QUICK REVIEW: A Cure For Wellness

Gore Verbinski's A Cure for Wellness is one of those films that I admire for its craftsmanship and ambition but can't really quite recommend, a visually perfect but narratively tired horror/thriller.

Dane DeHaan is Lockhart, a brash, young financial workaholic sent to a remote Swiss health spa to find a fellow exec who never came back from a two-week vacation. When Lockhart first arrives at the immaculate mountain-top “resort”, he seems mildly annoyed by the parade of white-clothed seniors playing croquet and badminton and amused by the idea that the aquifer below the spa has the power to heal all manner of modern conditions.

When his attempts to convince his cohort to leave fall on deaf ears, our arrogant hero incurs the wrath of Volmer (Jason Isaacs), the spa's administrator. A freak accident results in a broken leg, forcing Lockhart onto crutches. It's not long before he has suspicions that something quite wrong is going on, something to do with tainted water, disturbingly passive patients, a two-century feud between the spa and the locals, and... eels?

A Cure for Wellness, if nothing else, is just beautiful. Verbinski has always been a talented creator of mise en scene in a wide variety of contexts: Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring, even The Lone Ranger all did a fantastic job of immersing you into their respective worlds. The “wellness centre” of A Cure for Wellness is a triumph of production design that feels like a revamped Overlook Hotel out of The Shining, all its colours calming, its edges soft.

And there are scenes that astound, such as an increasingly claustrophobic sequence of getting lost in a series of sauna chambers, all identical yellow bricks in perfect patterns, or a truly horrific scene involving a dentist's drill, and a front tooth (yeah, people who have issues watching teeth “stuff” close your eyes, it's an image I won't ever be forgetting no matter how much I visit r/eyebleach).

But overall, the whole affair feels... tired? I had a tough time caring for Lockhart, who's a jerk at the start of the film and pretty much stays that way through to the end. It doesn't help that DeHaan has made a career out of playing twisted psychotics (see: Chronicle for a great example), making his face hard to sympathize with.

Worse, the entire mystery at the heart of the film is unnecessarily convoluted and not particularly well exposed over the course of the two-plus hours of its running time. Worst, isn't surprising in terms of pure mystery or theme. Horror is scary not just because of what's on the screen, but because of what it connects to in the viewer's real world, and A Cure for Wellness doesn't really evoke much in the way of psychological or social fears.

This is, of course, a Verbinskian concern. He is very much a product of the Jerry Bruckheimer system, a visual experimentalist who's nearly an auteur in the way he deals with colour and texture, but very much someone you'd accurately say makes films that are more “style than substance”. Only this time his sensual experience isn't matched by the script, and the result is a genre trifle that I don't think will appeal to many.

Before Sunrise

Richard Linklater's 1995 Before Sunrise has always been a personal favourite of mine, a tear-jerking little movie about young love. And yet, a recent reviewing, the first in easily a decade, exposed a deeper, more philosophical, existential heart, a meandering, nearly maudlin look at what it actually means to be alive as a human being, among other human beings.

If you haven't seen it, you should, but here's a summary. Two cute twenty-somethings, the American boy Jesse and the French girl Celine, meet on a train in Europe. There's an obvious connection, and Jesse makes a brazen appeal: they get off in Vienna and spend the night exploring the city before he gets on a plane bound for America at 9:30 the next morning. She agrees, and the two embark on an epic wander through the city, walking and talking and falling in love... but realizing that what they have is most temporary, and in fear of what happens when the sun finally rises.

On the surface, and admittedly, the way I'd always seen it, Before Sunrise

is something of a 101-minute meet cute, two pretty good but mannered actors ad-libbing a beautiful start to a relationship that's somewhat tragic, but endearingly so. Because they know they're going to have to separate in the morning, and they know that it's likely they'll never see each other again, the proceedings are lent a special kind of emotional punch.

And it's a great movie if you just take it at that level. It's not “realistic” in any way, really, it's more of a play in that it feels fairly stagy and much of its power comes from little moments that are genuine but at the same time seem nearly overtly played. Jesse's hand, casually dipping to brush hair from Celine's face just a moment too late before she turns, or Celine semi-subconsciously nibbling her pinky, “oh God he's so deep” as Jesse oh-so-adorably talks about seeing his dead great-grandmother's ghost in a spray of water from a sprinkler when he was a child. Somehow, these just work, maybe if at some level we wish we were Jesse or Celine and it was a young, goateed, leather-jacketed Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy with her wide-set eyes, perfect ivory skin and devastating smile that were sitting across from us while we drank a beer on a cafe beside the Danube.

But, on another level, and maybe this comes only from watching it as an experienced (sure?) adult, Before Sunrise is surprisingly layered in terms of theme. Sure, it's a tragic love story, but the tragedy isn't just limited to a banal discussion of “love”. Instead, it's existential, a moment in time worthy of Roy Batty's memories, a long day that summarizes human experience in all its brevity.

