Review: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)

* * *
Director: Rebecca Miller
Starring: Robin Wright

Hmm... great performance, so-so movie. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee ultimately strives for much more than it achieves, but it's a decent movie and incredibly well-acted. Certainly, it deserved better than the super quiet release it ended up with.

The film is split into two storylines, one taking place in the present day when Pippa (Robin Wright) moves with her husband (Alan Arkin) to an old age facility, the other comprised of flashbacks to Pippa's childhood and early adult years (where she's played by Blake Lively). In the present day Pippa is content but anxious. She loves her husband, their children are grown and have embarked on lives of their own; her life is stable and content. In flashbacks we see why this stability is so desperately valued. Her mother (Maria Bello is an excellent performance) was addicted to speed and held the family hostage at the whims of her emotions; she ran away as a teenager to live with an aunt (Robin Weigert) and got caught up in fetish photography courtesy of her aunt's girlfriend (Julianne Moore); as a young adult she drifted aimlessly until meeting her future husband who, while much older and already married, nevertheless made her feel valued and like she could accomplish something with her life.

Now it's decades later, her husband is retired, they live in a seniors' centre, and she's taken to sleepwalking. There's something wrong that she just can't put her finger on, perhaps it's just that her husband is nearing the end of his life while she still has decades more to go and the distance between them is only growing. One day their neighbors' son (Keanu Reeves) moves into the complex. He's apparently incapable of lying or sugar-coating things and he and Pippa develop a friendship which she is careful to keep platonic. And then, suddenly, everything just falls apart and the life she has built gives way, leaving her wondering: where do I go and what do I do now?

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee strives for - and occasionally achieves - a certain kind of poignancy. Its protagonist finds, suddenly, that no one needs her anymore and though she has lots of life left to live, there's no solid social narrative for her to follow. If a woman's life is supposed to be (as cultural mythology suggests) a progression towards getting married, having children and raising children and that's it, then where is one supposed to go once all that has been accomplished? A woman's life doesn't cease just because her children have grown up and she has grown older, but our culture nevertheless tends to treat older women as obsolete. This is the position that Pippa finds herself in and the film's primary concern is with her figuring out how to negotiate this odd transitional phase in her life.

Written and directed by Rebecca Miller, the film flows easily and is generally quite clever, even if I do think that it falls a bit short of its ambitions. Miller has assembled a great cast, beginning with Wright who manages to play Pippa in a very low-key way but is able to effectively express the restlessness and anxiety simmering beneath her surface. She and Arkin might seem like an odd match on paper (though not nearly as odd as Lively and Arkin in the flashbacks), but they have a good rapport with each other and make for a pretty believable couple. In a small but crucial supporting role Winona Ryder (who I usually find kind of annoying) provides an awesome bit of comic relief, playing an ultra emotional character opposite Wright's cool Pippa. Ultimately, I recommend the film more on the strength of the performances than anything else, but I do still recommend it.

Review: Green Zone (2010)

* * *
Director: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matt Damon

Since its theatrical release a few months ago, I've heard Green Zone characterized as both anti-American and as pro-American propaganda. Truth be told, while the film's premise is rooted in important questions about U.S. foreign policy, the political takes a backseat to more standard genre preoccupations. Honestly, you might as well just call it "Bourne Goes To Iraq."

Loosely based on the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the film follows Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), who is tasked with finding WMDs. The situation on the ground is total chaos as Miller and his team show up to investigate a possible WMD site and have to contend not only with insurgents firing at them, but also with people looting the site. There just aren't enough troops to secure the area and when Miller and his team finally get inside, they find nothing. Given that this has happened multiple times before, a frustrated Miller begins questioning the intelligence that they've been given, which gains him no friends in the army, but gets him an ally in the form of Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), the CIA's Baghdad bureau chief.

Together, Brown and Miller work to find the identity of "Magellan," the source who provided the information that served as the justification for invasion. This is no easy feat and they're working against the clock, as a special forces team lead by Major Briggs (Jason Isaacs) is also working to find the source and eliminate him so that he can't reveal the truth about the fabricated information regarding Iraq's WMD program.

Green Zone is a bit of a mixed bag, but for the most part the film works well. The characterization of the political situation as a mess of competing interests and narratives is interesting and, I think, probably more accurate most of us would be comfortable believing. Everyone is on the same "side," yes, but there are warring sides within that side that pretty much ensures that a series of smaller scale power struggles will get in the way of efforts to stabilize the social/political powder keg of post-Saddam Iraq. Everyone wants to be in control of "the story" of Iraq's liberation, regardless of whether or not that story has any real connection to reality. In one of the more telling scenes, Miller attends a meeting to discuss military progress and openly questions the Magellan source, only to be informed by his superior that his job is to find WMDs, not question military intelligence. Given that Miller and his team put their lives on the line every time they go to one of the alleged sites (and, as he points out, have suffered casualties in the process), you would think that the quality of the intelligence sending them there would very much be his concern. The film shows an emphasis at every level on not asking questions but simply moving forward on the assumption that information is true. Again, this is probably a lot more true to life than many of us are comfortable believing.

Though the film obviously has very strong political views, I would be hard pressed to describe it as a political film. By the end Green Zone becomes a fairly routine action thriller which casts Miller as a one man army determined to expose the truth. The action sequences are well done but making them the centrepiece to the story cheapens the aspirations the film seems to have to make a strong political statement. The ending, which is meant to be triumphant even if only in a minor sense, falls flat, in part because though the film is critical of the spread of misinformation through a blind acceptance of it, it's a lot softer on journalists than it could be. Still, for all that, it's a pretty solid genre film, even if it could have been more.

