People who complain trailers give away too much or that movies have become predictable may find something to keep them guessing in “Serenity,” the strange new Matthew McConaughey thriller. Or is it a metaphysical drama? Or should I call it a new age noir? I honestly don’t know what to file this under. However you classify it, this weird film will keep you guessing for better and for worse. Strange days indeed.
McConaughey is Baker Dill, the broke, headstrong owner of a boat for hire in the crystal clear waters surrounding the remote Plymouth Island. “In Plymouth everyone knows everything,” says Reid Miller (Jeremy Strong). “Except what’s going on,” drawls Dill.
He’s a Captain Ahab type, minus the prosthetic leg made out of whalebone, and obsessed with hooking and reeling in a giant tuna he calls Justice. Everyone on the tiny island knows of his obsession. Even the local radio announcer broadcasts, “It’s a perfect day to go out and catch that damn fish,“ during his weather update.
He’s a haunted man, troubled by the carnage he witnessed in Iraq and the family, wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) and son Patrick (Rafael Sayegh), he lost to divorce. When Karen reappears with a job offer it sends him into a tailspin. “I’m here to tell you that you were right and I was wrong about Frank,” she says about her new husband, a wealthy but abusive man played by Jason Clarke. Her deal is simple. “Take him out on your boat, let him get drunk and dump him in the ocean. Do it and I’ll give you $10 million.” Divorce is not an option she adds. “He’ll find a hole for me in one of his construction sites.“ Dill is conflicted until he hears that Frank has been violent with Patrick. Now all bets are off.
There’s more but you won’t read it here because this is about the time in “Serenity” where the story takes a left turn that would make M. Night” Shyamalan green with envy. Does it work? Not really but you have to give credit to writer-director Steven Knight for swinging for the fences. That it’s a foul ball is unfortunate because the gears shift from neo-noir to existential treatise on the fundamentals of life is the kind of risky move that we don’t see much of these days.
You don’t just see a movie like “Serenity,” you witness it.
It is one of the most baffling movies to come along in years. McConaughey is in full-blown “are-we-all-just-pawns-in-a-great-big-game?” mode while Hathaway convincing channels femme-fatale Veronica Lake. Both give heightened performances but the tone of the piece is so off kilter I can’t decide whether they are sleepwalking through this toward a paycheque or doing some edgy work.
If nothing else “Serenity” takes chances, not the kind of chances that are likely to please an audience but at least you can’t guess how it will end. Intrigued?
Richard sits in on the CJAD Montreal morning show with host Andrew Carter to talk about the Matthew McConaughey neo-noir “Serenity,” the King Arthur adventure for children “The Kid Who Would Be King” and the Oscar nominated “Cold War.”
If “Molly’s Game” wasn’t a true story it would be unbelievable.
Jessica Chastain plays Molly Bloom, a one-time Olympic class skier sidelined by injury. Leaving the slopes behind she found her way into the world of high stakes poker but not as a player, as a purveyor. In Los Angeles and then again in New York she cultivated a guest list of rich and powerful men of movie stars, Russian mobsters and Wall Street hedge funders. They bet, lost (and sometimes won) millions of dollars, catered to by drink slinging models and Bloom’s huge line of credit. With the game come wealth, drug addiction and ultimately, an FBI arrest for a variety of charges. Money seized, drug addiction kicked, all the Poker Queen has left is her integrity and a supportive criminal defense lawyer in the form of Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba).
Written by ninety-words-a-minute screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (who also directed), coats the unlikely tale of a dedicated athlete who uses the dedication an skill she developed in her sport to create a new life for herself with an elegant sheen. The dialogue is top notch, the performances very good but it’s all surface. The psychology—her father (Kevin Costner) is a pontificating psychologist—doesn’t provide the kind of depth we need to truly care about Molly, before or after her downfall. She’s all ambition and little else. Chastain breathes life into her, rattling off Sorkin’s impressive dialogue, ripe with pop culture references, mythology and bon mots, but it’s the performance that illuminates the character for the audience, not the script.
Sorkin doesn’t exactly deal “Molly’s Game” a bad hand but he does bog down the story with clever asides and details instead of moving the plot forward. Aside from Bloom, his characters are all sharp-tongued creations whose personalities are become increasingly interchangeable as the same Sorkin-esque style of witty dialogue spills from all their lips.
In many ways “Molly’s Game” overplays its hand. It’s neither a searing indictment of high-stakes illegal gambling nor a psychological study of its main character. Instead it’s a pair of deuces when it should have been a full house.
Director Guillermo del Toro sings the praises of Jessica Chastain, saying she brings authenticity to everything she does and is “interested in being chameleonic.”
Indeed. Earlier this year the two-time Oscar nominated actor played World War II Warsaw human rights activist Antonina Zabinski in The Zookeeper’s Wife. Soon we’ll see her as 1890s era portrait painter Catherine Weldon, as screen legend Ingrid Bergman and as a mysterious alien with shape-shifting abilities in X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
This weekend in Molly’s Game, she is Molly Bloom, an Olympic-class skier who also ran the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker game.
