Review: Jane Got a Gun (2016)

* *
Director: Gavin O'Connor
Starring: Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton, Ewan McGregor

Gene Siskel had a pretty simple test for determining the relative value of a film: is the end product more interesting than a documentary about the same actors having lunch? A film with a production history as famously fraught as Jane Got a Gun can simply never pass that test. I bet a documentary about the goings on behind the scenes of this film would be fascinating. It was developed and originally set to be directed by Lynne Ramsay, but she walked off the project before shooting could begin on the first day, resulting in both a lawsuit and Ramsay being replaced by Gavin O'Connor. The role of the main character's ex-lover was originally set to be played by Michael Fassbender, with the villain to be played by Joel Edgerton. However, when Fassbender dropped out, Edgerton was recast into his role and Jude Law was brought on board to play the villain. Then, when Ramsay walked, Law went with her, as did original cinematographer Darius Khondji. Bradley Cooper was then brought in to replace Law, Mandy Walker stepped in as cinematographer, and Edgerton and Anthony Tambakis were hired to rewrite the script that had been prepared by Brian Duffield. Finally, Cooper withdrew and Ewan McGregor came aboard to take his place. All that fuss and the result is really nothing to write home about, with Jane Got a Gun ending up being, at best, an okay B-western, and, at worst, a messy mix of the original vision plus all the subsequent visions of the story.

Review: August: Osage County (2013)

* * *
Director: John Wells
Starring: Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, Dermot Mulroney, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Misty Upham

As Tolstoy said, happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Few have been as intensely and vocally unhappy as the Weston clan, forced together against their will and then stuck in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the family home. With its heavy subject matter, a cast stacked with familiar names (and a few Oscar wins between them), and a theatrical release date that was smack in the middle of prestige season, August: Osage County is a film that has a lot of built in expectations, perhaps too many not to sink at least a little bit. I skipped this one when it was in theaters, as mixed reviews made it seem non-essential, and end of the year movie fatigue started to set in, but had I seen it in the theater I expect I wouldn't have liked it as much as I did seeing it now, without having to look through the "Oscar lens" that gets applied to almost every film released towards the end of any given year. Don't get me wrong: August: Osage County is not a great movie. But it's a solid, good movie.

Review: Velvet Goldmine (1998)

* * *
Director: Todd Haynes
Starring: Christian Bale, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ewan McGregor

Todd Haynes has made a lot of films for grown ups, but his 1998 film Velvet Goldmine is a film that is best encountered for the first time during adolescence. Like The Catcher in the Rye, it's a work that you can appreciate as an adult, but which has the greatest impact if you're a teenager because it's so calibrated to speak to the ways that teenagers experience the world as a place full of both possibility and phoniness that puts the lie to the notion of possibility as they stumble their way through the building of their identities. Though it received mixed reviews and low box office on its release, it's a film that a lot of people seemed to have adored as teenagers (and which teenagers are apparently still discovering today). When you see it as an adult, it may have lost just a bit of its sparkle, but it remains an entertaining and engrossing film.

Review: The Impossible (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: J.A. Bayona
Starring: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland

It’s the great equalizer: a wall of water ruthlessly rushing forward, knocking out everything in its path and rendering all the eye can see to ruins. The only thing that can help you in a situation like that is luck, and even then it might only help you get your head above water and no further. The aptly named The Impossible is the true (as far as that goes, in a fiction narrative) story of a family of five (Spanish in real life, British here) that somehow manages to survive the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami intact. Directed by J.A. Bayona, this is an intense experience that leaves one shaken at the sheer power of nature and the human spirit.

Review: Haywire (2012)

* * *
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender

When Steven Soderbergh announced last year that he planned to retire after making three more films (which, for most directors, would mean retiring in 6 to 10 years, but for Soderbergh would mean retirement within, like, a year), it was shocking but, at the same time, made a certain amount of sense. It's shocking because he's still in his prime and he's such a consistently interesting and excellent filmmaker, but it makes sense because there are few achievements he has left to meet. He has an Oscar, has proved to be ambitious in both large-scale (the Che films) and smaller scale films, has had films that were huge commercial successes, and has made personal, experimental indies, and he's been ridiculously prolific (24 films in 23 years). Soderbergh is an artist with nothing left to prove, which is why he can turn his attention to making delightful genre pictures like Haywire without having to worry that his legacy will in any way be tarnished because he's not making "important" movies.

Review: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2012)

* * *
Director: Lasse Hallstrom
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt, Amr Waked, Kristin Scott Thomas

A film with a title like Salmon Fishing in the Yemen might sound like a story with limited appeal, but it's actually a delightful surprise, a film with plenty of heart and no shortage of charm. A political/romantic comedy that finds just the right balance between comedy and drama, and between political satire and realistically drawn characters, this is a definite hit in the somewhat hit-and-miss career of director Lasse Hallstrom.

