Milk

2/4 stars

Note: I don't believe that you can have "spoilers" for a historical drama, so I wrote this review without regard for those concerns. If it turns out I'm wrong, and you can have spoilers... then this review's got 'em.

My objection to Milk may seem a little strange. I thought, first of all, that Sean Penn was exceptional in the title role. Without hardly changing his appearance at all, Penn is nonetheless completely swallowed by the character, embodying a unique set of mannerisms, a new persona. He has impressed me in a number of movies so far, Mystic River, I Am Sam, 21 Grams… but it wasn’t until this one that I realized how completely new he is in each performance. Actors ranging from the dispensable Dane Cook to the formidable Al Pacino have a stage persona, a set of expectations that they will often fall back on. Those like Penn, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Anthony Hopkins (to name a few) who always seem to manage a strong presence without one are impressive to me. Similarly, I’m impressed by the craft that goes into the creation of a successful period piece. A film set in the 1970s is as difficult in many ways to make convincing as one set in 1200, or in Middle Earth. Obviously my knowledge of the 70s is mostly based on movies, but still… In these areas, Milk is successful.

Nonetheless, I didn’t think it was a very good film. I’m a little more writer-centric, I think, than most reviewers you’re bound to read, but my problem with Milk was one I’ve never encountered before. The problem is that I don’t really think the story has a rising action and a falling action. In fact, I don’t think it has much dramatic structure at all. Yes, there is a brief denouement that follows Milk’s death, but this is so obviously necessary (and uninspired) that they get no credit for it. Essentially, Milk just happens until it’s done happening. The first scene is an arbitrary point in time; it almost feels like an in media res. From there, one thing follows another. There’s no change in pace, no dramatic tension, and as a consequence there are no stakes. Milk was a passionate man, and you’re interested in his struggle, but you don’t know what his goal within the context of the movie is. If you know the history behind the character of Harvey Milk then you already know that he will be elected to the board of supervisors and eventually assassinated by Dan White. I assume my knowledge on the subject is roughly average, and I didn’t know any more by way of details than that, but it was enough to rob the movie of any degree of suspense. This isn’t an inevitable feature of a historical drama, but when you make the whole question of the movie “Will he or won’t he do the thing that is the only reason he’s famous enough to have a movie,” you’re in a bad position.

This brings us to the summation, which seems to me to be the part of the review where I say good things about bad movies and vice versa. To that end: There’s a lot to like in Milk. Josh Brolin as Dan White is nearly as good as Penn, and I was glad that the movie resisted the easy temptation to play it as Milk being assassinated for being gay. The actors are excellent, the production is terrific, the dialogue snappy. For all I know, most people are likely to agree with all those rave reviews out there. But I don’t think that Milk works on a basic level, so I call it a failure. Last year, I wrote a 1 star review of No Country for Old Men, expecting to be shouted down by anyone I knew who cared enough to read it. What happened instead was that I heard, for the first time, from a lot of people who agreed with me. I’m looking forward to the feedback on this one…

The Wrestler

4/4 stars

The Wrestler is an impeccably real experience, a gritty movie about a man’s dirty, small and ever-contracting world. Mickey Rourke’s performance has been the focus of the movie’s acclaim, but what sealed it for me was the veracity of the life that Darren Aronofsky gave him as a boundary to that performance. Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Ramzinski, a washed up legend of a pro-wrestler. He has sacrificed his body and everything else in his life for years over his passion for the ring, and is now left with pitifully little to show for it. I was reminded (as I often am) of Michael Mann’s work. Wrestling is for Ramzinski what Mann would call “the elevated experience of his life,” and like Mann’s characters, his passion for it leaves little else in his world intact. He lives in a trailer park and is behind on rent; he relies on neighborhood kids and a stripper named Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) for companionship. He believes that he and Cassidy may have a future together, and the movie illustrates that they do have a lot in common. They’re both in the body business and are both the worse for wear; the time it has bought them is running out. Rourke gives a performance of incredible commitment and believability, to say nothing of its physical aspects. His loneliness, his regrets, his good heart and his bad decisions, Rourke makes them all tangible.

