Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Here’s what I think: somewhere back in his secret past (you know he must have one) director Chris Nolan made a bet with another director, or a close friend, or maybe the devil that sounded something like this:  “I bet I can entertain, absorb and manipulate an audience so thoroughly, that, by the end of my film, they will sit on the edge of their seats watching a simple object do something it normally does – they’ll watch a spinning top spin and hold their breaths, waiting for it to fall.”   With “Inception,” Nolan pulls it off.  Somebody somewhere owes him something.

If you’ve seen the movie already, you know what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t, you should.  If you don’t read another line of this review, read this:  see this movie.  You will be absorbed, thrilled, and entertained.  This is the best movie of the summer.

And it is very much a summer movie.   Really, “Inception” is like that spinning top; it’s endlessly fun to watch, and generates a certain amount of suspense, but at its heart, it’s little more than a machine operating in the way it’s bound to operate.  The last thing I would call “Inception” is predictable, but the feeling I have coming away from is that I just watched an immensely complicated contraption do just what it’s supposed to do.  Every move “Inception” makes is exactly the move it ought to make; it manages to keep from being predictable because we’ve never seen a film make these moves before.  That’s an impressive achievement in and of itself.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon Leavitt are a pair of dream robbers, not all that different from bank robbers.   This is sci fi corporate espionage/Philip K. Dick territory (Christopher Nolan says he came up with the idea when he was 16; I can guess what he was reading at the time.)  They make a living by surreptitiously breaking into the dreams of the rich and powerful and stealing their secrets, then selling them to their competitors.  DiCaprio is the talented genius, improvising and taking risks; Leavitt the methodical down to earth type, doing the research first and advising his partner against his craziest ideas.   Not that he listens.   “He said not to do that,” Ellen Page says to Leavitt, at one point, while helplessly watching DiCaprio take the lives of the entire crew into his own hands.   “Have you noticed yet how often he does things he says not to do?”  Leavitt responds.

After a failed attempt to steal his secrets, multimillionaire Ken Watanabe (who really needs to work on his English) hires DiCaprio and Leavitt to implant idea in his competitor’s brain that will lead to his downfall.  It can’t be done, Leavitt says.  Yes, it can, DiCaprio says, it’s just very, very difficult. So they assemble a team.  This includes Tom Hardy, who is able to impersonate people close to the dreamer within their dreams, and Dileep Rao, a sedation expert.  Ellen Page rounds out the team, as the architect; she is responsible for creating the (meta)physical spaces in which the dreams take place. She is also a helpful plot device; as DiCaprio et al teach her about dream thieving, we, the audience, learn as well.   And there’s a lot to learn.

Their mark is Cillian Murphy, who is set to inherit a utilities empire from his dying father.   In order to successfully implant the idea into Murphy’s head, DiCaprio decides that the team must not simply enter his dream – they have to go down 3 levels; that is, they must enter his dream, then cause him to dream inside that dream, and then enter that dream, and repeat.   (I’ve dreamed I was dreaming before; I’ve never dreamed that I dreamed I was dreaming.  Have you?  Is it even possible?  Irrelevant questions.  This is a sci fi action flick.)

Mucking things up at every level is DiCaprio’s dead wife, Marion Cotillard.  There’s a heck of a back-story here, but I’d hate to give all the movie’s juicy secrets away.  It’s enough to say that DiCaprio’s estranged from his children, and has taken on this risky job because Watanabe assures him he can make the trouble go away.  But every dream DiCaprio’s in, Cotillard’s in as well, and working against him.  He must deal with her before she spoils everything, or worse, causes him to lose his mind, and his friends.

