of the film is titled: “The Getting of Wisdom.”

The tragedy of Into the Wild is that Chris refuses the grace offered through the relationship with Ron, whose life of hope and love is the true holy grail of spiritual enlightenment, not Alaska. Ron invites Chris to stay with him as an adopted grandson, but Chris, in his restlessness, rejects the kindly old man’s offer and continues on his way to the vast emptiness of Alaska.

But Ron’s vision of life as forgiveness and love returns to Chris in his loneliness and isolation in the wilderness. In his mind’s eye, Chris sees his joyful return to his family, embracing them in the life-giving love made possible by forgiveness. In his mind, he asks them: “What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?” He sees the clouds parting and God’s light shining on him in his stricken loneliness.

There he remains, sick and starving in the Alaskan wilderness, “trapped in the wild” as he writes in his journal. His final insight is scribbled into the margins of his tattered copy of Tolstoy: “Happiness is only real when shared.”

Adventure, Drama | 1 Comment »

Directed by Ken Loach

Starring Cillian Murphy and Liam Cunningham

‘Twas hard the woeful words to frame to break the ties that bound us. But harder still to bear the shame of foreign chains around us. And so I said, “The mountain glen I’ll seek at morning early.

And join the bold united men, while soft winds shake the barley.”

The rugged, rocky wilderness of County Cork backdrops scenes of sudden violence and ambush. It’s 1920 in Ireland, and a rag-tag band of freedom fighters are hell-bent on expelling the British from their Emerald Isle. It’s no wonder; early scenes in the film show the “Black-and-Tans” (British soldiers) treating the Irish natives as something less than human.

Cillian Murphy stars as Damien O’Donovan, an intelligent and earnest young man ready to leave Ireland to study medicine at a London hospital. But when Black & Tan bullying turns into mindless murder, the tragedy is a catalyst for the county’s young men, including Damien and his older brother, Teddy. They decide to organize a resistance to the British occupation, relying on guerilla tactics to surprise the better-trained, better-equipped British.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley won the coveted Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, arguably the most prestigious award bestowed by the high priests of international cinema. They chose a worthy, sober-minded film; the kind that one approaches with respect rather than love.

The director, Ken Loach, has no interest in appealing to your emotions. There is no grandstanding in the film; no mawkish tugs on your heartstrings. There are no picture-postcard landscapes, lyrical set-pieces, or stirring action scenes. The music, mood, and color palette of the film are muted, earthy, unvarnished. The shoot-outs between the IRA and the British are deliberately clumsy, confusing, and strangely intimate. When an Irishman falls, he’s someone every fighter knew by name, may have known their whole lives.

Just as he refuses to supply formulaic action scenes, Loach also refuses easy answers, pat themes. Loach frames the larger questions of the conflict within a family drama. Damien and Teddy, blood brothers-in-arms who had fought together for the same free Ireland, eventually diverge in their ideology. The Treaty of 1921 called for a truce between Britain and Ireland with the establishment of the Irish Free State, which remained nonetheless a dominion of the British Empire. Teddy, a politician, supports the treaty as the first small but necessary step towards an entirely independent Ireland. Damien, a purist, believes the treaty to be a compromise, an insult to everything Irish soldiers fought and died for.

Which brother is correct? The defining moment for Damien already happened earlier in the film. On an isolated windswept heath, Damien executes a fellow Irishman, a young stableboy who had betrayed Teddy to the British out of fear for his family’s safety. Murphy does brilliant work in this scene as ideology battles humanism. “Have you said your prayers?” he asks the boy, his voice trembling with fear for his own compromised humanity.

Damien’s absolutist belief in freeing Ireland from British rule seems rooted in this moment. From that decision on, the sensitive young man who had wanted to heal others has to justify to himself that the Cause was above the life of a fear-stricken boy. No compromises with the British could allow that to be true. Murphy was the right choice for the part; with his icy blue eyes and chiseled cheekbones, he has the ascetic intensity of a man marked for martyrdom.

Later Damien must tell the mother of the boy what he did to her son. She insists that Damien to take him to the grave. They walk for six hours in silence. Once arrived, she lays flowers and a cross on the grave and tells Damien, “I never want to see your face again.”

Naturally any film set in Ireland circa 1920 is shot-through with Catholicism, but Loach—a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist—is less interested in religion than in the socio-economic needs that drive the revolution. There are cosmetic nods to the characters’ faith, such as the sign-of-the-cross over a fallen comrade, but religion for the most part remains in the background.

