As World Middleweight Boxing Champion Billy Hope in the new film Southpaw Jake Gyllenhaal learned a thing or two about anger. He plays a man ruled by fury who must learn to fight with his head, not just his fists.
“That journey was really interesting for me,” says Gyllenhaal, “the idea that I could explore that in my own anger. Sometimes things pop up, things that could be very destructive in my own life, like my own anger and I think, ‘Man, if I was only curious about this feeling instead of letting it kind of control me. If I could only stop and say, ‘What is that?’
“I saw this Australian comedian talking about gun control and he was saying, ‘Everyone should own a musket because by the time you finish putting the powder in and everything it takes a minute-and-a-half and by the time a minute-and-a-half has passed [the anger is gone] and you’re like, ‘You’re not a bad guy. It’s fine.’
Gyllenhaal says studying the character set him on a “journey about being curious about myself,” which seems counterintuitive. Doesn’t the actor inform the character?
“I think the experience of preparing for a role, meeting people along the way while you’re preparing for a role and the experience of that is what I learn from. It is really that that teaches me. The people I spend time with, the accumulation, that’s what I learn from. I don’t think I bring my own experience yet to a role. Right now my life is about learning from other people.”
One revelation from his time inhabiting Billy Hope’s persona was insight to what made Billy tick—fear.
“Billy is a really scared character who is fronting in some ways to present himself in a certain way. I think fear is a great motivator for him. That was a big thing. I think the idea of being tough is also about admitting your fears.”
The thirty-four-year-old actor certainly has no fear when choosing roles. From the extreme weight loss of Nightcrawler to Southpaw’s physical transformation—he gained 15 lbs of sheer muscle—Gyllenhaal is curating a challenging and interesting resume.
“I think the people I admire as artists are the people who really listen to themselves even if it is to the detriment of what people might consider success. I’d rather be myself and do what I love than listen to someone else and follow that role and be unhappy.”
I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising that a movie about a boxer’s fall from grace and subsequent redemption are handled in a heavy handed way. “Southpaw,” starring an almost impossibly pumped up Jake Gyllenhaal as a pugilist who goes from rags to riches to rages to… well, there will be no spoilers here, but in terms of the plot there are fewer surprises here than in a Mike Tyson first round knock out.
Gyllenhaal is Billy Hope, a World Middleweight Boxing Champion with a 43 to 0 undefeated record. He’s wealthy, has a daughter (Oona Laurence) he dotes on and a loving wife (Rachel McAdams) who has been with him all the way, from the Hell’s Kitchen orphanage they grew up in to ringside at Madison Square Gardens on the night of his biggest success. As one ringside announcer says, “it’s only a few blocks, but it’s really a million miles.”
Billy is the prototypical inarticulate brute with a heart of gold, who falls apart when tragedy KO’s his life, personally and professionally. Newspapers call him The Great White Dope but with everything gone—his friends, trainer, money and even his daughter—he pulls himself together the only way he knows how—in the ring. At his side is Tick Willis (Forest Whitaker), the Zen master owner of a run down gym, who teaches him boxing is not about fists, its about the mind.
“Southpaw” doesn’t have the epic feel of “Raging Bull.” Like the Martin Scorsese classic it has elements of human tragedy, but unlike Jake LaMotta’s story it is primarily interested in the more uplifting underdog and redemptive aspects of the story. The fall from grace is so extreme—one day he’s king of the world, the next he’s MC Hammer—that elements of melodrama are bound to sneak in, undermining what could have been a serious look at what happens when life throws a few below the belt punches your way.
Like it’s main character, the story is lightweight, but still packs a punch mainly thanks to Gyllenhaal’s gritty performance. Physically he’s a beast, jacked to an inch of his life, muscles bulging and veins popping. Mentally he’s volatile, a man who grew up fists first but who must learn to use his head and not just his body. Gyllenhaal does a great job of walking us through Billy’s rehabilitation, and while he’s still a bruiser at the end of the film, he’s an evolved one, much different than the person we met at the beginning of the film.