One could easily miss this depth while distracted by all the eye-batting and lovely smooching, but as an older viewer it's easier to discern Before Sunrise's sub-textual evocation of the awful pleasure of the passage of time, and impermanence. It's not just the circumstantial aspects of Jesse and Celine's day-long journey, the shortened time-frame lending their relationship an intensity, a rush, it's that said relationship becomes a metaphor for a human life.

Many times throughout the film, and in a lovely, nuanced way, our lovers' conversation dips into discussions of time and finality. The two dance around the subject of the mortality of not only relationships but human beings as a species, never fully conflating the two – perhaps because of their young age – but we, and Linklater, know better. We know that relationships, and people, get old and die.

But we also know, and it's to the film's credit that Jesse and Celine occasionally pick up on this, that it's the very fact that life, and everything connected with life, is mortal... that this mortality is what gives life meaning. Celine is somewhat stereotypically afraid of death, and it's obvious that this French existentialist bent is somewhat being balanced by Jesse's American gumption, and it's telling that it's actually he's the one who cracks first when the two are faced with finally coming to grips with the thought that maybe they should let things play out as if they'll never see each other again. She's the old world, he's the new one, a surprisingly effective dichotomy that almost plays out like the dual nature of ourselves as humans.

Most interestingly, and inspiringly, Before Sunrise absolutely offers an antidote for this bleak fear... connection. In perhaps the film's most important scene, one that takes place in a small back alley, the two sitting on pallets, somewhat exhausted, Celine notes that maybe, just maybe, if God exists, he doesn't exist up there, or in you or I... but in that space between you and I, in the moments where two egos meet and decide that hey, maybe you mean as much to me as I do to myself.

It's a stunning moment, one easily lost amidst the cutesiness of the rest of the proceedings, and I'd almost like to think it's enough to overcome the film's very last moments of nearly frenzied panic. It's telling that the editing, which usually follows our lovers constantly, stopping only for the occasional montage, occasionally cuts out at key moments such as when they might have sex, or at the midst of certain very important discussions... and the film itself ends on a curiously open-ended note that absolutely begs for hope but most likely will have to suffice with melancholy.

It doesn't really matter if Jesse and Celine get together again, because what they had, they had. Closing shots from the morning after of places they'd been only hours earlier, now quiet and sun-dappled, somewhat contradict this optimism, revealing places devoid of humankind, empty chairs and benches. But only somewhat, because those spaces only mean something because of what happened there, and what happened was connection. And connection, if it's God, as Celine said, is thus eternal.

Quick Reviews: Doctor Strange and Rogue One

Doctor Strange. A friend said “go see this in the theatre”. I should have taken his advice, but had been burned by one too many visually-middling Marvel efforts to quite get over the hump of making the effort to pay twelve bucks.  But finally, at home, and sitting there with a touch of some bug wriggling through my veins, I figured "what the hell, at least it has Mads Mikkelsen".  And I don't know if it was the bugs or the phantasmagorical visuals on screen, but the resulting viewing was a decently fun time.

Doctor Strange isn't narratively special; if anything, its story of an arrogant white guy going east for salvation and finding wisdom/magic powers is painfully cliche. Benedict Cumberbatch (No sp! First time, even!) is a Manhattan neurosurgeon whose Dr. House-like photographic memory and brilliant mind seems to have given him a comparably ridiculous superiority complex.

One night he multitasks just a little too much while driving a curvy road and ends up smashing both of his hands to bits. Finding that no conventional means will bring his fingers back to what they once were, he follows a loose rumour all the way to a temple full of mystics in Nepal. Their leader, the “Ancient One” (a bald, smirking Tilda Swinton), goes all Morpheus on the Doctor and before you know it he's bending the laws of reality.

So yeah, it's Harry Potter + The Matrix. And weirdly, it's mostly pretty good, and the way Doctor Strange visually realizes the effects of magic on reality is downright amazing. Sorcerers weave patterns of light and fire in the air. Gravity swings sideways, upside down, in circles. Buildings multiply and fold in amongst themselves. Wormholes fling us from dimension to dimension, from crystalline, shimmering beauty to bulbous, fuzzy disgust.

You probably won't care what happens – Strange is himself such a douche that it's pretty tough to care if he makes it past his rambunctious self-love to a space of “let's save the world!”. But as far as the Marvel side-projects go, Doctor Strange ranks alongside the first Iron Man and Ant-Man as one that people who aren't really into superheroes could check out.

Rogue One. So, it was 1:00 a.m., I'd just finished Doctor Strange and Rogue One was also just sitting there and the bugs hadn't won yet. I thought “well, let's just see how it looks”. Whoops. Before I knew it, it's 3:30 in the morning and my brain is just reeling in wonder.

