"The Finest Hours (2016)": Not Disney's Finest Hour

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

Director Craig Gillespie seems to be shaping up as Disney’s current go-to guy to direct feel-good stories of true story triumphs in the face of adversity, a staple of their live-action stable of films produced for the apparent sole purpose of giving high school teachers an excuse to provide their students with a distraction under the pretense of educational value.  The Finest Hours fits this mold pretty precisely, and much like Gillespie’s previous film, Million Dollar Arm, the film is competent, yet unlikely to leave much of a lasting impression once the credits start rolling.

Set on and off the coast of Cape Cod in 1952, The Finest Hours opens on the romantic entanglement and eventual engagement of Bernie (Chris Pine, as wooden as his namesake), a coastguardsman, and Miriam (Holliday Grainger), a "strong female character" who makes up for lack of agency with a pointless amount of screentime.  When an immense storm tears an oil tanker in half just off the coast, Bernie is sent to retrieve the crewmen of the ship and leave his fiancée behind for what appears to be a suicide mission.  Meanwhile, the crew of the tanker, led by the ship’s chief engineer (Casey Affleck, as forgettable as ever), fights to survive as the remains of the ship slowly submerge.

The film’s biggest problem is that it tries to split its running time evenly between the two plots, except without proper proportional investment given to either side.  Gillespie seems to want the Bernie/Miriam romance to be the emotional center of the film, yet the two aren’t much further developed that stock archetypes, and watching Bernie struggle against waves in his rescue boat starts to wear thin after watching it for nearly the entire last hour of the film.  Conversely, the more interesting action takes place on the sinking tanker, yet none of the characters on that ship are invested with much, if any, distinguishing characteristics, making them hard to care about or relate to.  This makes the two hour runtime of the film drag on interminably, since the film doesn’t place its emotional investment where it matters.

Yet, despite my glib commentary on the actors, their performances are actually decently serviceable given the trite circumstances of the script and their characterization in it.  They’re all eminently watchable and the production values of the film are on par with just about any natural disaster flick of recent memory, with computer generated waves bringing a functional level of distress to the table.  But ultimately, this is a bland piece of January theater fodder, a film that Disney produced and likely regretted once it saw the final product, and given their usual high standards for their output, this merely functions as a tedious distraction.  If you’re looking for a bare minimum of watchability, The Finest Hours serves that function, because nothing about it is blatantly awful; it’s just that nothing about it is particularly good either.

"Sunset Song": Pretentious As It Is Dull

Now In Theaters

It’s rare that I get angry at the films I review, even when the film is poorly made, thematically problematic, or even blatantly trading on offensive stereotypes.  Sunset Song is a film that made me mad though, because it has the lofty expectation that its faux-artistic pageantry will be interpreted by its audience as intellectual and deep, when in fact there is next to nothing under the surface of what I hesitate to call this film’s story.  I usually try to avoid using the word “pretentious” (though I admittedly sometimes fail at that) due to my ironically self-important pen name, but there is simply no better word for it.  Sunset Song is about as pretentious as film-making gets, and I absolutely hate that.

There isn’t so much a plot to Sunset Song as there are shallow characters interacting within a setting in various modes of meaningless conflict and banality.  Our protagonist is Chris Guthrie, a young woman on a cusp of adulthood living under the roof of her abusive father in the Scottish highlands in the early twentieth century.  The entire first half of the film is nothing but a series of tragedies, abandonments, and abuses, as Chris’s mom kills herself and her siblings all leave home to escape their tyrannical patriarch.  This concludes with the father having a stroke and Chris purposely ignoring his needs so that he dies.  What could have been a satisfying abuse survivor’s arc is muted by the fact that we never get much of a look into Chris’s, or anyone else’s, personality, so the players move around the stage like dolls in a dollhouse, acting out tragedy with all the nuance of a first-grade play.