A couple days removed from the film, it doesn’t seem like there was enough at stake in “Inception.”  Is Watanabe really a better guy than Murphy, and can we trust him when he says that planting this idea is, well, a good idea?  Certainly not. Do we get to know DiCaprio and his kids well enough to long for their reunion?  Hmm…not really.  And yet, while watching “Inception,” these concerns never entered my mind, probably because Christopher Nolan kept things moving so fast, that I didn’t have time to think about them.   This is an absorbing, exciting, entertaining film; it may not be a deeply emotionally resonant and powerful film.  But hey, it’s summer, and this is summer entertainment.   And as far as that goes, I dearly wish there were more directors and smart, and skilled as Nolan.  I had a great time watching “Inception;” the best time I’ve had at the movie theater in a long while.   But I’m really curious to see if it’s as much fun the second time around, when my head’s not spinning quite so fast.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“Shutter Island” disguises itself as a genre exercise;  it’s a procedural, a haunted castle flick, a psychological drama.  But underneath all that, it is one of the most challenging and complicated films I’ve seen in a long time.   When I first saw the trailer, I was puzzled that Martin Scorsese would take on a film about the investigation of an escaped patient from an Alcatraz-like mental facility;  it’s not the kind of movie he usually makes.   Having seen the movie, I understand why he said yes to the project.  Based on a book by Dennis Lehane (who also wrote the books behind “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone,”)  it’s an incredibly difficult story to bring to the screen, and Scorsese relished the challenge, and rose to it.    “Shutter Island” is an oddly hidden gem of a film, and shows off the immense talent and skill of its director– if you know where to look.

The best advice I can give you regarding this movie is to see it twice.   It contains a big twist at the end which both explains and justifies everything that comes before it,  and you need to see it a second time to appreciate all that it explains and justifies.  (Sometimes I think filmmakers make movies with twist endings just to torture critics.   We’re not supposed to give away the big surprise, but the whole movie revolves around the Big Surprise, so it’s nearly impossible talk about the movie in any meaningful way.   Forgive me if this review sounds like it’s written through clenched teeth.)

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a U.S. Marshal sent to investigate the mysterious disappearance of mental patient Emily Mortimer at a mental institution for the criminally insane.   Comic book fans will see echoes of Arkham Asylum in Shutter Island;  nobody here is innocent, or responsible for their actions, which are uniformly gruesome.   The most reasonable of the patients killed her husband with an axe after thirty years of infidelity;  the escaped patient—who managed to escape from a locked, windowless cell without a trace—drowned her three children and then propped them up at the dinner table and waited for her husband to come home.

But not everything here is quite what it seems.   The head pychiatrist, played with creepy charm by Ben Kingsley, seems to have a hidden agenda,  despite all his talk about compassion and “connecting” with his patients.   Max Von Sydow appears briefly and menacingly,  analyzing DiCaprio’s defense mechanisms and talking about “men of violence.”   He might as well be talking about the warden, who seems at least as crazy and dangerous as the patients;  “if I were to sink my teeth into your eyeball right now, would you be able to stop me before I blinded you?”  he asks the Marshal, while escorting him around the island.

DiCaprio’s got some demons of his own to wrestle with;  his wife was killed in an apartment fire, and she haunts his dreams. So do images of the concentration camp at Dachau, which he participated in liberating as a soldier in World War II.  “Shutter Island” bears a theme often found in Scorsese films;  the psychological scarring of men’s souls after acts of war and violence.   Turns out DiCaprio has a few scores to settle, and may have taken the Shutter Island case for personal reasons.

So when a hurricane strikes the island and all the cell doors fly open, you know we’re in for a heck of a ride.  Homicidal patients run amok;  homicidal guards chase them down.   DiCaprio and his partner, played by Mark Ruffalo, hide out in a sepulchre to get out of the rain.   The escaped patient reappears and returns docilely to her cell, and so the case is solved.  Except that now Ruffalo has disappeared, and Kingsley denies that he ever existed at all, and the crazies keep telling DiCaprio that he’ll never leave the island. And that’s just the beginning.   “Shutter Island” twists and turns upon itself, and dares you to guess what the Big Secret is.   Maybe you will.  I didn’t.

Any movie with a twist ending that is worth its salt buries clues within itself about its big surprise;  sometimes (think “The Sixth Sense”)  the movie even brings those clues back at the moment of the Reveal to show you what you missed.   I call these Forehead-Slapping Moments.   On a second viewing, you slap your forehead and cry, “how did I NOT see that the first time through!”  Any movie without these buried clues doesn’t have a Surprise Ending, it has a Stupid Ending. This is an unbreakable rule about thrillers;  the audience must be warned of what’s coming, even if the warnings are subtle and hidden.