Review: I Love You Phillip Morris (2010)

* * *
Directors: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa
Starring: Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor

It's beyond cliche at this point to say that a story is so bizarre it must be true, but how else could you possibly describe the story of Steven Jay Russell, a man who escaped from prison multiple times, including once by faking his death from AIDS (and, bear in mind, he was able to trick the doctors, too)? Writer/directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa tackle this unbelievably true story by treating it like farce, a strategy that works very well, since playing it straight probably would have led to a feeling of cognitive dissonance.

Review: Beginners (2011)

* * * 1/2
Director: Mike Mills
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent

In Beginners a father and son discover that it's never too late to make a fresh start. Both have spent a long time denying themselves the opportunity for real happiness - the father because of societal pressure; the son because he fears that real happiness does not last - and find that while it's not so easy to make big changes, taking a chance isn't without its rewards.

Review: The Ghost Writer (2010)

* * * *
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams

There is something sinister lurking at the edges of The Ghost Writer. Director Roman Polanksi establishes it immediately and then maintains it for two hours, masterfully demonstrating how much more important mood is than action in a thriller. Factor in a great cast and the story's thinly veiled, but nevertheless intriguing, portrayal of Tony Blair (or should I say "Tony Blair"?) and you've got a film worth making note of.

The ghost writer, unnamed in the film and played by Ewan McGregor, has been hired to re-draft the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) and to do it quickly so that it can be rushed into print. His predecessor has just died under mysterious circumstances (officially called a suicide) and the manuscript he left behind doesn't quite cut it for the publishers. When he arrives at Martha's Vineyard to begin working with Lang, the Ghost reads the manuscript and discovers the problem: it's dry and dull and lacking heart. He begins interviewing Lang in order to get at the man behind the policies but the process is derailed when Lang find himself in the middle of a political firestorm, charged with war crimes for allegedly handing over British citizens to the CIA to be tortured.

Lang flees to Washington for a few photo ops with the U.S. administration while the Ghost cools his heels in Martha's Vinyard, working on the book and also beginning to look into his predecessor's death. He finds evidence, discovered and hidden by the first ghost, which reveals that Lang is lying about how and when he became politically active; he learns that the body of the first ghost shouldn't have washed up where it did on the beach and that a woman who saw flashlights in the area that night fell into a coma after giving a statement to police; he learns of a connection between Lang and a rumored CIA operative. Just what, exactly, has he stumbled into and what secrets are hidden in the original manuscript?

Polanski keeps the audience on our toes by allowing a feeling of menace to permeate every part of the film. From the dark color pallet which relies heavily on greys, to the cold, sleek interior design of the Martha's Vinyard house, and the forbidding aura of everyone who seems to surround Lang, every element of the film just leaves us waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the Ghost to finally (and fatally) fall into the trap which has been set. Even the simple act of a note being passed through a crowd is imbued with a sense of doom. Whatever your feelings about Polanski as a person, it can't be denied that he's a skilled director. This a film guided by someone confident in his ability to craft and tell a story and the result is totally engrossing. From a techinical perspective, I think The Ghost Writer is about as close to perfect as a film can get and that final scene is positively exquisite.

As far as the performances go, there isn't a weak link. Brosnan's Lang is elusive, a man who doesn't want facts to spoil a good story and who, despite his success, is still yearning to be taken seriously as a politician. He is dependent on his wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), who acts as his most trusted advisor and yet he jeopardises that relationship through an affair with his assistant (Kim Cattrall) - a secret so open that Ruth has no qualms about angrily alluding to it in front of a room full of people. As Ruth, Williams plays the story's wildcard, the political wife who seems better suited to the job than her husband and whose motivations aren't always clear (at least on first viewing). She's the mystery within the mystery and Williams' performance is fantastic.

McGregor is great, too, though the role, by its very nature, is more muted than those that surround it - the everyman who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances that he doesn't fully comprehend will always be a little less interesting than the rogue's gallery that surrounds and impedes him. Still, McGregor is able to bring both a weariness and a wariness to his performance which helps ground the story and keep it moving forward, and the mixture of helplessness and nonchalance with which he plays a seduction scene is one of the film's lighter and more memorable moments. One of the things that ultimately makes the film so gripping is that the Ghost is so likeable that you really don't want something bad to happen to him and that threat of something bad seems to underscore even the most innocuous scenes. While watching The Ghost Writer, I couldn't help but think to myself, 'This is how you do it.'



*side note: thinking about it afterwards, I found myself nagged by thoughts that there is no way that Olivia Williams is old enough to be playing her character. IMDB confirms that at the time her character is said to have been at Cambridge, Williams hereself was actually about 4. Ah, the magic of movie reality!

