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Showing posts with label Jessica Chastain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jessica Chastain. Show all posts

Interstellar Review: Bad Habits Get In the Way of Greatness

Interstellar



Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway

When I walked out of the theater after Interstellar ended, a woman commented loudly, “Maybe they'll have translators waiting for us to explain to us what that meant.” Either she wasn't paying attention or she doesn't have working ears, because Interstellar is a movie that fails the old “show don't tell” test at every turn. How anyone could walk out of a theater confused by a movie so burdened by over explanation is astonishing to me. Director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception) has a habit of holding his audience's hands, not allowing his evocative visuals and stellar casts to do the heavy lifting they could. Maybe he isn't sure of the strength of his visual acumen or maybe he doesn't believe in his audience, but either way the result is preventing the audience from being able to make up their own minds about his movies. They tell us exactly the filmmaker's intent, an often suffocating one-way street that takes out a lot of the fun, and sometimes the longevity, from his films.

Interstellar suffers this problem more acutely than many of his other films. Whereas Inception was a movie built like a multilayered puzzle, with completely fictional rules that needed explaining, Interstellar takes place in a possible future for the world we live in, much of it well researched by Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan. The concepts of relativity, space flight, global warming, wormholes, the effects of loneliness, and parenthood are explicated ad nauseam. It's a shame, too, because Nolan, through the use of the camera and his actors, especially conflicted protagonist Matthew McConaughey, makes the emotional effects – emotion being the thing cinema does best – tangible. When McConaughey explains his decision to go on the humanity-saving mission to Anne Hathaway's scientist-astronaut, he makes platitudes about how parenthood is all about making your children feel safe. This was made abundantly clear in his loving – and occasionally truth obfuscating – interactions with his children in the hour or so the (nearly three hour long) movie spends on a dying Earth. We don't need the movie to tell us this, because we're already hard-wired to understand visual stimuli, particularly the kind related to self-preservation. The same goes for Nolan hammering us with information about why the Earth is ravaged by climate change and how it works – we get it with the dust storms, the dying crops, the people dying of lung infections.

And unfortunately, the worst of it is in the space scenes, including a planet on which spending an hour equals seven years in Earth time. The initial mention of it is fine to make sure the audience understands the stakes, but the hemming and hawing McConaughey and company do once they land is exhausting and undercuts the thrill of seeing the existential danger facing them. This continues time and again, all the way through the climax, which takes place in what looks like a box covered in puke green plaid wrapping paper – go see the movie and you won't be able to unsee that description – a scene that could be done in complete silence and it would still be fairly clear, but with more subtlety and, heaven forbid, some ambiguity.

But I mean it when I say go see
Interstellar, because, for all its faults and distrust in the audience's ability to stick with it, it remains thrilling and emotionally satisfying – from a full range of emotions. I mentioned earlier how the first hour takes place on Earth, and despite the qualms with explanation, it's not boring. McConaughey's character, Cooper, is a man stuck in a bad situation trying to make the best of it. He's a former pilot and engineer pushed by circumstances into farming, which the conventional wisdom of The People says is the only truly noble occupation in a world where a harshly warming planet makes every morsel necessary – other occupations and ambitions must be put aside to ensure a survival that still isn't likely. He lost his wife because of that deemphasis on grander plans, and he sees things getting worse. His son is locked into a life of farming, too, because of mediocre test scores. His daughter, Murph (played by Mackenzie Foy as a child and Jessica Chastain as an adult), is clearly brilliant and driven to be in charge of her fate. The connection between father and daughter is the crux of the film, and the scene when McConaughey must say goodbye to Murph after deciding to embark on the adventure at the cost of possibly never seeing her again is a doozy, packed with the weight of Steven Spielberg's best – it makes sense, given that Spielberg was originally slated to be Interstellar's director. I got a lump in my throat, which is rare for me in a movie, and even rarer for a Nolan film, given his emphasis on the brain in lieu of the heart.


Interstellar is a solid adventure film despite its flaws, but its disappointment lies in how close it is to being a great one. The bones are in place for sublimity, but its constant insecure – whether that insecurity is linked to Nolan's belief in himself or the audience, I'm not 100 percent on – insistence on explaining itself shoots itself in the foot.

