Movie Review: "The November Man"

Bittersweet November

By Rainey Wetnight

“WHAT DO YOU DO?” -Pierce Brosnan as Peter Devereaux, shouting at his fellow covert agent

Welcome to the grown-up world, Mister Bond. You’ll still find malevolence, mayhem, and gore galore, but no longer will any of your female conquests bear suggestive names revealing their actual purpose. Along with your daily doses of cranial junk food - death, fear and copulation - you’re going to have to choke down vegetables of virtue, moralizing as you’re murdering. Preferably afterward, but you know what I mean.

I am speaking, of course, to you, Pierce Brosnan. You’ve played the iconic role of 007 in four films. Most of them were unintentionally hilarious. We audience members could be forgiven for grinning at your chiseled face being superimposed upon stunt doubles’ heads through the subtle wonders of CGI. As you told the world how you liked your martinis, over and over, we couldn’t help but roll our eyes like you’d roll an olive across a bar counter. We even tried to hide our guffaws until after the ending line in Goldeneye about “debriefing each other”. Now there’s no more time for monkey business. You’re in a different zoo.

Instead of a name pronounceable in macho, monosyllabic grunts, you’re going to have to grapple with the moniker “Peter Devereaux”, coined by Bill Granger. I’m sure you know how to pronounce that first name, but the last one might be a bit of a stretch. Hint: It doesn’t rhyme with “sex”, although there’s plenty of it. I am also sorry to inform you, but the main scene is between your young rival David Mason (Luke Bracey) and a nightclub-loving blonde named Sarah (Eliza Taylor). For you, there’s Alice Fournier (lovely Bond girl Olga Kurylenko). Look, but don’t touch. That would almost be pedophilia at your age, so keep it zipped.

Your present plot is - well, a naturally-convoluted series of plots. Who are the good guys, the bad guys, the good bad guys, and the bad good guys? Add to that some raucous QueasyCam™ car chases, rear-kicking explosions, and gun battles that make those in Treasure of the Sierra Madre look like child’s play. If you’re looking for depth of character a la your role in Remember Me, remember you’re the November Man. ‘When you pass through, nothing lives.’ Which makes me puzzled: what’s up with the ending, then?

Let me be frank with you for a moment. This movie is schizophrenically unsure of what it wants to be, as RogerEbert.com critic Matt Zoller Seitz has so clearly pointed out. If it were a video game, one moment it would be Grand Theft Auto V, and the next moment Mass Effect. I once read that there were only two kinds of plots in the whole world: those of forza and forda, or body and mind. If you try to mix them up, audiences usually get confused, and the less they’ll want to see of one or the other. Nine times out of ten, what they’re looking for is much less mind (a la Agent Hanley, played by Bill Smitrovich) and much more body (Kurylenko). The issues presented in The November Man are very salient, and the villains’ raisons d’etre more believable than the ones in any of your Bond movies. However, I would have preferred that you turn down the volume of blood and turn up the intrigue, a la Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Gary Oldman.

The character that had me the most interested in your latest picture is the one with the least screen time: Natalia Ulanova, played by Caterina Scorsone. She’s the reason why you do what you do, or why Peter Devereaux does what he does. If it weren’t for Natalia, then you wouldn’t be trying to off David Mason as he tries to boff his latest girl (What was her name again? Remember, man?) “WHAT DO YOU DO?” you bellow after you yourself do something beyond despicable. I almost stopped rooting for you at that point. Then I recalled that you’re the…hero?…and you wouldn’t (would?) stoop so low. I understood perfectly.

In closing, Mr. Brosnan, you’ve earned the right to gravity - and gravitas - through your silver hair.

Embrace it. Let this bittersweet November be a draw, half-win, half-loss, in your considerable career.

RAINEY’S RATING: 3 STARS

Movie Review: "The Master Builder" (1958)

Master Builder, Master Destroyer

By Rainey Wetnight

“Homes for human beings…” -Donald Wolfit as Halvard Solness, on what he designs 

In high school, I had a thing for Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. While my classmates devoured the latest teen magazines and YA novels, I slowly savored A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler. I can’t recall reading A Master Builder back then, though, and in retrospect I’m glad. To understand this master work and what makes it tick, it takes a lot more maturity than my sixteen-year-old mind could have mustered. It centers around several opposing themes: youth versus age, desire versus duty, light versus darkness, and life versus death. Which characters embody which concepts, and at which times during the play? I have chosen to review the 1958 made-for-television version, distributed by BBC Films and 2 Entertain.

Halvard Solness (Donald Wolfit) is a man on a mission. Just as driven as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Solness’ goal is to slay the great white whale of “the younger generation”. The eponymous middle-aged architect is afraid that one day youth will replace him, crying “Make room! Make room!” Therefore, he has practically enslaved his former employer Knut Brovik, Brovik’s young but slightly-stooped son Ragnar, and his bookkeeper mistress, Brovik’s niece Kaia (Catherine Lacey). Ragnar has definite talent, but Solness yearns to keep him under tight control. Kaia yearns for Solness, even though she and Ragnar are engaged. Knut yearns to see his son branch out and build on his own, although he fears this won’t happen before illness overcomes him. At the beginning of the movie, he begs Solness to let Ragnar go. “Am I to die in such poverty?” he rasps. To which the Master Builder replies: “You must die as best you can.”

