"Jimmy's Hall": A Familiar Story Told Poorly

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

Set in Ireland in 1933, Jimmy’s Hall is centered on a local man, Jimmy Gralton, who builds a community center for his town that encourages the arts and education, but most notably is a place for young people to dance to the latest jazz hits.  This raises the ire of the Catholic Church, which notably wants to keep a firm grasp on the social influences its flock is subjected to.  So they seek to shame the participants of these gatherings and try to force Jimmy to dismantle the community center.  I got about thirty minutes into Jimmy’s Hall before it finally dawned on me.  This movie is basically Footloose.

Ostensibly, the film is based on an actual historical event, as Jimmy Gralton was actually a communist proselytizer whom the Catholic-controlled Irish government eventually had deported for his views.  However, at least the first half of the film is centered entirely on a farcically portrayed conflict between Gralton and the local pastor, Father Sheridan.  Gralton only wants to provide a place for local youth to spend time and receive education in a culture other than their own while having a bit of fun, and Sheridan is opposed to this because… well, I suppose because the church frowns upon such things as pleasure and education.  There is a surprising lack of nuance to the portrayal of both the sympathetic Gralton and the antagonistic Sheridan, and the degree to which the film takes itself so seriously does not help matters.  At least in Footloose there is a certain degree of self-awareness to how ridiculous the premise and proceedings are; here, the dead-serious portrayal of Gralton’s road to exile is hammered into a bizarre bit of formula writing.

This does become alleviated somewhat by the film’s second half, as Gralton’s communist political views become more apparent in speeches and conversations that he has with the denizens of his community center.  This in turn seems to give the government an excuse to try and have him removed from the country, since this was during the height of the Red Scare.  However, this feels like too little too late from the film, particularly with respect to the fact that the real life Jimmy Gralton built the hall for partially political reasons right from the start.  It is almost as if in the screenwriting process the writer realized halfway the amount to which he was plagiarizing an 80’s pop culture film and looked to Wikipedia for his differentiating inspiration.

On a purely technical level, Jimmy’s Hall isn’t really a bad film.  Its characters are relatable and when the plot finally steps beyond its formula hackery it does a pretty decent job of portraying an ugly chapter in Irish history, showing a scared and defiant Jimmy on the run after a violent attack on his dance hall.  But all in all, this film is a bizarre combination of tropes that don’t quite gel with one another.  There are much better films about the oppression of communists and the Catholic-Protestant divide in Ireland, and if you are looking for a movie about dancing kids, at least Footloose doesn’t try to take itself so damn seriously.  Jimmy’s Hall is too much of a mess to recommend.

"Concussion (2015)": Oscar Bait Without Bravery

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

It can be interesting to try to figure out why exactly certain Oscar-bait catches on and why other examples fail to grab the Academy’s attention.  Or, rather, “interesting” may be a poor choice of word, since what usually holds a film back from being especially noteworthy in the Academy’s eyes is an entire lack of noteworthiness in its execution.  Many filmmakers and film studios make films with the express purpose of appealing to award season sensibilities, and Concussion is quite clearly one of those films with a recent history true-story scandal premise and an aging actor trying to reclaim his reputation by taking on a dramatic role outside his usual comfort zone.  And Concussion probably could have been a serious contender if it had attempted to say anything more than what is plainly obvious from a quick plot synopsis.

Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) is a Nigerian forensic pathologist working in Pittsburgh who is charged with the task of examining Mike Webster, a former NFL player who had been exhibiting erratic behavior reminiscent of dementia for a long time prior to his death.  Upon performing an autopsy against the wishes of a Pittsburgh populace more concerned with honoring Webster’s career than the mystery of his premature demise, Omalu discovers extensive brain damage that he believes to be the result of repeated traumatic head injuries from Webster’s time in the NFL.  After Omalu publishes his findings, the NFL brings the full force of their establishment down against him, and he must decide whether the threat to his career and his life in America is worth fighting to bring his research to the world.

The film is structured as a tale of an immigrant struggling against an American institution that he has little care for as an outsider, and functionally it does its job.  Smith is surprisingly effective in a softer-spoken role than I would have thought him capable of, channeling his usual larger-than-life bravado into a character that feels weak in comparison to Smith’s action-hero archetypes but still determinedly brave compared to us mere mortals.  Alec Baldwin and Albert Brooks offer great supporting turns as professional colleagues of Dr. Omalu, with Baldwin's character in particular coming across as sympathetic, despite his role in the narrative as the white guy Omalu needs to have around in order to be taken seriously.