I was almost deterred from giving The Wrestler a perfect score by a number of small factors. The first is Evan Rachel Wood, who is inexplicably popular among both critics and real people. I got tired of her big sad eyes and the camera that never tired of drinking in her good looks in Across the Universe. Here in The Wrestler, she didn’t really have time to annoy me, but it was difficult not to notice that she didn’t really do much. A lot of people have said she’s brilliant; even Mickey Rourke has sung her praises, but whenever I see one of her performances, I see acting and not the character. Perhaps Rourke and others have seen some better movies than I have. Another problem is that at times Randy does things that seem so improbably stupid that I have trouble continuing to sympathize with him. The best example may be when he blows off his daughter to go drinking, then comes crawling back for forgiveness, so soon after regaining her love the first time. You’ll recognize other examples for yourself. What I came to realize though, is that while we may not see the world on Randy Ramzinski’s terms, and he may not behave as we wish he would, we still understand him. Like an underdog sports team, we root for him even when rooting for him is hard. In the end, I was moved by the foolish extent of his dedication, smiling at his self sacrificing bravado. The Wrestler is one of those movies that sounds depressing but isn’t; it enriches you by allowing you to feel for another person’s small triumphs.

Frost/Nixon

3.5/4 stars

Going into this Oscar season, from the time the nominations were announced, I was most enthusiastic about Frost/Nixon. Although it's true that I have an unusual dislike for Ron Howard as a director (I struggle to think of one of his films before this one that I have any affection for), the reteaming of writer Peter Morgan and actor Michael Sheen after their collaboration in the incredible The Queen was something to be excited about. In the end I did like Frost/Nixon quite a bit, but not as much as I wanted to.

Although, true to its title, the film plays as an examination of two characters, it is easily the historical enigma of Richard Nixon that the whole effort is centered on. The subject of the film is the interviews; the subject of the interviews was his tumultuous presidency. Even that was in many ways the final act of a convoluted political career. Frank Langella brings Nixon to life flawlessly, and the true genius of the script is that it allows him to be two things at once. On the one hand, he is the villain of the piece, a chillingly cunning and unrepentant opponent. On the other, he is a lonely and tragic figure. How can you not pity a man who worked so hard for something and lost it due to his own overbearing flaws? Langella is brilliant, in voice, appearance and temperament. He embodies the good and the bad equally, never far from each other, the stubbornness that began as righteous and drifted slowly yet irrevocably in the other direction. Even as Kevin Bacon turns in a distinctly unlikable performance as his chief of staff, it is tempered with an undercurrent of fierce protectiveness. In politics, an admission of wrongdoing on the scale of which Nixon is guilty is career suicide. At the same time, the interviews are his only chance to tell his side of the story, an apology his only opportunity for redemption.

This is where Frost comes in, and Michael Sheen expresses this in his portrayal of the character: while everyone around him wants simply to skewer and ruin the former president, Frost knows his duty as an interviewer is to come to know him on a human level. At the same time, the circumstances of what occurs are such that a conflict arises that neither can take lightly. The moment in which Frost realizes this is the turning point of the film. While Langella gives the outstanding performance of the movie, Morgan's writing and the fine ensemble are excellent in every corner.

The direction is where this movie finds trouble. Like in The Queen, real news footage is used in combination with the dramatization to supply a real, grounded feel. However, whereas in The Queen this gave insight into the perspective of characters who were seeing their every move documented for an angry public, in Frost/Nixon it seems to be an excuse to spoon-feed information or commentary that the movie otherwise can't be bothered with. Unlike this movie, The Queen was never speaking directly to the audience. Here, we sometimes seem to be watching a dramatic film, but other times we're watching a mocumentary, seemingly as it suits the director. The effect is that of a cellophane wrapping around the art of the film: unpleasant, distracting and cheap. While there are some interesting effects as work (the way the interview scenes are framed to move in and out of a television perspective) overall the style seems cluttered and uncertain.

A regrettable amount of this review is Oscar season quibbling. Frost/Nixon is as much worth sitting through as anything else (even compared to some of this year's other candidates) even if it lacks the near-perfection of its excellent predecessor.