Years before Mekhi Phifer played the stern-faced “Dauntless” enforcement officer Max in this weekend’s The Divergent Series: Insurgent, he displayed a dauntless attitude that got him his first acting job.
The year was 1994, the movie was Spike Lee’s Clockers and over 1000 people showed up for an open casting call.
“I went with my cousin,” he says, “not knowing anything about the audition or open casting call process. Spike Lee auditioned me about seven or eight different times. I had to read with Harvey Keitel and Isaiah Washington and do improvisations. I had never done that type of stuff before so to have gotten that was a whirlwind; I just thought that was the norm. That’s how you cast movies—a thousand people come in.”
He won the lead role and parlayed that success into a string of memorable characters in movies like 8 Mile and TV shows like ER, where he played Dr. Greg Pratt for six seasons and the Dr. Who spin-off, the sci-fi series Torchwood: Miracle Day.
“I am a big fan of sci-fi,” he says. “and that was part of the allure [to signing on for the Divergent series], but the other part was that it was good. I’m not looking for one particular genre or one particular type of film I usually just gravitate towards what’s good.”
He plays Max, leader of Dauntless, the warrior bloc of a Big Brother style government that has divided the post-apocalyptic Chicago into five factions. In the new film his job is to hunt down and capture fugitives Tris (Shailene Woodley) and boyfriend Four (Theo James) because she is she is divergent, a person who cannot be pigeonholed into just one designation.
“He’s not a villain at all in any way shape or form,” he says. “He’s tasked with protecting the society and I really feel that he believes in expunging the divergents and the rebel factions. He’s not doing it in a malicious way. He’s not getting pleasure from other people’s pain. He looks at it as a necessary evil.”
Phifer hasn’t read the Veronica Roth books that make up the source material for the films—“For me it seemed like more fun to do the series and then read the books and compare.”—so he’s not sure what’s going to happen with his character, but he hopes Max comes back for next year’s instalment Allegiant – Part 1.
“I don’t know what’s happening next so I’m on the journey with the audience,” he says. “I would love to see some of who he is come full circle.”
“Insurgent,” the second in the “Divergent” trilogy, takes one of the oldest dramatic tropes—the fear of the “other”—and blows it up into a teen epic about dystopia, guilt and artfully tossed pixie haircuts.
The backstory: In “Divergent” a Big Brother style government has divided the post-apocalyptic Chicago into five factions: the altruistic Abnegation sect, the peace loving Amity, the “I cannot tell a lie” Candor group, the militaristic arm Dauntless and the smarty-pants Erudites.
At age sixteen all citizens must submit to a personality test that will help them decide which faction they will join. Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley) is from an Abnegation family, but chooses to join Dauntless, the warrior faction charged with protecting the city. During her training it’s discovered she is divergent, a person who cannot be pigeonholed into just one designation.
At the beginning of the new film Tris, her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and boyfriend Four (Theo James) have escaped the world of factions and are living off the grid. They are fugitives from Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet), the head of the Erudite faction and an evil brainiac who desperately wants to get her hands on Tris. As a 100% divergent Tris is one of the few who can unlock the secrets of a mysterious box that holds the key to the future of humanity. As revolution brews against Janine, and the fascism of the factions, Tris does the only thing she can do to stop the bloodshed.
“Insurgent” takes place against a broad backdrop but that large canvas is painted with one very simple free-to-be-you-and-me-message. There is talk of class warfare and revolution but its bottom line tutorial on acceptance and “just because you may be different doesn’t mean you’re bad” is a potent lesson for teens.
The framework the solid message hangs on is a bit creaky, however. When characters aren’t explaining plot lines—whether it is by way of truth serums or Janine’s monologue to herself—they do inexplicable things, excusing them by saying, “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I have to do it.”