McAdams brings strength and warmth to the role of Billy’s soulmate Maureen. In the early part of the film she is Billy’s humanity, a living, breathing monument to all that is good in him and her. It’s a big weight to carry and McAdams nails it. Giving the film heart is Laurence. As the daughter who feels the severe repercussions of Billy’s ups and downs she is neither precious or just there to be the kid sidekick.
Whitaker, as the cosmic fight trainer, stretches credulity from scene to scene. He’s a fine actor but lines like, “You gotta let her go through her thing and not think your thing is her thing,” are a mouthful.
“Southpaw” is a solid sports redemption movie but lacks the punching power to be taken as seriously as “Raging Bull.”
“Death Wish,” the Charles Bronson revenge drama, painted its main character as a vigilante hero, someone who evened the score when the police couldn’t.
“Prisoners,” a new child abduction drama starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Terrence Howard, isn’t as cut and dried. It asks the question, How far would you go to get the information you need to protect your family?
The story is fairly simple. Best friends Keller and Grace Dover (Jackman and Maria Bello), Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) and their kids spend Thanksgiving together. After dinner the youngest members of the family, Anna Dover (Erin Gerasimovich) and Joy Birch (Kyla Drew Simmons) go for a walk and never return.
Panicked, the family search the neighborhood and when they come up empty the police are called with a description of the girls and a suspicious RV that was seen in the area. The camper is racked down and Detective Loki (Gyllenhaal) arrests a suspect, Alex Jones (Paul Dano).
Keller is convinced the police have the right man and when Alex is released, he takes matters into his own hands. Kidnapping Jones, he tries to beat a confession out of him. When that doesn’t work his methods escalate.
There is a serial killer subplot woven into “Prisoners,” but it detracts from the core element that makes the movie interesting. Jackman brings the full weight of Keller’s anguish to the screen, and his performance carries with it the moral dilemma of the movie. The serial killer element feels tacked on, as though screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski felt he needed to up the tension with a “Criminal Minds” style plot twist.
It’s too bad, because the last hour—the movie clocks in at 150 minutes—feels unnecessary. The procedural elements is interesting until the red herrings start and the movie moves away from the ethical question that propelled the first half.
“Prisoners” is compelling stuff. At its heart it is a family drama with a twist. But as is, it almost feels like two movies.
Jarhead isn’t a typical war movie. If you’re expecting the sonic boom of Black Hawk Down and Platoon or the anti-war sentiment of All Quiet on the Western Front you’re in for a surprise. Rather than making a statement either for or against war, director Sam Mendes has crafted a bloodless, but emotionally charged character study about men who fight. Jarhead has elements of the great Hollywood war pictures—the drill sergeant seems cribbed from Full Metal Jacket, the arid desert setting from Three Kings, the cynicism from Catch 22—but instead of going for bombast, Mendes takes us inside the heads of the soldiers. Jake Gyllenhaal hands in another impressive performance in the lead role, while Jamie Foxx adds layers to the clichéd role of the hard-as-nails Marine, turning it into compelling viewing.
The lives of LAPD cops have been he stuff of TV shows and movies for years. So how do you lend some interest to the story of two South Central patrol cops? By not telling a story, that’s how.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña play Officers Taylor and Zavala, patrol cops in Los Angeles’s tough South Central neighborhood. A routine traffic stop turns into something bigger when they confiscate money and guns from a cartel member. “Be careful,” they’re warned by a senior officer, “You just tugged on the tail of a snake that’s going to turn around and bite you.”
“End of Watch” is all build up. The movie spends an hour-and-a-half introducing its characters, giving us a sense of the dynamic between Taylor and Zavala as they bust chops and solve crimes. We learn about the mundane work-a-day nature of policing (“Policing is all about comfortable footwear,” we’re told.) We also come to discover that these guys are trouble magnets. Not since Angela Landsbury in “Murder She Wrote” have fictional characters have such a knack for being where the crime is.
