Review of the film Greenberg

             It takes so much energy to be angry all the time. Exhausting and painful. But it is also invigorating; it can give purpose. Director Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg is about two people on separate sides of that emotion, at different stages in their lives, who somehow still seem to want to understand each other.

Greta Gerwig excels in her performance of Florence, a 25-year-old living nearly rudderless in Los Angeles, working as a personal assistant for a wealthy family and barely pursuing a singing and songwriting career. Vulnerable and expressive to a fault, she falls into bed with men because it is easier to just go along than say no. She desperately wants to have a purpose and, since she cannot find her own, it seems that other people’s purposes for her are fine right now. When the Greenberg family offers to write her a check before they go on a long trip to Vietnam, she brushes the urgency of her bad financial situation to the side and insists she will come by the next day to pick it up after they have left.

            This brings her into contact with Roger, the brother of Mr. Greenberg, who has come to live at the house while the family is gone. They have a strange first interaction, awkward and uncomfortable. But Florence insists that Roger call her for anything he may need.

Ben Stiller plays Roger Greenberg as a caustic, unlikable human being heading into what is definitely a wasteland of middle age (of his own making). He recently was released from an institution and has returned to Los Angeles from New York City to “do nothing,” as he says. He certainly embraces the situation. His brother and family have gone away for six weeks and left him with the house and dog. He spends his time composing letters to various organizations he feels have wronged him in some way, one being United Airlines for having a seat reclining button that did not work to his liking. He calls an old band mate (Rhys Ifans) and has the kind Brit drive him around and listen somewhat patiently to his constant criticism of every detail the world has decided (in his mind) to assault him with.

Roger does call Florence and suggests they go out for a drink, more out of boredom than any attraction. They end up instead at her apartment, sharing the single Corona in the fridge. Roger makes a strange pass at her that she, at first, does not deter. Then, as he lifts up her skirt, she becomes skittish. She reveals that she has just come out of a long-term relationship and is afraid of simply going from “having sex to sex to sex.” “Who’s the third sex?” asks Roger Greenberg. Florence blinks. “You.”

It seems that Roger isn’t just having trouble getting laid. The story reveals that his old band had been offered a big record deal back in their heyday that Roger flatly refused, much to the sorrow of the other band members. This bad decision colors his interactions with all his old acquaintances. Everyone is still mad at him for abandoning what should have been instant success simply because he didn’t buy into big labels. They’re right to keep up the anger. Roger doesn’t appear to have any idea what he did to the people who had been around him.

But Florence is different. She is younger and impressionable. She thinks Roger is a sensitive and thoughtful human being. He easily pulls her back into some sort of weird semblance of a relationship. They keep ending up pulling each other’s clothes off. But every time it seems like things are going somewhere good, Roger keeps pushing her away. Roger Greenberg makes it almost impossible to like him, even for someone, like Florence, who wants to like everyone.

It isn’t an easy task to watch Roger’s interactions without hating him. He has so closed himself off from sentiment that all he can emote is anger at a world that has (somewhat rightly) rejected him. An easier film than Greenberg would shove in some sort of epiphany for Roger to realize and give him time to apologize fully for his many transgressions, begin to heal. He and Florence would certainly end up together. However, Baumbach does not have redemption for his lead character in mind. It is something more realistic, humane and also touching. This is a man who, despite every effort to the contrary, can be loved. Unfortunately, he cannot find it within himself to return that love.

Review of the film Primer

            Primer is for nerds, computer programmers, philosophers, Mensa members and dorks. The film was directed and filmed mostly in a garage by Shaun Carruth for $7,000 and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004. It has gained a cult status in the film world, among film dorks and nerds for the ideas and conundrums that it lays out for its audience. It looks great and certainly leaves one with many questions.

The film begins with four young men hashing out complex ideas of programming that are well beyond my understanding. It’s unclear whether any of them fully understand what they are discussing either, but they are comfortable pushing their minds and knowledge. They work out of a garage and use the dining room table as their meeting place. Two of the men, Abe and Aaron begin a new project, one that has implications that are unknown but huge. They increasingly push the other two away from their work. They steal a catalytic converter for platinum and rip a part an old refrigerator for its Freon. The machine they create seems to produce an exorbitant amount of protein, more protein that it has time to secrete. Maybe time inside the machine is occurring at a different rate than that outside of it. So they build two similar machines that can each house a person.