Nonetheless, The Wind that Shakes the Barley raises difficult and necessary questions about the nature of political ideology in a human context. Loach has been accused in the past of using his films as unsubtle vehicles for his socialist agenda. Not having seen his other films, I couldn’t comment on his oeuvre, but this particular film struck me as essentially humanistic. Consider the anecdote Damian relates about the mother of the boy he killed. And then consider the last line of the movie. Loach is not afraid to make clear the tragic human cost of pitiless political purity.

USCCB rating: A-III – Adults only

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Drama, Historical | No Comments »

Directed by Andrew Dominik

Starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck

Brad Pitt, international superstar, steps into the spurs of Jesse James, the notorious outlaw who once rivaled Mark Twain for title of World’s Most Famous American. Jesse James was the stuff of tall-tales, his gang’s goings-on grist for the myth mill. But don’t expect any showdowns, shootouts, or cops & robber chases from this revisionist Western. Adapted from Catholic novelist Ron Hansen’s book of the same name, Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a snail-paced psychological drama—heavy on the psychology, light on the drama.

The elements are all in place for a good, possibly great, movie: spare, poetic dialogue delivered by well-cast actors (always nice to see Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, and the especially excellent Garret Dillahunt); lyrical, atmospheric cinematography by Oscar-nominated Roger Deakins; evocative soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis; and an interesting story featuring larger-than-life characters and melancholic themes.

So why do the elements not combine to make a great movie? There’s probably a long way of answering that question and a short way. Unlike the movie, I’ll opt for the shorter route. At two hours and forty minutes, Assassination is as slow as molasses in January. Though meditatively paced, it’s never clear what exactly the filmmakers are meditating on. America’s unhealthy obsession with outlaws? The exacting price of fame and notoriety? The disillusionment of hero-worship? The nature of betrayal? The complicated motivations and meanings behind an apparent act of cowardice?

Andrew Dominik, directing only his second film, never settles on a consistent tone. He relies on voice-over narration lifted whole cloth from Hansen’s book—a concession, in a way, to the fact that he never solves the problem of how to make his characters’ interior struggles visually dramatic. The narrator informs us what the characters are thinking as we watch them stare pensively out a window or across a windswept plain.

If anything, the movie aims to complicate its own apparently straightforward title. The “Coward Robert Ford,” like Mark David Chapman (John Lennon’s assassin) killed his object of worship. Though biblical parallels to Judas might spring to mind (James is even buried on Good Friday), Jesse James is no JC. Bob Ford’s fixation is more reminiscent of Tom Ripley’s homoerotic obsession with wealthy dilettante Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley; both characters seem unfinished, socially inept, and incomplete without someone to look up to. Jesse James tells Ford, “I don’t know if you want to be like me, or if you want to be me.”

Pitt is an interesting choice for the part of Jesse James. Casting a world-famous celebrity—who so many people want to be like or to just be—as the kind of outlaw who inspired Robert Ford’s dangerously unstable brand of hero-worship, is a clever bit of meta-commentary. But the idea is more effective in the abstract than in the execution. Pitt lacks the intensity that makes you believe Jesse James murdered seventeen people. The movie as a whole would have benefited from the fierceness and unpredictability of an actor like Daniel Craig, whose piercing blue eyes can seem challenging, ruthless, and devoid of pity, including self-pity.

Pitt does creditable work, and I can’t fault him for tackling challenging, un-Hollywood material. He plays James as careworn, weary; perhaps tired of living up to his own outsized reputation. Either that or he’s coasting. It’s difficult to tell. The characters that satellite James are supposed to be terrified of him, living in constant fear of his wrath or his suspicion or his vengeance. Pitt does not seem dangerous. He carries himself with the same stoner lassitude that has characterized his performances of late. It is by no means a bad performance, just a predictable one, where another actor might have tapped a deeper vein of anger, cruelty, and pathos.

The movie merited its two Oscar nominations: Roger Deakins for his atmospheric cinematography and Casey Affleck for his portrayal of Bob Ford, the sycophant from hell. Affleck, unlike Pitt, is able to manifest his character’s pained, insecure interior life through a performance eloquent with nervous mannerisms, unconvincing affectations, empty smiles, and crippling social awkwardness. Ford’s story is a sad one, worth telling, and no doubt when Hansen came across it in the history books he felt that he couldn’t improve on the truth. Perhaps Dominik felt like he couldn’t improve on his source material—you can just about read the book in the same amount of time it takes to watch the movie.

USCCB Rating: A-III — Adults

Drama, Westerns | 1 Comment »