But that isn’t where the film ends.  The entire second act is about Chris’s courtship by a local man, Ewan, who eventually marries her and becomes the father of her child.  The second act of any film is supposed to function as the escalation of conflict, the point in the film where stakes are raised and the protagonist is faced with their toughest challenges.  Here all sense of conflict fizzles away, leaving a dry and protracted stretch in the middle that is well-suited to anyone hoping for a nap.  When the film finally does bring in some third act drama by way of Ewan’s enlistment in the army during World War I, it feels unearned and self-contradictory, simultaneously enabling scenes where Ewan abuses Chris in ways similar to how her father did and excusing his behavior by alluding to his fear of death on the front lines.  Notice that I don’t mention Chris’s character development, because other than her apparent ability to suffer at the hands of the men in her life, she doesn’t have much of a character at all; Ewan is as close to a fully realized character as we get, and he isn’t the principal focus.  The climax of the film is all about his actions and how Chris accepts them, turning what is ostensibly a coming-of-age tale into a neutered telling of how passive acceptance is the key to adulthood, and I think to call that message intentional would give the film too much credit.

All of this shallowness is dressed up in a forced theatricality, complete with nebulously opaque character voiceovers, overlong shots that convey pathetically simple ideas, and actors staring directly into the camera.  I confess that I am not familiar with writer-director Terence Davies’s previous work, but for how much acclaim the man receives this is a shockingly amateur attempt at cinematic artistry.  Sunset Song is nothing but award-baiting style laid over a story that doesn’t amount to anything character-driven or symbolically significant, at least not how it is told here.  That is the definition of pretension.

"Cartel Land": Bravery Bogged Down By Distraction

Now Available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Netflix

The fact that Cartel Land was nominated for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar is both concerning and makes complete sense.  Normally that combination would signal a problem with the Academy’s selection process, and while that is what could be going on here, that’s not the entire picture.  Cartel Land is at times an incredibly proficient piece of documentarian storytelling, but at other times it feels amateur and directionless, wandering away from its central thesis into a point that it never fully develops, if that point even existed in the first place.

The running theme of the film is of vigilantism in the face of the Mexican drug cartels, primarily as seen through the eyes of the Autodefensas, a group founded in the Mexican state of Michoacán by Dr. Josė Mirales.  The film does a great job of portraying the Autodefensas in both positive and negative lights, whether it be in the impact they have on the cartels’ grip on local communities or on the way the soldiers among their ranks are flawed people who might not be the most deserving or trustworthy when given a gun and free reign to hunt bad guys.  The character study of Mirales himself is particularly interesting, as he supposedly sacrifices closeness with his family in order to fight for the cause and yet uses his power to seduce younger women.

But the main reason I think this film was Oscar nominated was because it obviously was very dangerous to shoot, and documentarian Matthew Heineman often chooses to face that danger head on.  There are multiple firefights caught on film that Heineman is directly involved in, with frantic Autodefensa members telling him to get down and out of the way.  The devotion to the craft is admirable, as is the willingness to look at the bloody aftermath of the firefights and the devastation of the families whose loved ones were caught in the crossfire.  That said, the film strangely decides to censor itself during certain moments, like a scene in an Autodefensa “prison camp” where people can clearly be heard being tortured in the background, but the camera instead chooses to focus on a more benign interrogation.  It isn’t that I’m eager to watch someone be tortured, and perhaps the openness of the Autodefensas to be captured on film only extends so far, but it felt odd at the very least given the lack of restraint earlier in the film.

The film’s biggest problem, though, is its insistence on cutting back to an American vigilante group, the Arizona Border Recon (ABR).  This is an extremist group that hunts down people trying to cross the border from Mexico into Arizona, but the film never presents any evidence to suggest that their actions are having any impact on cartel trade.  Heineman isn’t shy about showing how the members of this group are generally motivated by racism and misplaced economic frustrations rather than the drug trade, so it’s more than a little baffling why he decides to spend so much time on them.  If he is seeking to make a contrasting statement about the ABR against a more morally reasonable Autodefensa, the film is not edited in such a way to suggest it; likewise, if he was trying to compare the two, the comparison feels completely disingenuous based on their different mission statements.  It feels like Heineman shot his footage with the ABR and then didn’t know how to make it thematically fit with the rest of his film, yet decided to include it anyway.

Cartel Land still has plenty to offer as a look into the Autodefensas, even if it shies away from the odd moment of brutality.  It was clearly a work of intense labor and dedication, and I think that is what the Academy was trying to honor with its nomination.  But I honestly can’t wrap my mind around why its second vigilantic focus is even here, and that keeps the hard work from entirely paying off.