In “Shutter Island,”  however, the buried clues aren’t in the movie;  they are the movie.  The very texture of “Shutter Island’s”  first two hours is the biggest, most obvious, most cleverly hidden-in-plain-sight clue about the Big Twist.   There are elements of “Shutter Island” that feel like shoddy filmmaking the first time through.  Once you know the secret, you will recognize these elements as very intentional, and absolutely appropriate, choices made by Scorsese. It’s a risky move, and as a result, a lot of people, and a lot of critics, are missing the point. “Shutter Island” hasn’t been reviewed very kindly up to this point, but I think, given time to be watched and re-watched, it will be recognized as the work of a great talent.  It is another solid film from Scorsese, an impressive achievement, and perhaps his most challenging, complicated film to date.   You should see it.   At least twice.

In 1999, Sam Mendes made a great movie about suburban malaise in the 90′s, “American Beauty.”   Though it begins and ends with a suicide, it is a hopeful, if sarcastic, vision about rejecting the status quo and pursuing happiness, on whatever terms are available.   Now, almost ten years later, Sam Mendes is back with another movie about suburban malaise, this one set in the ’50s, but not nearly as hopeful.   It’s good to know we made some progress from 1950 to 1990.   We still are faced with the same basic problem – “the emptiness and hopelessness of suburban life” — but at least by now, we’ve found ways to fight back.  

In “Revolutionary Road,”  Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are your typical married couple via 1955 – big house (but not too big,) two kids, a job in the city, and an awul lot drinks and cigarettes to keep up a healthy level of numbness to it all.  Even a little infidelity on the side, but nothing to throw a fuss over.   Only they always thought they were better than this, destined for more.   He works in the same firm as his father, whose name nobody knows, and who he swore he’d never be like.   She wanted to be an actress, but that was years ago.    Like I said, they’re pretty typical — their primary skill being the ability to blame their unhappiness on each other, as well as mask their own desires as “concern” for the others’ well-being.   Welcome to Marriage in the ’50s.  

Winslet hatches a crazy plan.   They’ll move to Paris, where she’ll work as a secretary (“do you know how much they pay secretaries in those foreign offices?  It’s outrageous!”)  while he figures out what it is he’s passionate about.    What’s crazy about this plan isn’t that they’re going to sell everything and move to a different country; it’s that she really thinks she’ll be happier doing menial office work than cleaning house, and he really thinks he’ll discover something great about himself once they’re in a different country.   It’s a move away from, in Leo’s words, “the emptiness and hopelessness of suburban life” into… well, something different, at least.  

But as soon as they make their crazy decision to live life to the fullest, life empties both barrels at them.   He gets a promotion and a raise.   She gets pregnant.  Suddenly, the Paris move carries a much greater cost, and the dream buckles underneath the weight of that cost.   Somewhere in here “Revolutionary Road” starts to feel a lot like the old play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — the arguments are intense, but it’s almost impossible to differentiate the cleverly disguised barbs from the times when someone takes unreasonable offense at next to nothing.   The film is dominated by these intense arguments between DiCaprio and Winslet, and thank God these two actors can bring it.   

Michael Shannon makes occasional appearances as the “unwell” son of the real estate lady, on short breaks from the mental hospital.  But for all intents and purposes, he is the prophet of Revolutionary Road.  He is Isaiah wandering naked through Jerusalem, unafraid to say what he sees, unconcerned about others’ opinions of him.   Shannon brings great, fiery energy to the role, an energy that cuts through the numbness and bickering of everyone around him.  The screen sparks and pops when he’s on, and when he exits, the yelling and frustration of everyone else just seems like an exercise.   

One of the lies (or at least glosses) of Hollywood is that nobody in their right mind could be happy as a housewife.  “Revolutionary Road” goes that route; one could say that DiCaprio wins the battle of the wills, and the movie ends tragically as a result.    Portraits abound of women slowly quietly dying in this role, but you’d have to look long and hard to find someone relishing it — someone that is happy and healthy and not insane or repressed, anyway.  And yet I know several women for whom there’s nothing else they’d rather be doing, and a few who resent the fact that they’re expected to work and have a career and aren’t allowed to just stay home and take care of their kids.   Certainly it’s tragic when a woman who doesn’t want to be a wife and mother is forced into that role.   But isn’t it tragic, as well, that the happy homemakers and mothers never see themselves represented on the big screen?   