Perhaps the two leads know on some level what they are doing, but it’s obvious that they are in over their heads. It’s always as if we’re eaves-dropping on their conversations—things are hazy and said quickly, excitedly and softly, important science and principles of physics are left out.  It is obvious why someone would want to be able to travel forward and back in time, but what of the dangerous implications?

There certainly is danger lurking in their experiments. After a few times in the machine, one of the two men has blood coming out of his ear. Why and how did this happen? What period of time did this happen in? A future they have not encountered yet? Then there is a moment where they look through a pair of binoculars, watching what appears to be their doubles leaving the storage facility where the machine is stored. Are the Abe and Aaron being watched the two living in real time and the Abe and Aaron doing the watching those who traveled back in time? It’s unclear to me, and it will at least be somewhat difficult to figure out for those smarter than I.

This could be a fun undertaking—perhaps watching the film multiple times, taking notes, etc. But I’ve got to tell you that seems like a lot of time and effort to waste for a movie that doesn’t love, or even hate, its characters. They are merely there to advance the puzzle and, though their persons are put into danger by their undertaking, it doesn’t seem all that important if they are hurt or not. The other characters that litter the film are fully marginalized. They are simply there to populate the situations in which the two leads find and put themselves in. I had the opposite reaction to this movie that I had with Ben Affleck’s The Town—the ideas and narrative put forth by Primer are endlessly inventive and interesting, but putting concern behind the leads is something that the film does not allow. Sure, there are wonderful loopholes and loose ends to ponder, but there is nothing that makes me truly care enough to take the time.

Review of the film The Town

            The Town, directed by Ben Affleck, is ultimately an overblown Bostonian affair that left me slightly sleepy. I guess the tiredness came from the amount of energy the film requires a viewer to put into caring about the characters that it takes such thoughtfulness to draw and then almost predictably puts through action movie trope paces and ends. It’s kind of exhausting to watch, not least of all because the lone Boston native, the director and lead, has the worst accent in the entire cast.

The film begins with a quote explaining to viewers that the mostly blue collar Charleston neighborhood of Boston is home to more bank robbers per square inch than most American penitentiaries. This immediately leads to a robbery scene involving four men masked as nuns with melting faces doing a job on a large, profitable bank branch. Things get hairy. They take a hostage—the pretty and new assistant manager—whom they do let free. But this becomes a loose end that must be taken care of, in the form of the team leader, Doug (Ben Affleck), following the scared beauty to ensure that she does not give up anything to the sniffing Federals. It seems silly that Claire (Rebecca Hall) is so naïve to think that this man suddenly snooping around her life does not have a hidden agenda, but she is emotionally devastated by the robbery situation. She is out of his league, obviously so, and there is some interesting class tension that plays out. Inevitably, Doug and Claire fall for each other, and the tension shifts to Doug’s relationship with his team and lifestyle. He no longer wants to rob banks for a living. Claire shows him what he does want and that is a life beyond circumnavigating the law and the bad associations that it brings. We all know where this will lead—the last and ultimate heist.

Doug is level headed and smart, too profitable an investment to allow to walk away. There are elements that, of course, want him to continue his thieving ways. The wonderful character actor Pete Postlethwaite enters the picture as an insidious florist slash money launderer who pushes the issue to a scary point. There is also Doug’s best friend and partner, Jem (Jeremy Renner), who cannot imagine a life outside of thieving. He violently wants to hold onto the status quo that he and Doug possessed before that previous fateful robbery. And the Federals are onto their schemes at this point. All this propels the action towards that final job where it is all too easy to realize what is coming about.

It’s to the director, actors and writers’ credit that viewers care about these people as much as they do upon the unfolding of that final act. To put these carefully drawn characters through this weightless melodrama is insensitive. It seems that Affleck is a good wrangler of actors’ performances but is poor at picking a complex and challenging story to put them, and us, through. The Town is never boring, but it is a bit sad and tiresome.

Review of the film The Hurt Locker

            The ongoing conflict in Iraq is beyond my understanding here in the U.S. It takes place half a world away in an environment and culture unlike anything to which I have been close. The whirlwind of issues surrounding the events past and present there are things I will probably, hopefully, never experience. My life can be complicated, frightening, strange. But I have to remind myself not to forget those true stories that leak around the curve of the world to the United States, that people as real as me experience a day to day life much more harrowing than my own.

