Review: Watchmen (2009)

* * *
Director: Zack Snyder
Starring: Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Malin Ackerman, Matthew Goode

It’s probably a bad thing that my most consistent thought while watching Watchmen was “I wonder when something’s going to happen.” That doesn’t make it a bad movie – visually, it’s a stunner (although I think director Zack Snyder needs to give slow motion/fast motion a rest) – but it does keep it from becoming a great movie. By no means generic, it nevertheless fails to transcend the way that The Dark Knight did a year ago, though the two explore similar themes regarding vigilantes and their place in society. The story itself is strong, it’s the telling that doesn’t quite work.

The story takes place in an alternate version of history, where Nixon is still President well into the 1980s, the Vietnam War was an unqualified success for the U.S., and masked heroes are a part of everyday life. Most of these heroes were forced into retirement with the passing a bill outlawing them, though the government has kept two employed – Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) and The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) – and another, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), continues in his work, his adopted identity having usurped that which he was born into. When The Comedian is murdered, Rorschach believes that the rest of the former Watchmen may be at risk as well and works to discover who is behind it.

His former colleagues are less inclined to get back into crime fighting. Dr. Manhattan and Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), formerly the hero Ozymandias, are working on a project together that would deliver energy to people the world over for free; Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), formerly Nite Owl II, is out of shape and spends his days reminiscing with the first Nite Owl; and Laurie Jupiter (Malin Ackerman), formerly Silk Spectre II, never really wanted to be a masked avenger in the first place, but was pushed into it by her mother, Sally (Carla Gugino), the first Silk Spectre. The relationships between the characters are elaborated upon a great deal through flashbacks and herein lies part of the problem. While this story structure is ideal for a serialized format, it doesn’t translate easily to film. Watchmen is perhaps a little too faithful to its source material and the result is a film that doesn’t flow particularly well.

There are other problems, the most glaring of which is with the character of Laurie. I know that when the film first came out a lot of people placed the blame squarely on Ackerman, which I don’t think is really fair. Certainly she doesn’t help things but the fact is that Laurie is such a flat, non-entity of a character that even a great actress would have had difficulty breathing life into her. She’s the token girl, designed to wear a costume ridiculously unsuited to her occupation and to cause strife amongst her male colleagues. Ostensibly she should be more than that, since her existence is what convinces Dr. Manhattan that the earth is worth saving, but there’s really very little too her as a character. To be frank, the story doesn’t really take women as heroes very seriously at all*. For all her talk about how she used to be a hero, Sally’s role seems to have been largely symbolic and to consist primarily of posing for pictures. Silhouette gets to be a lesbian and then die (a common occurrence in mainstream fare), and while Laurie proves capable of kicking some ass, she ultimately doesn’t seem very necessary to the Watchmen team. Add in the fact that none of the women are masked while all the men are, which perhaps suggests that secret identities aren’t really important for women because they don’t really matter in terms of the group’s success – the team wouldn’t be noticeably weakened by their absence. The best moment of unintentional comedy comes from a nightmare Dan has where he peels off his face to reveal the Nite Owl cowl and then Laurie peels off her face to reveal… her face with slightly more eye makeup.

All that aside, however, there is more than enough good to make this a film worth seeing. Of the actors, Haley is the standout and a scene where he comes unraveled at the realization that he’s been set-up is one of the best in the entire film. Another best comes from Dr. Manhattan’s exile on Mars, as he contemplates his existence on earth and constructs a structure seemingly made of glass. Crudup’s performance as Manhattan is also very strong, creating a character who is so detached from human beings that he sees their existence as entirely unimpressive, but at the same time has flickers of human emotion which remind him of the person he used to be. The true measure of these two performances is that they're so effective despite the constraints placed on the actors, with Haley spending most of his screen time behind an ever shifting mask and Crudup playing his character through a mass of CGI. The film also boasts one of the very best opening credit sequences I've ever seen, although it did leave me thinking that I would have enjoyed seeing a movie about The Minute Men more than the Watchmen. In the end it's bits and pieces of Watchmen that I liked, rather than the film as a whole.



* I am by no means an expert on comic books or comic book characters but I’m willing to bet that none of the Super Friends ever got picked up from a Justice League meeting by their mom, which happens to Laurie somewhere around the middle of this film.

Review: Hard Candy (2005)

* * * 1/2
Director: David Slade
Starring: Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson

David Slade’s Hard Candy is an aggressive little gem of a movie that pushes itself – and the audience – to the very edge. It goes places that few films will go and does so with admirable finesse, never allowing its subject matter to overpower the film itself. It is a very carefully constructed and firmly guided film that allows its actors the freedom to explore some of the darkest reaches of human nature. It can, at times, be a difficult film to watch, but it is well worth the effort.

It opens on an online chat between Jeff (Patrick Wilson), a photographer, and Hayley (Ellen Page), a 14-year-old girl, as they make plans to meet in person. They meet over coffee and flirt – he’s confident and says the right things at the right times, she starts off guarded but becomes increasingly bold with him. They go back to his house and dance ever closer to the line. He offers her a drink, which she declines by informing him that she knows better than to accept a drink she didn’t mix herself. She’ll mix the drinks – and prove her point in the process.