This Weekend at the Movies: A Preview

We live in one of the greatest decades for American cinema since moving images were first captured. Since about 2007, every year has had at least a handful of masterpieces from every genre and budget, and that pace seems to be picking up. Unfortunately, due to financial matters (re: being broke), I did not go see as many movies as I would have liked this summer. I saw three of the big blockbusters, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Godzilla, and Guardians of the Galaxy, in theaters. These films, combined with things like this Scott Tobias piece at TheDissolve, make me think this was a superb year for the movies of the “bang-zoom” variety. I will have to catch up as things like X-Men: Days of Future Past and Edge of Tomorrowhit Blu-Ray and streaming services and wish retroactively that I had been richer during the months of April through August, 2014.








However, those same budgetary concerns may soon not apply as I work on getting critics' passes to the fall films typically associated with Oscar season. I will attend the Chicago Independent Film Festival next month for this here publication, but that is only part of the cinematic coverage I hope to bring you. So, with the influx of auteur-ish films on the horizon from now through December, I will be bringing Halfstack readers a quick rundown of what to expect in theaters each weekend. It is not intended to be comprehensive, but more about the movies that personally excite me and those filmmakers and performers I think deserve more eyeballs. Again, depending on cash flow or (hopefully) free screenings, I look to have reviews of the films throughout the following week.

So here are a few movies opening this weekend, September 12, that caught my eye. A note here because September is usually a transitionary month, with some interesting art films getting released, but also a slew of things the studios didn't feel enough confidence in to release during the more lucrative summer season. It leads to some odd thrillers placed alongside costume dramas. It's a great time for counter programming.

The Drop
Director: Michael R. Roskam
Writer: Dennis Lehane (adapted from his short story “Animal Rescue”)
Starring: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Matthias Schoenaerts


Author Dennis Lehane has seen a large number of his novels adapted by Hollywood in the last decade plus – Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. The Drop puts Lehane's low level toughs in Brooklyn instead of Boston. Hardy and Gandolfini run a “drop bar” for all the less-than-legal money flowing through the neighborhood. Bad things happen, they get robbed, and soon desperate choices must be made.

Having a “hard-boiled”(the ins and outs of those low on the criminal totem pole) plot is generally an easy way to get me to see a movie, but a hard-boiled movie with all-world talent like Hardy (Bronson remains one of the greatest films of the last decade), Gandolfini in what is likely his final screen role after his unfortunate passing earlier this year, and Rapace, who is capable of creating otherworldly empathy (she was the highlight of Brian De Palma's otherwise dreadful Passion), then it could be a new favorite.

No Good Deed
Director: Sam Miller
Writer: Aimee Lagos
Starring: Idris Elba, Taraji P. Henson, Leslie Bibb


Idris Elba is an indispensable actor. From his early days as criminal striver Stringer Bell on HBO's The Wire to his supporting role as a god in the Thor films to “cancel[ing] the apocalypse” in last year's Pacific Rim, he's done a lot of big stuff. Missing from his resumé, though, is a trashy thriller where he gets to be a genuine malcontent baddie.

And make no mistake,
No Good Deed is trash. From the trailer alone, I can tell there's a strong sense of dum-dum moralizing and some scenery chewing for Elba. But even if it's just a paycheck gig, the presence of Henson (whose kind role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was one of the few highlights of that overly saccharine film) and Bibb (charming as the straight woman in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy and the first two Iron Man movies) may class up the joint a little. Either way, this could be a good one to half pay attention to on a lazy Saturday afternoon one day.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
Director: Ned Benson, making his feature debut
Writer: Ned Benson
Starring: James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Viola Davis, Bill Hader


Originally conceived as two films about the arc of a relationship, one from the female perspective (Chastain) and one from the male (McAvoy), recent edits have made them one, hence the Them subtitle. Rumor has it according to last week's Filmspotting podcast that all three versions will be released in some form in the future, but for now, filmgoers are getting the combination cut.

The trailer gives a couple hints as to how that will work, with different takes and angles to show the slipperiness of human understanding and interaction. It looks ambitious as all get out, and the two leads are possibly the best in the game right now. Chastain especially has been on an all-universe roll the last few years, with The Tree of Life and Zero Dark Thirty being particular standouts. Now they pair in what looks to be an even-handed approach to relationships, with the highs and lows receiving a lot of screen time.

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