"A Most Wanted Man": Hoffman's Swan Song

Now Available On DVD and Blu-Ray

No one could have predicted that A Most Wanted Man would feature Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final role, but I can’t think of a better way that he could have taken his final bow.  Hoffman’s primary talent as an actor was to take harsh, unsympathetic characters and portray them with such humanizing nuance that we cannot help but be sympathetic.  With the exception of his portrayal of Truman Capote, I don’t think Hoffman has ever done a finer job of making the unlovable just a little bit understandable.

Hoffman plays a German intelligence agent in Hamburg named Gunther Bachmann, attempting to hunt down a Chechnyan refugee, Issa Karpov, whom he believes may be involved in plans for future terrorist activities because he is the son of a known launderer of terrorist funds.  Hoffman’s espionage team also begins tracking a local Muslim philanthropist whom they believe funnels money to fund terrorist organizations.  Gunther seeks to manipulate the two targets into exchanging funds, coercing the help of a nervous banker and Issa’s own attorney in order to achieve these ends, all while trying to navigate debriefings with American agents who seem a little too interested in the case.

The plot itself is hard to describe much further, due to its relative complexity and reliance on surprises.  However, what I will say is that initial perceptions of several key characters are not always as they appear to be, and the lines become a bit blurred when determining who is truly a villain and who is only doing villainous things in order to further a righteous agenda.  Hoffman walks this line perfectly as Gunther, a cynically unapologetic spy who seems to live entirely on cigarettes and coffee and has no life outside of his obsessive job.  He and his team are not legally a part of German law enforcement, so he has license to illegally use surveillance and is not above blackmailing or kidnapping people in order to get what he wants.  However, he only does those things because he wants to prevent another terrorist event from happening.  He takes no joy in what he does, and the film does nothing to make his tactics any more redeemable.  He’s only doing his job in the best way he knows how and hoping that the world ends up a safer place because of it.

The film is really only hindered by a few weaker performances, notably Rachel McAdams as Issa’s attorney and Willem Dafoe as the banker.  Dafoe doesn’t do a horrible job, but he mostly feels like he’s been miscast, forcibly restrained from being a more animated character that wouldn’t have fit in this film.  Again, not a bad performance, but one that I think should have been filled by a different breed of character actor.  However, the real weak link her is McAdams, who, while not terrible, feels a bit flat compared to her fellow performers.  She doesn’t portray much emotion beyond blind concern for Issa’s well-being and guilt for being manipulated against him, and her inability to convey a convincing German accent leaves a lot to be desired.  While not outright bad, her lack of ability is especially noticeable when in scenes where Hoffman dominates not just out of his own gravitas, but out of necessity to carry the scene forward.

Those minor quibbles aside, A Most Wanted Man is a damn good espionage thriller that will leave you shocked at some points, intrigued at others, and disgusted in gut-wrenching ways by the end.  This one is definitely worth your time.

Have a favorite Philip Seymour Hoffman film?  Let me know in the comments below.

"Jersey Boys": Sure Ain't Like The Good Ol' Days

Now Available On DVD and Blu-Ray

I generally write these reviews immediately after watching the film, so that my impressions are fresh and my feelings aren’t clouded by the passage of time.  And after watching Jersey Boys, only one feeling comes to mind: exhaustion.  Jersey Boys is a marathon of a film, obligatorily moving from plot point to plot point in the lives and times of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, from their humble, slightly nefarious beginnings, to their meteoric rise to fame, to the events that drove the group apart, and finally to Frankie Valli’s struggling solo career.  To a fan of The Four Seasons, I’m sure this is just a gold mine of fascinating performances that provide real insight into the band’s amazing story.  For the rest of us… Well, I can certainly think of better ways to spend two hours.

The film starts off strong enough, establishing Valli as a down-on-his-luck kid growing up in New Jersey who, through the help of a seedy mentor named Tommy DiVito, comes to join a band called The Four Lovers.  The band struggles for a few years, playing dives and small stages, until songwriter Bob Gaudio joins the group and the band starts producing hits under the new name The Four Seasons.  Until this point, the film has a period-piece feel to it, emphasizing the 1950s atmosphere and probably making more than a few grandparents nostalgic for the good ol’ days.  This is a Clint Eastwood film, after all.

However, the film makes a notable shift in tone once the band becomes famous.  It starts montaging through the group’s greatest hits, and suddenly we’re seeing the life and times of a partying group of successful musicians.  We see Frankie Valli’s home life fall apart due to his perpetually prolonged absences, creating a conflict that, while nothing we haven’t seen before in this genre, is still sympathetic.  This is all well and good, but then the film stops and drops a bombshell on us, telling us that it hasn’t all been paradise.