When Jeff comes to, he learns of Hayley’s true intentions. She isn’t a naive little girl waiting to be taken advantage of, but rather a kind of vigilante who has been keeping tabs on Jeff and waiting for him to fall into her trap. It isn’t simply that she thinks he’s a pedophile; she also believes that he’s involved in the murder of a teenage girl. What unfolds is a brutal psychological game as Hayley diligently goes through his life, dismantling it and holding a mirror up to it to force him to see it for what it is. Later she reveals her intention to castrate him and encourages him to beg her not to. Jeff’s day only gets worse from here.

Hard Candy runs contrary to the conventions of mainstream storytelling. There are several points where you think that the film has to start pulling back and yet it never does; it just keeps charging forward into darker and darker territory. It runs at a high intensity that builds in a very effective way, starting with the dangerously calm scenes of the initial seduction, to the growing aggression of the later scenes – there is hardly a denouement; it instead ends at the peak. The film – and in particular its actors – ought to be commended for being willing to really go there, but while the plot does get to exactly where it needs to be, there are some problems with the structure of the story. The constant repetition of Jeff almost gaining the upper hand only to get knocked out once again by Hayley becomes a bit tiresome after the third or fourth time that it happens, although the battle between the characters regains some momentum by the end of the film, when there’s a greater sense that it could go either way.

Most of the film consists simply of Wilson and Page, who play off each other well in the various incarnations of their characters. Both begin the film as characters playing characters, later dropping their masks – Jeff slowly, as his carefully constructed persona is stripped away from him and Hayley more quickly, like a band-aid being ripped off. Wilson is fine in his role, particularly towards the end as he watches his entire life unravel before him, but it’s Page who really owns the film. As Hayley she holds nothing back so that you almost end up feeling sorry for Jeff at certain points. It’s another role which shows what an interesting actress she is – unlike any other actress her age that I can think of – and what potential she has to become even better as she continues to grow as an artist. Director David Slade also shows a great deal of promise, his previous work as a director of music videos apparent in the pacing and fast-cutting of the more intense scenes. It’s a high energy film that manages to maintain its momentum right up until the very end and a fascinating study of two unusual characters.

Review: Little Children (2006)

* * *
Director: Todd Field
Starring: Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley

“It’s not the cheating. It’s the hunger. The hunger for an alternative and the refusal to accept a life of unhappiness,” Sarah explains, speaking as much about Madame Bovary as her own life. Little Children is a film full of unhappy people searching for a way out, another story in a long line of stories about suburban malaise. The problem with the film isn’t that its characters search for alternatives, it’s that after finding them, they opt to accept lives of unhappiness anyway.

Kate Winslet stars as Sarah, a stay-at-home wife and mother. She’s an outcast at the playground, existing on the fringe of discussion between the other mothers, who parent with efficient coldness, having finely tuned their children to very precise schedules which allow little room for variation. In comparison, Sarah is something of a mess, a mother whose style is perhaps best described as haphazard and, to a certain degree, desperate. The truth is that Sarah is unsuited for her roles as wife and mother, a fact driven home by the narrator who describes her as getting through her days by “counting down the hours.”

One afternoon a hush falls over the other mothers: the Prom King (Patrick Wilson), who figures heavily into their fantasies but to whom no one ever speaks, has returned to the park. His name is Brad and he and Sarah have an instant, albeit somewhat awkward, connection. Like her, he’s stuck, an emasculated stay-at-home husband and father who takes a backseat in all things to his wife (Jennifer Connelly), who holds tight to the purse strings and pushes Brad to take the bar exam for the third time, apparently unaware that he doesn’t really want to be a lawyer. The relationship which develops between Sarah and Brad is chaste until the tension between them explodes in a series of sexual encounters.

Running parallel to this story is the story of Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), a convicted sex offender whose release has stirred public indignation and widespread fear. Ronnie lives an isolated life with only his mother (Phyllis Somerville) to keep him company as he endures a barrage of harassment from an ex-cop (Noah Emmerich) who decides to make it his job to ensure that Ronnie never has a moment of peace. At various times, separately and together, both Brad and Sarah will come into contact with Ronnie, who indirectly impacts their lives in ways neither could have anticipated.

Throughout the narrative, Little Children alternates between bringing the audience right into the story with scenes of incredibly intimacy, and pushing us away with scenes designed to create an ironic distance. This mix gives the film kind of a lopsided feel, which is only exacerbated by the ending. Sarah and Brad are both unfulfilled in their marriages and manage to find something in each other which brings some light into their lives. In the end, though, they abandon each other and happily return to lives which made them miserable before and will, no doubt, make them miserable again. I’m not arguing that they should have ended up together, but rather that by having them return to where they started the film undermines its earlier message that it’s okay not to settle and to want more out of life.

Performance-wise the film is strong, though I’m at something of a loss to explain what attracted an actress as skilled as Jennifer Connelly to a character who ends up being such a non-entity. The two standouts are Haley and Winslet who, perhaps not coincidentally, have the two meatiest roles. Overall I’d say that the performances make the film worth seeing even though the film itself is a bit muddled.