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…

In the Valley of Elah

2.5/4 stars

In the Valley of Elah is a movie that tries to be a mystery, a tragedy and a political statement. As a mystery it is dense and unpredictable (if somewhat dry), as a tragedy it is well acted and strikingly composed. However, the film's political agenda derails its success in other areas.

Tommy Lee Jones is the protagonist, a father who tries to solve his son's murder even as he grieves. His quiet intensity and constrained emotion are the film's greatest asset, and a reminder of Jones' incredible talent. He plays a character struggling with many emotions; anger, guilt, courage and determination, and he balances them all with great restraint. Charlize Theron gives a well drawn performance as the ambivalent police detective who helps him. The supporting cast includes numerous talented actors and strikes the right note as well, even if this often only requires them to be somber.

Whether or not they agree with the film's political sentiments (a condemnation of war in general and the Iraq war in particular), viewers will find that they rob the film's conclusion of the emotional payoff we should be feeling. Instead of playing as ingenious plot twist, the mystery's solution seems like an arbitrary deux es machina, designed to take us by surprise in the most tragic way possible. The use of a flashback at the end to twist the knife undermines the spare and direct storytelling style that the movie has established, and its powerful final image seems an unearned contrivance. Paul Haggis, while a highly talented writer and director, also has a history of such heavy-handedness (see Crash). In the Valley of Elah is another entry in his catalogue that overshoots the correct balance between drama and message.

Spider-Man

3/4 stars

A pretty good movie, but with a disappointing ending. A little more self-important and clunky than its two superior sequels.

Written September 8, 2007.

Pineapple Express

2.5/4 stars

By some strange coincidence, I saw two movies this weekend that involve older men dating 17 year old girls. One was Pineapple Express, the other Woody Allen's 1979 film Manhattan. You could hardly be blamed for not wanting to consider the similarities between these two films, but they do share a certain honest quality in their dialogue and their treatment of relationships. This is the primary draw of Pineapple Express. Seth Rogen is quickly becoming one of my favorite comedic performers, and I suspect I'm not alone in this. As a writer, he's certainly very good at coming up with one liners for himself and crafting hilarious exchanges, both improvised and on paper. However, like the other prominent film that has Rogen in a writing credit, Superbad, Pineapple Express suffers from a rather nearsighted construction. While these movies get a lot of mileage out of joking around between their leads, they fall short whenever they try to be movies. The bigger setpieces, such as a car chase and a massive shootout are unsatisfying, and the arc of the film itself is meandering and lacks closure. You will laugh a lot in this movie, but unlike superior Apatow produced efforts like Knocked Up or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, you won't leave the theater satisfied that you saw something entirely worthwhile. There's something very cheap about the ending of Pineapple Express, the way various elements are left unresolved (like the aforementioned girlfriend), and the random, credibility straining manner in which others are resolved. Maybe other viewers will be less bothered by this than me, but you get the impression that it was thought that every important part of the movie could be improvised, and through some magic, the end result would be okay. I prefer a movie that knows where it's going, what it's doing, and can provide a why for the things that it shows us.

Written August 16, 2008.