It takes a while to warm to the “story’s” episodic nature. Director David Ayers (who specializes in LA cop drams, having written “Training day,” “S.W.A.T.” and directed “Street Kings”) eschews traditional storytelling for character study. Through a loosely related series of scenes we learn about the sense of love, honor and loyalty shared by these cops. Once you allow yourself to be drawn into the performances and the chemistry of the leads, you’ll be sucked in straight through to the exciting conclusion.
The beginning is tough, however. The first half-hour is stagey. The having-the-character-film-part-of-the-movie thing has been done to death, and adds a level of artificiality to the movie that doesn’t need to be there. The Barf-O-Matic hand held camera work adds a sense of immediacy to the action scenes, but it’s overused and it is sometimes hard to tell what’s happening. Take out the wobbly cam and no one would miss it.
Also, it’s hard to discuss the end without being spoilerific, but let’s say the movie goes from jovial to gritty and then back to jovial again. I didn’t love it, but Hollywood seems to be allergic to tragic endings and Ayers found a way to circumvent that and stay true-ish to his gritty vision for the story.
Despite an unnecessary coda, “End of Watch” works because of the naturalistic performances and the climax.
Über producer Jerry Bruckheimer draws his inspiration from many places. He makes movies based on video games, amusement park rides, and toys. One day perhaps he’ll make one based on a bed spring, and you know what? It’ll be successful. The guy is genetically programmed to make movies that make money. His latest blockbuster-in-the-waiting is “The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” the action-adventure that hopes to make Jake Gyllenhaal (and his finely sculpted abs) the next Steve Reeves.
Based on the video game, the action packed story starts when Dastan is still a parkour practicing preteen peasant who out smarts the king’s guards and earns himself a spot in the royal household. Cut to many years later. Dastan is now a full grown man who looks a lot like “Brokeback Mountain” star Jake Gyllenhaal. He’s a bit on the wild side, but when he uses ancient firebombing techniques and slo mo to defeat enemy forces his reward is to be treated like a traitor and sent into exile. With the help of Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) and a crafty ostrich jockey (Alfred Molina) he might be able to prove his innocence and prevent the mystical Dagger of Time—releasing sand from the hilt of the knife turns back time and turns Dastan into a cool looking special effect—from falling into the wrong hands. Along the way there are double crosses, much videogame action and, of course, a love match. That Princess Tamina. Jake just can’t quit her.
This is the movie I’m sure Gyllenhaal’s management hopes does for him what “Pirates of the Caribbean” did for Johnny Depp, that is, get Bruckheimerized. Like he did for Will Smith, Nic Cage and Depp, all actors best known for doing risky character parts, Bruckheimer’s magic may turn him into household (although still difficult to spell) name. Will it work? Probably. Maybe. Who knows? Gyllenhaal is already a respected actor, and does what he can to emerge from this sword and sandal showdown with as much dignity intact as possible, but the movie and his character don’t have the same kind of verve that, say, Johnny Depp showed in the first “PotC.” Dastan is a big action role but aside from the odd emotional moment Gyllenhaal never really makes the role his own, in the way that Depp made Captain Jack Sparrow into a character that sold Halloween costumes and inspired the guy at the desk next to yours to do bad pirate impressions for weeks after seeing the movie. Savvy?
What it does have is lots of action. The camera NEVER stops moving and when “Prince of Persia”—the character and the movie—is flip, flop and flying it is campy good fun. Gyllenhaal is literally crawling the walls in a display of physical prowess (and some pretty cool parkour) that’ll make your eyeballs dance, but when the story goes into the Sands of Time Mythology ™, or should that be mumbi jumbo, it’ll make your previously watusi-ing eyeballs glaze over. The crazy time shifting folklore and hopelessly silly solution to the sands situation slows the movie down to a shuffle and is only saved by Sir Ben Kingsley’s eye-rolling pantomime.
“The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” is typical Bruckheimer bombast. It’s a huge movie with big battle scenes, a love story, a few laughs (some intentional, some not) and even a flock of ostriches. It has everything you want from a summer blockbuster except really memorable characters or a noteworthy story.