For those that aren't already entrenched in the “Star Wars” phenomenon, Rogue One is a standalone film that takes place just before the action that starts the original 1977 Star Wars. It follows the story of a ragtag group of castoffs who find themselves at the heart of a plot to steal the technical plans for the very first Death Star.

Again, sort of like Doctor Strange, the plot isn't entirely inspired. Well, that's being kind of unfair, since Rogue One shares some of the baggage carried by the recent Star Wars: The Force Awakens, forced to continually remind you that you're in a “Star Wars” movie by way of little (and big, that said) references to the saga. And I think Rogue One did that better, if only because it didn't have to showcase a clearly bored Harrison Ford.

Where this film really shines is its energy and visuals. Director Gavin Hood, who also did the recent Godzilla, has a great touch for composing action within a frame. Unlike Force Awakens, which kind of suffers from its own director's obsession with keeping everything on the screen at a sort of flat, middle-distance, Rogue One perfectly establishes distance and movement.

A star destroyer pops out of hyperspace, completely filling the frame and dwarfing the half-dozen Rebellion ships with its size, and proceeds to shred them to pieces with a barrage of laser blasts. The camera tracks a squadron of X-Wing fighters, whipping to the side as they pass and then pulling behind them as if on a string as they swirl and dive down to attack a shield-generating space station. A blind mystic fights a dozen stormtroopers simultaneously, twisting and dancing, his staff flailing and smacking them on the head and foot, pure controlled chaos.

I'd also be lying if I said I didn't get a little emotional at a couple of points, but interestingly, they weren't the obvious ones (i.e. when the film was making its connections with the rest of the series). It was the smaller moments, the times in between “big moments” when the excellent cast has their banter and whatnot.

So yeah, Rogue One is great fun, a welcome addition to the saga, and I hope that more of these get made. If this new “Han Solo” movie is even close to as good, and it's Lord and Miller (“Clone High”, the Jump Street remakes, The Lego Movie) so it likely will, we're looking at an interesting new trend in the way in which Hollywood does the remake/sequel thing.

Quick Reviews: Cafe Society and Nocturnal Animals

Cafe Society. The first Woody Allen film I've seen since... Midnight in Paris? Kind of a shame, as this semi-trifle is a pretty enjoyable effort, if not a little too slight to be entirely interesting or totally memorable. Reprising their chemistry nurtured in the quite likeable Adventureland and American Ultra, Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart are still super darned cute together. It's the 30s, and Eisenberg's Billy moves from the Bronx to Hollywood to hopefully get a job from his powerful studio-mogul uncle Phil Stern (Steve Carell, nicely toned down). He immediately falls for Stewart's Vonnie, Phil's secretary. The two connect immediately, but she's got a “journalist” boyfriend that keeps them from hooking up entirely. Plot twist? The journalist isn't a journalist, it's Phil. Oh, boy.

I kind of figured the entire movie would be a screwball comedy of missed connections and delayed declarations of great loves, but Cafe Society eschews anything so simple. Allen not only edits to surprise, extending throwaway character bits beyond their narrative purpose and then popping a revelation out of the blue, but the film shifts halfway through from something cutesy to something approaching something short of depressingly realistic. Before you know it the entire affair has shifted back to New York and Blake Lively livens up the show as a stupendously hot shiksa (can I say that?  I haven't read Portnoy's Complaint recently enough to remember if it's a bad word or not) while “House of Cards”' martyr of choice Carey Stoll magnificently suspenders-it-up as a smart-talkin' gangster.

Worth seeing? Yeah, depending on your tolerance for Eisenberg and Stewart (I have an abundance of love for both). It's pretty and cute and the aforementioned shift in tone is interesting enough if not really all that novel for an Allen film. Does it look like you'll like it? You'll like it.

Nocturnal Animals. Middlebrow thrillers are pretty rare now, what with theatres now oscillating between eye candy for teams of semi-drunk office ladies on prowl and uh, hot guys in spandex flying around and tackling each other.

I haven't seen director Tom Ford's A Single Man, but now I kind of want to, just to see if it's as frustratingly nearly-there as Nocturnal Animals. A sort of a story within a story, the film has Amy Adams once again wandering around a glass house with beautiful vistas (see also: Arrival). Adams is Susan, an L.A. art dealer/curator/somethingrather who puts on high budget art shows of the kind that cultural Marxists (like myself) love but probably only make sense to other cultural Marxists or their groupies.

Susan not only hates her job, because she wishes deep down she was an actual artist, but she's in the death-throes of a horrifically casual marriage to a cheating cad (the way-too-wholesome-to-authentically-play-a-cheating-dick Armie Hammer). One morning she receives a manuscript of a novel written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), who she dumped long ago when his failing career as an author didn't match up with her somewhat “realistic” needs for a more standard lifestyle.