She is the very definition of versatile, a performer who is hard to pin down.
“I feel like the bigger risks I take, the more I learn,” she says. “I know I learn more from my failures than successes.”
From big films like Interstellar and The Martian, to small ones like A Most Violent Year and Miss Julie she is always distinctive and always interesting.
For instance contrast her work in two recent films, Miss Sloan and Crimson Peak.
In Miss Sloane she plays Elizabeth Sloane, a sleep-deprived D.C. lobbyist “at the forefront of a business with a terrible reputation.”
She’ll represent anyone, it seems, except the gun lobby, who offer her a lucrative contract, only to be laughed at and rejected. Soon after she leaves her firm—one of the biggest in the country—to join a small, scrappy group who aim to whip up support for a bill that will demand background checks for all gun owners.
Zippy dialogue flies off the screen probably easier than it would actually fly off the tongue, giving voice to colourful characters who say mostly interesting things.
“When this town guts you like a trout and chokes you with the entrails don’t come snivelling to me,” snarls Sloane.
It’s a catchy line and Chastain spits it out with conviction and often transcends the rat-a-tat dialogue by bringing some actual humanity to a character largely made up of bon mots and a bad attitude. It’s a struggle for Chastain to grow Elizabeth Sloane as a character but in her rare quiet moments, when she isn’t mouthing Jonathan Perera’s carefully crafted words, she finds warmth and vulnerability in a person described as the “personification of an ice cube.”
In Crimson Peak she is Lucille Sharpe who, along with her brother Thomas (Tom Hiddleston), is British gentry in America to raise money to perfect and build a machine to mine the rich red clay that lies under Crimson Peak, their family estate.
The movie is love letter to both V.C. Andrews and Edgar Allen Poe. Madness and murder are front and center, coupled with Chastain’s arch performance that embodies the Hammer Horror style of wild-eye-acting. To play Lucille she worked with a dialect coach to perfect her English accent, learned to play piano and, most unsettlingly, never blinks. “Lucille not blinking is her trying to say, ‘Look at me, I’m normal. Everything is fine.’ And there’s effort in that,” she said.
As the scoundrel of the piece the versatile actress is a commanding presence, one who drips with evil.
“My God, she creates one of the truly scary villains I have seen, so dark,” says Guillermo del Toro. “Jessica took this to 11. She went full Spinal Tap here.”
Interviewers love talking with Robert Downey Jr., not just because he’s one of the biggest movie stars in the world, but also because he’s a one-man quote machine.
Walking into a room full of Canadian reporters to chat up his latest film, The Judge, he’s wearing a festooned shirt — and that is the only word that can be used to describe his flamboyant sartorial choice — with a pattern that resembled a bisected tree trunk. More intriguingly he carried a small green, nondescript box.
Asked what was inside he said, “I have distilled socialism in this box. It wasn’t easy. I’m bringing it back to America.”
And the quotes kept coming.
The Judge is a family drama about Hank, a hotshot, big-city lawyer who returns to his hometown for his mother’s funeral. He’s been estranged from his father, Judge Joseph Palmer (Robert Duvall), for years — “He’s dead to me” — but is forced to re-examine everything he knows about his dad when the judge is accused of murder.
Downey says, “I found myself crying all the time,” (great quote No. 2 for those keeping track) during filming, but not because he was reflecting back on his own life. “I got caught up in the reality the movie expresses,” he says. “Hank’s mom’s funeral is every funeral and Hank’s cut-off with his dad is every cut-off that anyone has ever had. It’s not even particularly a father-son story because the judge could have been the mom. I just think about these family dynamics and they light up constellations that are very emotional” (great quote No. 3!).
He describes shooting the movie as a “weird game of Sudoku” (great quote No. 4) in terms of making sure the emotional moments didn’t stack up against one another, blunting their impact.
“You can’t just play 120 catharses in a row,” he says. “I hate it when I see that in movies. It’s like, ‘All right, is everyone always crying in real life?’”
The first step in finding the character meant not allowing his Hollywood persona to bleed into Hank. “That was the first thing I had to smash,” he says.
“Hank is really observing this situation that’s happening around him and to him and he becomes this person who has to go through this terrible and wonderful crucible. It was really just about doing less and less and less and less and I like being busy. I like to talk and I like to be active and all that stuff, so sometimes I felt like I was literally just sitting on my hands.”
He leaves us with one last great quote that sums up his emotional response to the film. “It kicks me in the stomach in the nicest way.”
Film critic Richard Crouse sits down with CP24’s Nathan Downer to look at some of the new movies out this week, including “The Judge,” “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” and “Dracula Untold.”
People who complain trailers give away too much or that movies have become predictable may find something to keep them guessing in “Serenity,” the strange new Matthew McConaughey thriller. Or is it a metaphysical drama? Or should I call it a new age noir? I honestly don’t know what to file this under. However you classify it, this weird film will keep you guessing for better and for worse. Strange days indeed.