Maythew #2: Big Fish (2003)

* * *
Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup, Albert Finney, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter

If you think of Tim Burton's films as the cinematic equivalent of the Munster family, then surely Big Fish is the Marilyn of the group. Quirky but much more gently so than the rest of Burton's output, the film is something of a departure for the director, who really seems to be reigning himself in here. For the most part it works, though I don't think it quite achieves its ambitions.

Big Fish tells the story of a father (Albert Finney), his son (Billy Crudup), and the stories that stand between them. The son, Will, has grown up to be resentful of his father's storytelling abilities and feels marginalized amongst the large cast of bizarre and fanciful characters in his father's narrative. The father, Ed, insists that his stories are true and has no qualms about telling them over and over again. Now the father is dying and the son wants to seize his last opportunity to really get to know him, to know the truth behind his tall tales.

The flashback scenes, in which Ed is played by Ewen McGregor, unfold in episodic form, detailing his many adventures. He leaves his small town in the company of Karl (Matthew McGrory), a giant, stumbles into a utopia in the middle of the woods, meets his soulmate, joins the circus, goes missing in Korea and makes his way back with a set of conjoined twins, accidentally gets involved in a bank robbery, and so on. Will doesn't believe any of this but slowly finds evidence that, at the very least, his father's stories aren't complete fabrications. The line between truth and fiction becomes blurrier and blurrier until it seems that one can no longer exists without the other. As Will states at the end: "A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him and in that way he becomes immortal."

Based on the novel by Daniel Wallace, Big Fish is a charming movie but one that doesn't entirely work - or, at lest, doesn't work in the way that it wants you to think that it works. It is visually sumptuous and its exploration of the art of constructing a story is well done, but the relationships that should make up the heart of the film get short shrift. Except for Ed, the characters are secondary to the stories rather than the stories being used as a means of developing the characters. As a result the ending doesn't have quite the emotional punch that it could and the film itself doesn't resonate that much.

Matt's Thoughts: I really want to like this picture, but there's just something about it that I can't quite identify that's putting me off. I think that part of the problem is the fairytale aspect of the plot. We're lead to believe, at the beginning, that Edward is just fabricating insane lies, but it's when Sandra confirms that he had gotten lost during the war that we begin to think otherwise. It's only a little later when William is cleaning the pool and the big fish surfaces in the water, that he has this moment of realization that either his father has been telling the truth all these years, or that he has started hallucinating. The truth seems confirmed later still when Helena Bonham-Carter tells a story involving the giant tilting her house back to its original position.

It's the fact that, as the film closes, we're told that he was, indeed, exaggerating his tales for entertainment purposes, that you wonder if Helena's story was truly as majestic as it appeared, or if William had just exaggerated it in his mind's eye to fit it into the mold of his father's usual stories.

I think my problem is that I wanted it to be all or nothing: either full-out fairytale, or just insane lie after insane lie. But I can't really fault the movie for this, because, at it's core, it's the tale of a father and son; like Field of Dreams, but with fewer dead baseball players.

I didn't hate the movie, I just didn't love it either. But that might be because I find Miley Cyrus kind of irritating; although, in this role, she was still Destiny Cyrus...which is kind of more irritating.

Review: The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009)

* *
Director: Grant Heslov
Starring: Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges

Why do I get the feeling that the genesis of this film started with the idea to cast Ewan McGregor and then progressed to a bunch of meta Jedi jokes and then progressed to a story? I really wanted to like The Men Who Stare At Goats and given the caliber of its cast, I had pretty high expectations. Unfortunately, I found it really half baked and shapeless and a waste of the assembled talent.

The film centers on Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), who is despondent following the break down of his marriage and goes to the Middle East in an attempt to prove to his wife that he's a man to be taken seriously. While waiting for clearance to go into Iraq he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former member of a special branch of the U.S. military whose mission was to harness paranormal forces in order to help usher world peace. Lyn's legend as one of the most powerful New World Jedis is already well known to Bob, though he remains skeptical of Lyn's actual abilities.

When he learns that Lyn is going into Iraq, Bob talks his way into coming along and soon finds himself in way over his head. He and Lyn essentially stumble from one bad situation to another, getting kidnapped by locals, getting caught in the middle of a firefight between two U.S. security teams (each of whom thinks they're being fired on by insurgents), getting lost in the desert, and so on until they discover what all of the New World Army experimentation has finally come to.

