Drive (Sunday, September 18, 2011) (80)

Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn makes really interesting movies that are about suberficiality and technical surface qualities as much as they're about genres. Drive is an operatic noir but also a baroque driving movie and borrows from all of those subgenres in a very interesting visual way. There really isn't much of any narrative in this film: Ryan Gosling plays a driver who works part time at a mechanic's shop, part time as a Hollywood stunt driver and part time as a getaway driver for Los Angeles heist gangs. He has a direct way of dealing with everything he does, a style that can easily get ultraviolent in the blink of an eye. He falls for a typical noir mol, this time played dully by Carey Mulligan (that's the only way she knows how to do anything), who enters the plot only as a device to move the story to its next level. Any search for depth of story will lead one down blind alleys and into oblivion. This is a film about surface and it is interesting and quite beautiful in that context. Albert Brooks plays a wonderful bad guy here and is deserving of any acclaim he might get. All in all a fun film and pretty one, but not a great one.

Stars: 3 of 4

Brighton Rock (Monday, July 25, 2011) (58)

Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock is an adaptation of a novel by Graham Greene (which he also adapted into a screenplay for a film by the same name in 1947). As is typical of Greene, the film deals with the underbelly of society and with Catholicism. This is a generally good reexamination of the book with a slightly simplified structure that focuses more on the central characters and relationships (also typical of Greene).

Pinkie (Sam Riley) is a young thug rising up the power ladder of the Brighton underworld in the early 1960s (the book was originally set in the 1930s). He seems to have absolutely no ties to society, no family or friends and no ability to trust anyone of his mobby cohorts. He is, however, a Catholic, at least in name, though he seems oblivious to sin or any sort of real religious practice. He's a total wild card who might strike out violent at any moment.

As the film opens, he witnesses the murder of his gang boss and mentor by a rival gang and decides to kill the assailant. When he does this, a naïve young woman, Rose (Andrea Riseborough), sees him and he decides the only way to protect himself and his gang is to get her to fall in love with him to make sure she won't tell the cops what she saw. As the two start spending time together, Rose's boss in her tea house, Ida (Hellen Miren), begins to understand that Pinkie is dangerous for Rose, though she can't convince her to dump him.

As all the mob action is going on, there's a war between the Mods and the Greasers, with a totally over-the-top Vespa-riding sequence ripped out of Quadrophenia (or The Young Girls of Rochefort). Though this really doesn't relate well to the greater story, it does allow for more gang violence and looks pretty cool.

Almost everything we see in Brighton is dirty and ugly. There's a scrappy quality to both Rose and Pinkie, her hair is always disheveled and never looks washed, his room in his boarding house and the apartment she lives in with her parents are totally falling apart and filthy. Its hard not to notice that Britain was in the middle of very tough economic times during this era. Meanwhile, Joffe does a great job, though of showing how Pinkie and his gang live in squalor, while the rival gang boss, Colleoni (Andy Serkis) lives in the posh environment of a fancy, sleek hotel.

There is a constant sense that Pinkie is dangerous and unbridled by "societal norms". He cuts people and takes power without any sense of decency or morals. He speaks to Rose about his Catholicism (though much less then he does in the book) and how it's the only thing that makes sense to him, the only thing that he finds reliable. It's never totally clear, however if he's doing this to sell himself to her (and her family) or if he really believes it.

He seems to be like the character of the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, where he's got religion figured out to use it for his dark ends. I can imagine Pinkie explaining that he'll be forgiven for his sins when he dies, but in the meantime, he will keep killing. Sadly, he never seems self-aware or deep enough to have such an interesting thought.

The acting throughout the film is fantastic, most notably Riley and Riseborough. They both seem like kids who are in love. She has no self-confidence and understandably things that Pinkie is the best she can get; he's conniving in the short run and thinks he can out-maneuver anyone who comes his way. They're a great pair, filled with young angst and a bit cheeky that they know what they're doing is wrong.

Joffe really does bungle the ending here, drawing it out to a silly 15 minutes, when it could end in one and then giving us a sad and disconnected idea of Rose's victimhood. I wish he had ended it about four times before he did (or rearranged the kicker into a different part of the script). Really the whole second half of the film (after the Mods and Rockers riot) is a forgettable mess, though it still looks good and has some redeeming elements.

Joffe does admirable job directing this film, using really great editing to give a constant sense of violence lying just below a peaceful surface and updating the film noir model. His real problems here are in his script (well, his adapted script), where characters are underwritten and scenes are misplaced in the narrative or unnecessary altogether.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Lincoln Lawyer (Sunday, March 20, 2011) (17)

On paper The Lincoln Lawyer seems like a great film noir in the grandest Hollywood sense, but it is executed so poorly it just comes off as a really terrible film.

Mick Haller is the eponymous advocate, who gets his name because he rides around Los Angeles in a Lincoln Town Car (seriously - that's all the name means). It seems he has an office (at least he has an assistant), but he never spends time there. Instead he rides around town going from one court house to another and from one client to another. He has a driver, apparently because his license was suspended at some point in the past, but he has his license back now and still uses the driver mostly - except for the middle act when the guy is mysteriously not around. Whatever.

He's sent to meet with a rich-boy client, Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), who is being charged with assaulting a girl who turns out to be a prostitute. Roulet says he didn't do it, and his story is very convincing, however when Mick gets to digging - or gets his investigator, Frank (William H. Macy), to dig - they find that he's not the boy scout he seems to be. Mick's ex-wife, Maggie (Marisa Tomei) is a district attorney (of course) and they get into fights about their daughter, have sex now and again and share confidential information with one another. That's just what exes do, dontcha know.

I really appreciate how much of an ode to Hollywood noir this really is, with silly, random gunfights, views of obscure parts of Los Angeles and rich boys getting into trouble for their bad habits that involve unseemly elements of town, but the script here (written by John Romano, based on a book by Michael Connelly), aside from the basic plot points is really terrible. The dialogue sounds like it was written for a teenybopper soap opera and the story is so inert, it's no surprise when twists come or when characters flip.

There's absolutely no style to be found at all, as most of it takes place in daylight (that's an interesting update of noir if there's no way to get interesting shadows and lighting that gave the genre its name) and in a shity Town Car from the 1980s. Oh yeah - the stupid car that inspired the title is a late-model Town Car - because somehow Mick wouldn't care to buy a new car or something. Why not call it the Mercedes Lawyer or the Land Rover Lawyer? Is the American auto industry in such shape that this guy's heap would be its salvation?

Most of the acting here is terrible, but the actors aren't really working with any good lines. It seems much more like a high school drama club performance of a noir than any real movie with professional players. It's really badly directed (by Brad Furman). I guess this film serves the purpose of how to make a bad film noir with only bad choices. Film students can dissect each scene looking at what Furman does and lean how to do the opposite. That would probably make a pretty good movie!

Stars: 1 of 4