Book vs. Film: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button vs. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Plot: Benjamin Button is born under unusual circumstances. Unlike those around him, he's born elderly and grows backwards until eventually reaching infancy. During the course of his life he fights in a war, falls in love, and has various other adventures.

Primary Differences Between Book and Film: Um... pretty much everything except the basic concept and the protagonist's name. Even the concept is a bit different because in the film Benjamin is born an old man but infant sized and though he's born old in body, he's born new in mind and his intellectual/emotional development occurs in a normal way. In the book, Benjamin is born a full grown old man (incidentally, after this we never hear of his mother again) with the mind of an old man. As his body grows younger, so too does his mind. Further, while the film version is built around a love story, there's no Daisy in the book version. Instead, there's a woman with whom Benjamin falls in love when he's old and she's young, and then gradually falls out of love with as he grows young and she grows old.

For the Book: Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the prose is of course extraordinary. The tone is light, leaning to comedy where the film leans towards drama, and it's a quick, easy read.

For the Film: The film is more ambitious in terms of the journey that it wants to take. The book sort of washes over you as it immerses you in absurdity and then it lets you go, but the film achieves something more profound. It's about the elusive qualities of life and love, and about the inevitability of loss and many of the images and scenes crafted by David Fincher et al. are lasting and beautiful.

Winner: Film. It comes down to a fairly simple storytelling issue: the book tells the story of a man who starts out with knowledge and gradually loses it, devolving as a person. The film tells the story of a man who, while physically growing backwards, nevertheless continues to grow and learn as a person and that makes him a more compelling character. The book is worth a read (particularly the illustrated version), but the film easily tops it.

Friday's Top 5... Posters of the 1960s

#5: A Fistful of Dollars
No doubt about it: Clint Eastwood is the man. If that's not enough to sell a movie, I don't know what is.


#4: La Dolce Vita
It's cool, it's sexy, it's Fellini.


#3: Breakfast At Tiffany's
There's a reason that this poster is so popular. It's a classic Audrey Hepburn image and the rest of the poster is uncluttered enough to keep her image from being overwhelmed.


#2: Rosemary's Baby
This poster is sooooo creeeeepy. Even the color scheme is creepy. My hat is off to whomever designed it.


#1: Blow Up
Simple but stunning. It literally shows the protagonist's occupation and also encompasses the hedonistic spirit of his lifestyle.

Canadian Film Review: Defendor (2010)

* * 1/2
Director: Peter Stebbings
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Kat Dennings, Elias Koteas

Where do super hero movies have left to go? They've appeared as straight up dramas, as self-referential comedies, as colorful action films, as dark action films, as throwbacks to classic Hollywood, as intense metaphors for a morally/socially fraught time, and campy excuses to mass market toys. Judging by Defendor and Kick Ass (from what I've heard; I haven't actually seen it) the genre has also reached its "revisionist" period, where it strips away the mythology and leaves something more ambiguous behind. Personally, part of me kind of hopes that the next Batman film is a musical, just to keep mixing things up (it's not like Christian Bale has never done one before - Newsies!).

The premise of the film is thus: by day Arthus Poppington (Woody Harrelson) is an ordinary man with an ordinary job. By night he is Defendor, a masked crusader set on avenging the death of his mother at the hands of Captain Industry. What sets Arthur/Defendor apart from your standard hero is that he's functioning at a diminished mental capacity (what, exactly, the issue is is never elaborated). When he dons his Defendor persona, he seems to enter another world, a world of comic book conventions where the hero is able to out smart (rather than necessarily out fight) the bad guys and a quip is always the final word in a situation. Unfortunately for him, the people he's fighting - usually dirty cop Dooney (Elias Koteas) - don't inhabit the same fantasy world and aren't swayed by Defendor's assertion that guns are for cowards.

After a beating at the hands of Dooney's men (and it's always Dooney's men who deliver the beatings because Defendor, kind of hilariously, is always able to take out Dooney through one means or another), Defendor meets Kat (Kat Dennings), a drug addicted prostitute who feeds his illusions about Captain Industry in order to bilk him for money and maybe settle some of her own scores. Eventually Kat starts to feel bad about this, not only because Arther/Defendor gets hurt, but also because she just generally comes to care about him. Unfortunately, by the time she realizes the error of her ways, it may be too late.

I'm really on the fence about Defendor. I think that it actually has quite a bit going for it but that it ultimately never really finds its voice. It wants to be an action movie and a comedy and a drama, and while it does a fine job crafting individual scenes that can fit one or the other of those genres, it's not able to construct a film that blends all three in a workable way. The changes in tone are abrupt and sometimes jarring and I think that the ending in general is kind of a mess. This is Peter Stebbings' first feature film as director, his second as a screenwriter and it shows; he displays a lot of talent in both roles but he doesn't quite have the control of the material that he needs.

As far as the good stuff goes, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Harrelson's performance. He walks a fine line here, making Arthur simple enough to be believable without crossing over into that caricaturish No Man's Lands Robert Downey Jr. warns of in Tropic Thunder. His performance is understated and compelling. Dennings doesn't fare quite as well (I've only seen her in a couple of things but she seems to play variations on the same basic character over and over), but she has some good moments and she and Harrelson have decent chemistry. Nothing about Defendor is really bad, it's just a terribly uneven film where the things that are really good make the weaknesses all the more obvious.