Also dead are Solness’ wife Aline, in a spiritual sense, and the two twin boys they once had. Rather than consider this dire misfortune to be what it is, he believes it’s the source of his remarkable luck in business. Once their former residence, Aline’s ancestral home, is consumed in a fire, the Builder is free to parcel out the land and build “happy homes, [for a] mother, father, and a troop of children” - the ones he lacks. His own house is a dark mausoleum, a monument to the past, with no less than three (!) separate nurseries. Who will occupy them now? Enter Hilda Wangel (Mai Zetterling), a lovely sprite of twenty-four who knew both Solness and Aline ten years before. She appears out of nowhere, dead broke and seeking lodging.

Why has Hilda returned after all this time? What does she want from Solness, and what is she prepared to take from his family? Those are the central questions of the play, and I won’t spoil it entirely. I’d much rather explain why, two centuries later, The Master Builder casts a spell over those who cherish drama.

This play is, first and foremost, a character study. All of the explosions and special effects are the ones secretly churning in the human heart, searing everyone they touch once they boil over. It’s also about our longing to relive and correct the past, especially if it contains tragedies we’d rather try to hide. Solness’ struggle is our own, on a profound level. As he attempts to build high towers and “castles in the air”, so do we. He is no longer satisfied with what he promised (and what he shouted at God) that he would do. He craves much loftier things, even though he’s now terrified to glance down from a second-floor balcony.

However, what separates the Builder from most of the rest of us is the true source of his strength. It’s most clearly expressed in his greatest delusion of grandeur. Solness believes that he is one of a very few “special people” who can cause events to happen if they simply wish hard enough. (Did he write the massively popular self-help book The Secret two hundred years in advance?) He calls “helpers and servers” to him, uses them, and then discards them like apple cores. Indeed, one can almost say that he consumes them, as one consumes food, attributing their positive qualities to himself while projecting his own negative qualities onto them. He is a Narcissus in love with his own reflection, and the Impossible Dream. There is nothing he would not do for what he wants, and for the people he supposedly loves.

Solness is a master destroyer, a false Odin - god of the sun - taking human sacrifices unto himself.

RAINEY’S RATING: 4 STARS

Movie Review: "Jack"

Jack Be Simple

By Rainey Wetnight

“It’s too soon! It’s too soon!” -Diane Lane as Karen Powell, “Jack’s” mother

It’s only fitting that an absurd fable about a ten-year-old boy in a forty-year-old-man’s (Robin Williams’) body begins with an entourage dressed as the cast of the Wizard of Oz in the delivery room. “Jack’s” mother (Diane Lane) is the Wicked Witch of the East with ruby slippers; his father (Brian Kerwin) is a tearful Tin Man. “Don’t rust up on me now!” Lane exults as her baby boy is born seven months early. It is, perhaps, the funniest line in the whole movie. Certainly, his condition isn’t meant to be funny, but pitiful.

So, what exactly is wrong with Jack? He doesn’t have progeria, as a doctor explains early-on in the film, which is “devastating to the child”. Rather, his cells mature at four times the normal human rate, but he’s otherwise healthy. Why being so different from his peers would not be devastating to him is just as much a mystery as his main trait, and indeed, Jack is viewed as a monster by some curious neighborhood kids. Nevertheless, he’s just as happy-go-lucky as any typical ten-year-old boy, and as distracted. His tutor, Mr. Woodruff (Bill Cosby) comes to Jack’s house every day to teach him, but Jack wants to go to regular school instead. “We’ve seen how people react,” his mother says in defense of keeping him at home, “and we don’t want Jack to have to face that.” What Jack must face, of course, is other people (kids and adults) looking at him like he’s a child molester instead of a child - or, in this case, a man with a child’s mind.

So he goes off to school. He wakes up late, in his blue print pajamas. His mom makes him a lunchbox. He has a rather dorky plaid shirt and a backpack that’s half a size too small for him. The only differences are that Jack has to shave and his dad tells him he can come home any time he wants to, a luxury that ordinary kids lack but often wish they had. His new fifth-grade teacher, Miss Marquez (Jennifer Lopez) is too gorgeous for her own good. Let’s face it - a romance between her and Jack would technically be pedophilia. Knowing this, she loops her arm through his and introduces him to the rest of her class just as if he were a child-sized new student. Unfortunately he’s not, and promptly tips over in his child-sized desk.

Such sophomoric hi-jinks are only the beginning of Jack’s journey through the world of middle school. His shoelaces come untied. He doesn’t realize that he can easily navigate the balance-beam ledge. The other kids laugh, point and stare. “He’s probably planning on kicking our butts or something,” one neighbor boy with glasses says. If only, but this is a kids’ movie, and Robin Williams can’t unleash Jack’s inner beast. Instead, he gets poked with a long stick by two snooty little girls and ignored by the basketball team. Will he have his revenge a la Carrie, or eventually win them over? Even a ten-year-old knows the outcome.

The trouble with this movie is not Robin Williams, or even director Francis Ford Coppola. It’s the inane plot, flat characterization, toilet humor, vapid dialogue, and utter lack of insight into Jack’s character - until he starts getting gray hair. By then, the poignant fear he feels at growing truly old is too little, too late.

What are we supposed to learn from Jack? Accept those who are different? Yes, but why couldn’t Coppola have directed a movie about a real person with a real disability instead? Live life to the fullest? Yes, but why couldn’t Robin Williams have learned that lesson as a forty-year-old man in mind and body? Jack’s graduation speech is supposed to sum everything up, but the entire movie Dead Poets Society does the exact same thing in a much better way over the course of its running time than this movie does. Jack is insulting on so many levels, and to so many kinds of people, that it’s a wonder it was ever made.

I’d like to close this review with a modified Mother Goose nursery rhyme:

Jack be simple, with such schtick,
Jack’s so dumb that it makes me sick.

The late, great Robin Williams deserved better for bringing out the wishful, wondering kid in all of us.

Robin Williams
1951-2014