Proof debuted at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival and at the time I thought it had the potential to go on to become one of the hot movies for grown-ups to come out of the fest. Instead it was ignored on release, but now people have a chance to revisit the movie on DVD and check out the great performances by Gwyneth Paltrow as the daughter of a brilliant but mentally ill mathematician with Anthony Hopkins the father, Jake Gyllenhaal as the love interest and Hope Davis as her overbearing sister.
Based on the Broadway play, Proof –adapted for the screen by Arthur Miller’s daughter Rebecca—is the story of Catherine, the daughter of a brilliant but mentally ill mathematician who fears she may have inherited her father’s insanity. Complicating Catherine’s life are a domineering sister and a young math student who believes that he has found an important new mathematical proof in her father’s old papers. I think people assumed that this was a movie about mathematics—that it would be dry—but it is not. Proof is an absorbing drama about family, genius and self worth.
Rendition is a political thriller about the use of torture to obtain information that may, in the long run, save innocent lives. Starring Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard and Alan Arkin it is an even handed look at a sticky ideological question from Tsotsi director Gavin Hood.
American sweetheart Witherspoon plays Isabella El-Ibrahimi, the pregnant wife of an Egyptian-born chemical engineer who disappears while on a flight from South Africa, where he has been at a conference, to Washington, where he lives. Unbeknownst to Isabella her husband is suspected of involvement with an extremist group responsible for a Middle-Eastern suicide bombing and has been the subject of ‘extraordinary rendition,’ whereby suspected terrorists in the US can be sent, without the legal consent of their parent nations, to third country prisons to be clandestinely questioned and detained.
As she desperately tries to track her husband down with the help of her old friend Alan (Peter Sarsgaard), an aid of Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin), on the other side of the world a sad-eyed CIA analyst (Gyllenhaal) is developing moral questions as he becomes personally involved in El-Ibrahimi’s torture. In the middle of this mess is Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), the powerful intelligence agent who ordered the rendition.
There are a few moments in Rendition when a lesser director may have allowed the material to go off the deep end, but Hood keeps everything on track. It is a well balanced film that does something that most Hollywood films don’t do—it allows the audience to make up its own mind. When Streep’s character argues that information obtained by torture has saved thousands of lives it acts as a counterbalance to Witherspoon’s anguish. Imagine Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart arguing the point and you get the idea of the divide between these two characters.
Unlike the recent terrorism movie The Kingdom, Rendition isn’t as interested in pointing fingers, but seems to be determined to present a story that will entertain, but also stimulate conversation.
“Source Code,” the second film from “Moon” director Duncan Jones, is a tough one to describe. Imagine “Groundhog Day” with a terrorist subplot, a romantic angle and an explosion every eight minutes or so and you start to get the idea.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Captain Colter Stevens, a helicopter pilot, who wakes up on a Chicago commuter train in the body of a suburban high school teacher. Baffled he makes small talk with the stranger across from him until the train is blown to bits by a terrorist bomb. Turns out he’s part of a high level government project called Source Code that allows him to inhabit the last eight minutes of a person’s life. Posing as this teacher he has a finite amount of time to discover and dismantle the bomb and help avert a much larger subsequent attack. Heroics aside, Colter begins to wonder what would happen if he went back into the source code permanently.
“Source Code” is sci fi in the mode as “Inception” and “The Adjustment Bureau,” stories that have metaphysical premises but are firmly rooted in the physical. In each case a wild plot is brought back to earth by strong characters that put a human face on the script’s fanciful ideas.
“Source Code” is a moderately less successful than “Inception” and “The Adjustment Bureau,” mostly because it doesn’t have the mind boggling depth of the former or the human touch of the latter. It exists somewhere in between, but it gains points from me for not being based on a video game or comic book.
Jones skillfully takes a premise that could easily have become tired very quickly—the replay of the same eight minutes over and over again—and adds in enough variation, enough detail to keep the viewer on board as Colter revisits the scene of the crime and slowly pieces the terrorist plot together.
Less successful is the romance angle. It’s sweet and ends on a hopeful note but isn’t as compelling as the love story in “The Adjustment Bureau.”
Despite that “Source Code” remains an interesting and novel piece of sci fi.