Woodley’s expressive face and eyes (not to mention the perfect Vidal Sassoon haircut) bring humanity to the story and Miles Teller’s smarmy villain character is a fun mix of Alex Delarge and Courage the Cowardly Dog, but much of “Insurgent” feels too generic to really be of interest. The action packed finale, for instance, puts Tris through her paces but none of the stunts feel real enough—thanks to the CGI—for there to be any real sense of jeopardy.
“Insurgent” is a curious thing. It’s a movie that sings the praises of being different and yet presents the story in as generic a way as possible. If it truly believed in its main thesis it would take more chances.
Richard Crouse interviews “Insurgent” star Mekhi Phifer on playing Dauntless leader Max.
“I didn’t know anything. That’s the thing with this series. I still don’t know where the character is going, that’s not typical for filmmaking. Usually you read the whole script and you know what’s happening from beginning to end and you adjust accordingly. So it is interesting playing this because I have no frame of reference to where he’s going.”
Jennifer Lawrence once showed me a cell phone snap of herself dressed in a fierce black leather outfit.
She was hot off the success of her Oscar nominated work in Winter’s Bone and used the photo as part of her audition for a role that every actress of a certain age in Hollywood clamoured for in 2010.
She didn’t get the part of Lisbeth Salander, the pierced and inked computer hacker star of David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—the producers thought she was too tall—Rooney Mara did, but not before auditioning five times and beating out better known hopefuls like Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Anne Hathaway.
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was 2011’s big literary adaptation, ripe with star making possibilities and lucrative franchise potential. It didn’t pan out that way but Hollywood hasn’t given up on bringing bestsellers to the screen.
This week there are high hopes for Fifty Shades of Grey. Calling the story of college graduate Anastasia Steele and BDSM enthusiast Christian Grey a “literary” adaptation might be a stretch, but with 100 million books sold (including parts two and three) there are great expectations.
So, actors should be crawling over one another to star in the film, right? Think again. Unlike Dragon Tattoo, young Hollywood has not exactly been whipping themselves into a frenzy over Fifty Shades. Shailene Woodley apparently had no qualms about performing the film’s explicit bondage scenes, but was already tied up making the Divergent movies.
Emma Watson did have qualms. “Who here actually thinks I would do Fifty Shades of Grey as a movie?” she wrote on twitter.
In the end Dakota Johnson, better known as the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith than for her work on the cancelled sitcom Ben and Kate, won the role and while it might make her a star there are dangers involved with a project like this. Just ask Elizabeth Berkley.
Berkley was a wholesome teen model and star of the sit com Saved by the Bell when a role in Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 sexploitation flick Showgirls left her career in tatters. As the untested star who bared her soul and body in a big budget film she took the hit for the film’s failure.
Almost twenty-years later she was still emotional about the backlash she suffered. After a performing an erotic dance on Dancing with the Stars she tearfully said, “it reconnected me to when I was just a young woman and took a risk creatively and did Showgirls. With that came a lot of doors being slammed in my face.”
Will Johnson be the next Berkley? According to ticket-selling site Fandango Fifty Shades of Grey is the fastest selling R-rated title ever, so Dakota may yet be spared a tearful breakdown in Dancing with the Stars in 2035.
The first five-hankie film of the year, “The Fault in Our stars” is an adolescent “Love Story.” Based on John Green’s young adult novel about two teenagers who fall in love after meeting in a cancer support group, it’s a tearjerker that has been making teenage girls spout tears like water shooting from fire hydrants since its release in 2012.
“Divergent” star Shailene Woodley plays Hazel Grace Lancaster, a sixteen-year-old first diagnosed with cancer when she was thirteen. An experimental treatment has given her some semblance of a normal life, but the cancer is now in her lungs and she relies on a portable oxygen tank to keep her alive. “My lungs suck at being lungs,” she says, “but theoretically they should work for a while.”
Fearing that the young girl is spending far too much time alone compulsively reading a cancer memoir called An Imperial Affliction, her parents Frannie and Michael (Laura Dern, Sam Trammell), push her towards a support group for kids with cancer at a local church.