The film then rewinds itself two years into the past, and starts portraying events that lead up to the band eventually breaking up in the events shortly after the bombshell event.  Now, if this had served a narrative purpose other than showing two completely different sets of events with thematic similarities, I would have been on board.  If, for example, the film had deigned to reframe certain events so that we were shown how the film had misdirected the audience into thinking everything was swell, that would have been fine.  But to show a parallel narrative after a key turning point in order to show that point’s significance is just lazy writing.

The remaining half hour of the film dwells on Frankie Valli’s post-Seasons career, working hard to support his family and finally be there for his daughter.  His redemption arc in the eyes of his daughter falls more than a bit flat because up until this point, she hasn’t been a relevant character, and so it’s impossible to care about her or her feelings for her father.  Instead, we’re supposed to take on faith that Valli is trying his best to reconnect with the teenager, but the focus is so much on Valli’s effort that we never see the pay-off of whether he actually succeeded.

The film’s epilogue is over-long to the point where I was pacing my living room just waiting for the damn thing to end.  I wasn’t emotionally invested in the characters, who had seemed to somehow become more two-dimensional as the film went on, and I just didn’t care about the history lesson about a band I’m only marginally familiar with.  Maybe this film just wasn’t for me, but I somehow get the feeling that the intended audience for this film is people who may just be trying to catch a glimpse of times long past.  I can’t begrudge that, but for the rest of us, this film will likely be forgotten by history.

The Four Seasons.  Discuss or something in the comments below.

"Interstellar": Fantastic Until It Isn't

Now In Theaters

Interstellar is a pretty good science fiction film… until it isn’t.  Director Christopher Nolan has attempted here to create a science fiction movie that grounds itself as much as possible in real physical and spatial phenomena and how humanity might experience it… until he decides not to.  This is one of those bizarre cases where the film is much better if you do not judge it as a sum of its parts, but look at each of its major setpieces in isolation and judge them independently of one another.  When the film succeeds, it really succeeds, exhibiting Nolan’s talents for creating tangible tension with an exquisite eye for detail and emphasizing the huge stakes of a given situation.  However, Nolan also attempts to tell a story about the human condition, and that’s where the film goes off the rails.

In a near-distant future where a blight has gradually destroyed most remaining crops on Earth, Coop is a struggling farmer who pines for the days when he was a pilot and engineer for NASA.  The current political climate has shut down NASA in favor of focusing on agrarian sustenance, seemingly grounding the potential astronaut for good.  However, through some circumstances that the film winkingly refers to as “supernatural,” Coop ends up discovering the last underground remnants of NASA just as they are about to launch their final mission into space in hopes of finding a new home for humanity.  Coop is recruited, and he and his crew of scientists launch off to explore three planets in a far-off galaxy.

Once the crew enters space, the film ends up playing out like something that Arthur C. Clarke could have written, relying on hard science (or at least a layperson’s understanding of it) to create setpieces of spatial phenomena such as wormholes, planets circling a collapsed star, and relativistic time slippages.  The former two inspire the type of visual awe that really make the film worthwhile, and the latter adds a unique twist to the time constraints necessary to make the relocation of humanity a success.  As the film moves from setpiece to setpiece, it does try to throw a few dramatic twists at you that were so obviously telegraphed that I was able to predict them, but the plot ends up taking a backseat to the spectacle for the majority of the runtime, so any narrative weakness can be forgiven in favor of the film’s dedication to scientific reality as cinematic adventure.

That is, until the film’s third act and final vignette, where that dedication is unceremoniously thrown out the window in favor of an exceedingly contrived and stupid twist ending.  It relies on suspension of disbelief so much beyond what the film has conditioned its audience to accept up until that point, relying on science that even I as a non-physicist know is completely bullshit.  It even goes so far as to claim that love is a physical force in the universe in the same vein as gravity, which just feels bizarre and out of place in a film that had until then relied on realism to drive its plot rather than sentiment.  It requires such leaps of faith, logic, and basic understandings of the physical laws of the universe that it breaks the emotional payoff the narrative is supposed to provide.

That said, though, Interstellar is a film worth seeing for the parts when it really does work.  At three hours long, I am tempted to suggest that the film would have been better if cut down for time, but any parts that were narratively unnecessary were the most entertaining, and the worst parts were the most critical to the resolution of the main narrative arc.  Christopher Nolan has pushed out of his depth here, trying to create an experience as awe-inspiring as Inception, and only succeeding in so far as creating a work of visual wonderment, leaving the story elements a thematically disjointed mess.  To see the spectacle on the big screen is alone worth the price of admission; just don’t be surprised when the final act betrays that sense of wonder.

Favorite Nolan flick.  (Not The Dark Knight Rises.) Comments.  Go!