The novel, dealing with Tony (also played by Gyllenhaal, surprise), deals with both the horrific assault on Tony and his wife and daughter in the Texas hinterlands and the subsequent revenge scenario. Susan, of course, reads the novel as a metaphor for their failed marriage and is immediately struck by existential dread. But as she moves further along a hope seethes within her, a hope for a return to a more idealistic time in her life, before her beauty-queen Texas mom and her consumerist, all-American values drove her to a real career and away from Edward.

This is one of those movies where your final reaction is either “oh, that's nice, I can get out of bed tomorrow” or “Oh Jesus Fuck, turn on the oven” depending on the very last shot, and on that level Nocturnal Animals is pretty good, even excellent. It has a lot to say about how the power of art is derived from our own personal reactions to how it relates to our life experience; Edward is literally using art to expose Susan to her unconscious self and it's pretty genius in that way as a dark, nearly cynical polemic on why art is so vital to human existence.

But there's something missing, some kind of directorial flourish or idiosyncrasy that you might have seen from other thriller experts like Da Palma or Verhoeven or even recent genre-apers like Jeremy Saulnier. The first few minutes is totally dynamite, opening on an art-piece consisting of buck naked, quite overweight women dancing while wielding American flags and sparklers, then cutting to visions of a smoggy, lethargic LA landscape, but after that Nocturnal Animals is stylistically sort of bland.

Worth seeing? I don't know. I think it's more of a curiosity than a must-see, a relic of earlier cinematic times. I almost want to champion it just for its ambition within the genre, but we all know that that's a slim rationale for a recommendation.  

Blue Valentine and the Lovely Transience of Love

Go, pretentiously.

There's a sense of permanence fuelling the desperation behind Valentine's Day. “If I don't have a partner for this one, I never will”. Obviously that's not the words actually flowing through singles' minds at the time, it's more of a subtext, an unconscious feeling that gives the whole thing a sort of existentialist dread. The same dread, in a way, pervades Blue Valentine. Derek Cianfrance's grungy, grimy, all close-up look at the two-day expiration of a marriage is laden with references to ageing, death, and impermanence... all framed within the context of various supposedly permanent institutions: America, capitalism, family, and most importantly (but never without ties to the others), marriage.

The film takes place in two timelines following the lives of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), one a grim procedural of what might be their last two days as a couple and the other a greatest hits tour of how they met cute and got together quick some five years prior. Cianfrance expertly flits back and forth between the two, giving us a truly insightful look at how the lives of couples are a mishmash of memory and perception and history, how both subtle, passive-aggressive jabs and brutal, knock-down arguments are often tied up with emotionally positive moments of the relationship's past.

Obviously, this isn't your typical Valentine's Day film, one that I only retroactively realized had “Valentine” in the title, weirdly enough, but while a lot of people would find it overly depressing and not in the spirit of the holiday itself, this writer would beg to differ. Of course, the (possible, goddamn spoiler alert) dissolution of a marriage is not a good thing, but Blue Valentine's aforementioned emphasis on the very ephemeral pleasures of the current moment are what I think power the film's essential meaning: find pleasure in the current moment, for it could fade and disappear at any time.

This may certainly be the waylaid desires of a critic/bachelor attempting to salvage hope from a film that, ostensibly, is about the futility and impermanence of “love”. After all, it's fucking Valentine's Day, and holy shit isn't that just a great reminder that you have failed at the Great American Dream of two cats and a fence or something.

It may be, but I've seen enough films to realize that it's not the ones that everyone else calls “depressing” that depress me. Things like your typical romantic comedy are the depressing ones, because you know there's no goddamn way your lower-middle-class butt is going to ever be that repressed millionaire who booked it halfway across Manhattan to make sure your Manic Pixie Whatever Girl doesn't get on the flight to London.

No, films like Blue Valentine, films that acknowledge that love is temporary, that love would mean absolutely freakin' nothing without the possibility that it could someday end – like life, amirite – these are life-affirming. The way in which Cianfrance muddles the timelines of the events makes the chronology of them immaterial. It doesn't matter when Dean and Cindy were so truly in love, his shitty ukulele playing and her awkward tap-dancing staging a gorgeously perfect moment of connection on a Brooklyn street, that moment is completely out of time.

In this way that I, a single man who ain't quite Hey Gurl young no more, can look back at my own past moments like this and acknowledge that their past-ness doesn't matter. I mean, you'll never see me singing with a ukulele, but I have ripped off a drunken serenade of “All of You”. It's as if love is always and will be always. And all of you in couples right now, maybe having just made love, or sitting waiting for your lover to come out of the bathroom so you can make love, or even parked on the couch Netflixing without any likely Chill to come (heh), reading this, remember that this moment is right now, but in a way it will always be always.