There she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a handsome eighteen-year-old former athlete who lost a leg to osteosarcoma. He falls for her but she keeps him in the friend zone in an attempt to protect him from what she sees as an unhappy ending to their potential romance. “I’m a grenade,” she says, “and one day I’m going to explode and obliterate everything in my wake and it is my responsibility to minimize the causalities.”
It sounds like it has all the elements of a major summer bummer, but despite being set in what Hazel calls the “Republic of Cancervania,” it avoids the maudlin. Instead the story is told with acerbic wit, filtered through the life experiences of characters who have rarely known a healthy day. In the film’s opening minutes Hazel says she doesn’t live in a world where “nothing is so messed up it can’t be fixed by a Peter Gabriel song,” suggesting that there won’t be any easy answers offered up here.
Spearheading the uniformly excellent cast is Woodley who strays into Jennifer Lawrence territory here. Her Hazel is a realist, with a fatalistic streak, but still a teen and Woodley finds a balance between those aspects of Hazel’s life and personality in a remarkably complex but natural performance. She’s wry, calling herself the “Keith Richard of cancer kids” while inventorying her daily intake of drugs. But she’s also wise beyond her years. On her parent’s struggle she says, “The only thing worse than biting it from cancer,” she says “is having a kid bite it from cancer.”
As a terminally ill girl who lets down walls to let love into her life Woodley drips with charisma. Her performance—with capable assistance from Elgort and Dern—brings genuine emotion to scenes that might have gone the way of over-the-top sentimentality or cliché.
It’s true that some of the dialogue is overwritten—these are the most articulate teens on film since Juno—and the second half succumbs to a hint of emotional manipulation, but it works.
My biggest complaint about the whole experience was being splashed by the tears of my fellow moviegoers. Bring a towel.
A new young adult film based on a best selling series of books is set in a world where diversity is frowned upon; sort of like Arizona without the dry heat.
In “Divergent” a Big Brother style government has divided the post-apocalyptic Chicago into five factions: the altruistic Abnegation sect, the peace loving Amity, the “I cannot tell a lie” Candor group, the militaristic arm Dauntless and the smarty-pants Erudites.
At age sixteen all citizens must submit to a personality test that will help them decide which faction they will join. “The future belongs to those who know where they belong,” is the Orwellian motto.
Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley) is from an Abnegation family, but chooses to join Dauntless, the warrior faction charged with protecting the city. During the grueling training “Tris” meets future love interest Four (Theo James) who helps her disguise the fact that she is “divergent,” a person who cannot be pigeonholed into just one designation. “If you don’t fit into a category they can’t control you,” she is told.
“Divergent” feels like a greatest hits version of recent young adult stories. Mixing and matching “Hunger Games” with a taste of “Harry Potter” and a splash of “Twilight,” results in a new story that feels familiar, like a sequel to a movie that doesn’t exist.
The film does take pains in the first hour to establish a world, with a unique set of rules—like once you choose a faction you can’t go back—and then promptly proceeds to break their own guidelines. The disregard for the rubrics blunts the power of the story, changing it from a high concept sci fi idea to simply a shifting situation for the characters to exist in. It’s a state of affairs passing itself off as an idea.
That won’t matter to the film’s core audience, teens, who will be more interested in Tris’s grrrl power, the dynamic of the Dauntless recruits and Four, the movie’s heart throb. Director Neil Burger aptly juggles all these elements well, and despite the plot lapses and some bloodless action—a zip line aerial scene that should be visually spectacular doesn’t make the eyeballs dance like it could—but the film is a little darker and grittier than you’d expect from a blockbuster-to-be. It would have been interesting to see what a director with true futuristic vision, like Terry Gilliam, could have done with the material, but ultimately it’s not about dystopia.
The young adult story thrives off subtext and in this case it is more about family, being yourself and facing fears, all subjects that will resonate with the target audience louder than any sci fi premise.
“Divergent” is “Hunger Games” light, but Woodley and James bring some heat to the leads and it’s fun watching Kate Winslet sneering her way through a villainous role.