The film starts out fairly strong - lightweight, to be sure, but charming in its eccentricities. Though McGregor's accent is often suspect, I think he nails the general essence of the character and he makes a decent straight man for all the wacky guys who surround him. Of these wacky guys, none is more so than Clooney (though Jeff Bridges, starring as the leader of the New World Army, gives him a run for his money). Generally speaking, when Clooney does a straight up comedy character I find that he goes way too broad and relies too much on a particular set of facial ticks and mannerisms, but since a character like Lyn calls for broadness in the performance, it ends up working well with Clooney's comedic instincts. All in all, whatever problems the film has really aren't rooted in the cast, which also includes Kevin Spacey in a deliciously subdued role as a rogue Jedi gone over to the darkside. The cast is fine; it's the screenplay that really sinks this whole enterprise.

Though it has its moments, The Men Who Stare At Goats plays out like a product from the poor man's Coen brothers. The humor is there - though, to be honest, it really is just the same couple of jokes over and over, which gets tedious - but the structure is not. The movie never really seems to know where it's going or what, exactly, it wants to do once it gets there. It makes a few half hearted attempts to comment on the powder keg of competing interests in Iraq, but it really doesn't have anything to say about the situation that hasn't already been said, and better, by many others over the past few years. I don't think The Men Who Stare At Goats is a truly bad movie, but I do think putting the screenplay through a couple more drafts and tightening things up would have served it well.

Review: Trainspotting (1996)

* * * *
Director: Danny Boyle
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlisle

So, it only took 14 years, but I finally saw Trainspotting. To put this in the proper perspective please note that I saw Swimfan in the theatre. It's amazing the things we make time for. As usual when I find myself playing catch-up with films like this, I really didn't know what I was missing. This dark and sometimes nasty (I still haven't fully recovered from the toilet scene) movie is an absolute masterpiece.

Trainspotting explodes out of the gate with a chase down the streets of Edinburgh as Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” plays in the background. The song captures the hedonistic, devil may care spirit of the characters, though the title is a bit misleading, as none of them really have a lust for life but rather a longing for oblivion. The story is seen through the eyes of Renton (Ewan McGregor), a heroin addict who will try at various points throughout the story to get clean. His success is impeded by the fact that most of his friends are also heroin addicts and that part of the pleasure of the addiction comes from the camaraderie that blooms out of getting high. His friends are Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), who is obsessed with Sean Connery, Spud (Ewen Bremner), psychotic Begbie (Robert Carlisle), and Tommy (Kevin McKidd), who starts out the film clean but slowly descends into addiction and death.

With the intervention of his parents, Renton does eventually manage to get clean, escape Edinburgh, and get work as a realtor. He’s well on his way to becoming a regular, upstanding citizen but then his past catches up with him, first in the form of Begbie and then in the form of Sick Boy. At first his two guests simply annoy him (particularly when he finds out that Sick Boy has taken it upon himself to sell his TV), but things get serious when they get him involved in a drug scheme that sees him falling off the wagon. In the film’s final moments Renton informs us that he’s going to get clean again, but we have our doubts. We have, after all, heard this before.

Directed by Danny Boyle, the film is visually quite stunning. Some scenes play out as drug induced fantasies and nightmares while others take on a grim reality that, taken together, captures the highs and lows of addiction. The most wrenching scene involves the fate of the baby who is always crawling around the drug den where Renton and his pals congregate. Her sad, sickening demise is not particularly surprising and neither, really, is Renton’s reaction: “I’m cooking up.” Heroin is the balm that enables him to deal with life, though it is also of course robbing him of his life by usurping everything else in it. At his worst, all he cares about it heroin and everything else falls away in his desire to use it, to get it, and to get more of it.

When the film was first released it was accused of glamorizing addiction, leading me to wonder if those accusers saw the same movie I did (Bob Dole, one of the more vociferous opponents of the film later admitted that he’d never actually seen it). What about the filthy, decaying rooms in which the characters spend their time, the scabs and scars that mark their bodies, is supposedly romanticized? I think Trainspotting is actually a great anti-drug movie because it shows the balance of pleasure to pain inherent in addiction. Some of the visuals look cool, but not cool in a “wow, I’m going to go try heroin” kind of way, but rather in an “I’m glad I didn’t have to try heroin to be able to see that” kind of way.

The film made a star of McGregor and it’s easy to see why. Even when Renton is at the very depths of suffering and anguish, the performance itself is charismatic. He inhabits Renton easily, blurring the line between actor and character, and he captures both the “fuck it” attitude and the guilt that follows the consequences of that attitude. He feels badly about what happens to Tommy, perhaps not because he really thinks it’s his fault but rather because he’s glad it happened to Tommy and not himself, and he feels badly when bad things happen to Spud, but at the same time he lives from moment to moment. The way that he lives, every second could be his last so he’d better move on, leave the guilt behind, and make the most of whatever comes next. As anti-heroes go, he's fairly compelling and a large part of that comes from McGregor's ability to weave humor into pathos; Renton is a sad character, but he's also very watchable and engaging. Kudos to McGregor and, of course, to Boyle for bringing Renton and his world so vibrantly and brutally to life.