            It may be a fictional narrative, but the film The Hurt Locker attempts to place before our eyes some of the true harrowing nature of the Iraqi conflict. The story by journalist Mark Boal tells of the day-to-day affairs of a three-person bomb squad in Baghdad. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, it plays like a series of adventures, albeit life-threatening adventures, as the soldiers go about disarming IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device) throughout the war and sanction-ravaged city.

The unit is newly lead by Staff Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner), a man who is brilliant at his work, who is teetering on the brink of death and sanity every day as he goes about doing what the Army has charged him with and what he loves doing. We can see the adrenaline junkie that he has become; he throws caution away in order to do that which he is the very best at, defusing bombs. The other two men in the squad, Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are not as enthralled with their task of supporting James. They are both scared by what they do, understandably. The days until they can go home are mental ticks they mark off in their heads; it’s an almost visible occurrence. They want to survive, but James seems to only want to get to the next fix of his obsession, damn the consequences.

            Those consequences are starkly evident throughout this film. Director Bigelow never allows the audience to forget what the stakes are as the team goes from one deadly situation to the next. The story centers on these three men, but it also is about those who live and die on the margins of their tale. This is, most specifically, the Iraqi people who must survive in this landscape of constant war and continue, or not, to do so even after these soldiers have gone home to their families across the world. I looked at those individuals the hardest, the population the Army is supposed to be protecting, supporting—those whose dignity and lives are forever on the line.

This is a nerve-jangling film, suspenseful and hypnotic. There are so many levels to why this is, but I think it has a lot to do with the focus Bigelow shows. She does not stray from these men’s story, but those incidents and individuals that ultimately invade that tale and those lives are not simply scenery. They truly change these characters that we watch, and they truly fester in our memories. And there is no doubt that their impact will linger beyond the credits.

Review of the film An Education

It’s raining heavily as Jenny carries her cello to the bus stop and waits. The 16 year old English girl is drenched, as is the case holding her instrument. A handsome man in his 30s stops his beautiful red sports car to ask if, as a true music lover, he can at least give her cello a lift so the downpour doesn’t ruin the wood. The movie is called An Education, and it is set in the early 60s in the London suburbs. Jenny is bored with her life. The young woman, precocious and inquisitive, bound for Oxford, walks alongside the car for a while and they chat. Soon she is in the passenger seat smiling and laughing as the rain stops just before they reach her house. Jenny is obsessed with pop culture and yearns for a more sophisticated existence. David offers this to her. So begins a seemingly idyllic relationship in which he takes her out to hear classical music, dance at nightclubs, see and talk about beautiful art and spend weekends in the country or Paris. He charms her father, a man obsessed with status and wealth. He brings her mother gifts and flatters her. Both seem unsuspecting of an older man’s motives towards an under-aged girl. He seems like the perfect older gentleman, but his ingratiating demeanor does little to belie his true nature, which becomes more apparent the more time Jenny spends with him and the more curious and strange many of his actions become.

            It ends badly, as these things are always likely to do. It is not at all surprising, but that does not make the story any less sincere, and we watch as Jenny copes. Despite the tears she sheds, the experience has been good for her. “We feel old after we’ve lived through a charade.” But it wasn’t as if she didn’t welcome David’s deceptions and the goods that they allowed him to offer her. Jenny may have been naïve, but she is still smart and strong; what she has been through she will use to better her life. Her relationship with David has been a catalyst for her to figure out what it is she truly wants. She is lucky for the chance. Perhaps this is why I so wanted to and did identify with Jenny: She did not let a seemingly devastating experience slow her down. She cried, took stock and moved on, chalking it up to an education.

We have all had those moments where our lives may have been drastically different based on one piece of knowledge. This film finds that moment in one young woman’s story and shows us how she comes to a life-altering decision. An Education is based on a memoir by the British journalist Lynn Barber. It became well known that in her youth she had an affair with a much older man during the 1960s. The movie is beautifully produced and directed and the performances are all wonderful, especially Carey Mulligan as Jenny, who became a star upon its release. She makes us root for Jenny. And in the end, we know, as an intelligent and thoughtful young woman, that she will be all right.