But good acting is stifled by a script that, while not necessarily bad, could have used a few more drafts to become more than merely functional.  Dialogue is effective at conveying plot points and moments of personal struggle for Omalu, but none of it is memorable except for an obnoxiously repeated mantra of “Tell the truth.”  I think part of the reason why the actors come across so well is because they have to compensate for what little material the screenplay gives them.  It also doesn’t help that, while Concussion does go after the NFL for purposely covering up the effects of the sport on its players’ heath, it tries to mitigate that unpopular sentiment by calling the sport “beautiful” in non-specific ways, as if that is supposed to make it okay that this life-ruining industry continues with a minimum of consequences for those who make the most money from it.

Concussion could have been a cutting exposé of a beloved American pastime if it had had the guts or the talent to get it right.  However, the writing is not ambitious, nor does it take the risk of putting its weight against the NFL in a way that will cause people to sit up and take notice.  The actors do their best to salvage a good film from the mediocrity, and they mostly succeed, but it ultimately isn’t enough to call the film much more than a decent attempt.

"Hardcore Henry": Hell of a Nauseating Ride

In Theaters on April 8, 2016

It’s often a derogatory phrase to say that a film looks like a video game, though this is usually directed at a critic’s distaste for CGI graphics and their inability to emulate reality.  However, I can’t really think of a film that actually looked like a video game; it isn’t as if the Super Mario Brothers movie was shot like the hallway scene from Oldboy, as the titular characters platformed their way through obstacles.  In retrospect, it seems inevitable that a film would attempt this sort of stylistic choice, and the advent of the GoPro makes the first-person shooter the perfect genre to test out the translation of video game action into a cinematic format.  Enter Hardcore Henry, an experimental film that takes its stab at this conceit by placing its audience in the role of the titular character.

You are Henry.  You wake up with no memory and no voice as a woman claiming to be your wife attaches cybernetic limbs to where your original limbs used to be.  As she orients you to your surroundings, a villainous crime lord with psychic powers abducts her so that he may build an army of similar cyborg warriors.  With the help of a constantly respawning sidekick named Jimmy (District 9’s Sharlto Copley), you must fight through waves of Russian thugs to keep yourself alive and save your wife.

Narratively, the film has a lot of fun with its first-person perspective, addressing issues of identity and the nature of the shared theatrical experience by speaking to the audience directly.  The plot is kept video game simple, but to pretty neat effect as the story elements converge in ways to turn what would normally be strange cinematic choices, like Jimmy’s seemingly endless supply of lives, into a comical experience that can only work if one accepts that this film runs on video game logic.  Yet, in no way does it exhibit even the pretense of being a thoughtful meditation on the film medium (as the script’s unfortunate number of Neanderthalic homophobic jabs should indicate), nor does it need to be, as it doesn’t even try to make the first person shots seem continuous, constantly cutting in ways to make the action more intense.

That intensity, though, is both the film’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness, depending on who you are.  There are some very fun and inventively violent action setpieces in this film, and some of the film’s best shots will remain lodged in my brain from how exhilaratingly fun they were.  After all, that’s what you’re paying admission to see, and this film certainly delivers on that front.  However, there were an equal number of shots that will likely distress those with weaker stomachs: not because of the blood and viscera, but because the camera shakes around just as much as a real person’s would in during a combative confrontation.  This isn’t really an issue during the shooting sections of the film, but early on there are a lot of scenes with hand-to-hand combat and parkour acrobatics that were nauseating to experience in a darkened theater with no point of reference to give the eyes something solid to focus on.

Perhaps it’s best to think of Hardcore Henry as more of an experience than a movie, something akin to a theme park ride.  Despite the motion sickness I felt after walking out of my screening, I can definitely recommend it for those who can take ninety minutes of intense camera movement, and even those on the fence should know that the worst of it is over by the halfway point.  I doubt the experience will translate as well to the small screen, but if your gut’s temperament is anything like mine, it might be worth the wait.  It’s an interesting experiment that is largely successful and a lot of fun, even if you have to deal with some gay jokes and some equally nauseating camerawork every once in a while to get to the good stuff.