The new young adult movie Divergent declares, “The future belongs to those who know where they belong.”
In the film a Big Brother style government has divided the post-apocalyptic Chicago into five factions: the altruistic Abnegation sect, the peace loving Amity, the “I cannot tell a lie” Candor group, the militaristic arm Dauntless and the smarty-pants Erudites.
In the middle of this muddle is Four, played by Theo James, a Dauntless warrior with a sensitive side. He’s a mentor of sorts and love interest to Tris (Shailene Woodley), a sixteen year old who has recently pledged to Dauntless. During her grueling training Four helps her disguise the fact that she is “divergent,” a person who cannot be pigeonholed into just one designation.
James, the English-born star, beat out half of young Hollywood for the role, which was made popular in the wildly successful Divergent series of books. Sales of over five million copies puts the novels into Hunger Games territory, but why are they so popular with teens?
“I think there are two things to summarize it,” says James, a philosophy graduate from the University of Nottingham. “One, on a generalist level, it’s a good story to be able to be involved in in the same way as some others in the genre are. The faction system is a good thing for young people to grab hold of because they can question themselves. They can say, ‘Which one would I be in?’ There are cliques in high school, and it has those kinds of ramifications.
“There are other high school parallels; it’s a big assembly hall, there is a kind of teacher, there is a kind of ceremony which is almost like graduating from high school.
“Then there is the college era, being in Dauntless and then choosing what kind of job you’re going to go into. It has those fun things to be able to latch on to.
“On top of that there is the fantasy level of being in a world which is relatable because it is Chicago. You can see these landmarks, so it makes sense, but then it is the future so there is something more fantastic about it. As a result of that, there is also a deeper world you can step into.
“Then, you wonder about the generation now. Growing up they are constantly hearing the conversation about depleting resources and all these kind of environmental things. Not to say that everyone is partaking in it, but you can’t get away from it so they’re hearing, ‘Oh, the population is massive. China is two billion; we’re not going to have enough resources by this time. Look at India.’ As a result they are questioning the future and are questioning how they will be in the future and how they’re kids will be, so maybe it is kind of a relatable fantasy.”
George Clooney may be the above-the-title star of “The Descendants,” but the movie cannot rightly be called a George Clooney movie. Although he may get nominated and may even win an Oscar for the performance, this movie belongs to his director Alexander Payne, who once again keenly observes the human condition through his camera lens.
Clooney plays Matt King, a work-a-holic Honolulu lawyer, descendant of Hawaiian royal blood and the heir (along with his cousins) of a huge chunk of valuable, unspoiled land. His life is turned upside down when his wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie in cinema’s least rewarding role ever) is gravely injured in a boating accident. He’s always been the “back-up parent,” the distracted dad who left the raising of his two daughters, impulsive Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and ten-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller), to his wife. Now, Elizabeth’s diagnosis isn’t good, Alexandra is a wildcard and Scottie is acting out. To make maters worse Matt discovers his wife had been having an affair with a realtor named Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), and was contemplating divorce.
Simply put, “The Descendants” is one of the year’s best movies. Payne keenly observes Matt’s life, effortlessly mixing the heartache, humor and hate which make up the character’s journey. It’s complex but understated, focusing on small moments to create a larger whole that is deeply satisfying.
Clooney leads the uniformly terrific cast with a performance that puts aside the sly grin and charm that have been his trademarks till now. He’s raw, flawed and heartfelt in his search to rise above the domestic turmoil.
The supporting cast is equally strong. Shailene Woodley is a revelation playing a character trapped between childhood and an uncertain future. In the supporting cast Judy Greer as Speer’s unsuspecting wife, Beau Bridges as a greedy relative and Robert Forster as a grieving father-in-law all leave us wanting more, in the best possible way.
“The Descendants” is a hard movie to define. It’s a contradiction, a dramedy, a drama with comedic elements, but more than that it’s a small movie with big emotions.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