Recommended

• If you liked “American Beauty.”  
• if you, or your parents grew up in the ’50s, and were miserable.
• if “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”  is one of your favorite plays.
• if you love watching great actors yell at each other.

Not Recommended

• if you are a mother and/or homemaker, and like your life.
• if you hate watching actors, great or otherwise, yell at each other.

I’d seen this before, but I just bought it so I watched it again.   A few notes: 

Martin Scorsese does the best director’s commentaries of anybody, anywhere.  It’s a real education – not just about film, also about history and sometimes religion – to hear him talk about his movies.  

One of the many great things about “Gangs of New York” is the way it always feels, from the first moments, like there’s an awful lot going on just offscreen.   When the bigger world finally intrudes in the final minutes, as the draft riots overwhelm the gang fights, it makes perfect sense — it feels inevitable.  

Daniel Day-Lewis really is the man.   What a performance — good enough for two movies.   Because really, the biggest problem with last year’s “There Will Be Blood” is that he was pretty much Bill the Butcher all over again.   And look at all the awards it won.  

It’s good, if kind of sad, to see John C. Reilly really act the heck out of a dramatic role here.   Reminds me what a good actor he is, or can be.   Makes me sad that his bread and butter now is stupid comedies alongside Will Ferrell.   He’s better than that, and was for years.   Unless he snaps out of it, he’s going to end up cursing Ferrell on his deathbed.  

Turns out Cameron Diaz can act as well.   Also made me think of her fine performance in “Being John Malkovich.”  Apparently, like John C. Reilly, these days she just choose not to.   Baffling.  

This really was the turning point in DiCaprio’s career.   His performances in “Romeo+Juliet” and “Titanic” were good, no doubt, but it was a little risky to say you liked him at that point, unless you were a fourteen year old girl.   But he’s great here, and gritty, intense, adult.   And then he followed this with “Catch Me If You Can,” “The Aviator,”  and “The Departed,”  and now I can call him one of the best actors of our generation without flinching or ducking.  

Other small parts worth mentioning: Johnny Scirocco (DiCaprio’s right hand man, who betrays him, then gets crucified) is Henry Thomas, ie Elliott from “E.T.”   Someday I’d like to a do a parallel piece on Thomas and Drew Barrymore.   Both are successful adult actors, but they’ve chosen vastly different paths.    Oh, and isn’t that D’Angelo Barksdale from “The Wire”  as Jimmy Spoils?   Sure enough.   Larry Gilliard, Jr. is the actor’s name.   Playing two different kinds of gangster in two different cities — and venues.   Better watch out for typecasting.

That is a horrible, horrible beard.

“Body of Lies” plays like director Ridley Scott went and saw an odd double feature consisting of Charles Ferguson’s excellent documentary “No End in Sight” and “The Bourne Conspiracy.” Then he decided the one movie should be more like the other, and vice versa.

“No End In Sight” is a documentary about Iraq composed of interviews with street-level intelligence workers complaining about how they were ignored by higher ups, who undermined just about everything they tried to do and thereby ruined any and all chance America had of getting out of Iraq quickly and efficiently. And “Bourne” was about a guy who could singlehandedly win a war against the world, if only his conscience would leave him alone.

Leonardo DiCaprio is the Bourne, except now his name is Roger. He chases terrorists primarily in Jordan, though don’t doubt that he’s got three passports and six alibis. He builds relationships with the locals, primarily chief of Jordanian intelligence Hani, and executes ops from the ground level. He’s is constantly on the phone with Russell Crowe, who gained thirty pounds to play DiCaprio’s Wolfowitz. Crowe thinks he can save civilization while taking his children to preschool. He doesn’t need to listen to the locals, because he has the “global perspective.” Crowe consistently undermines DiCaprio’s ops, gets his men killed and him captured, and walks away with a smile and a swagger. (Given his track record, a treachery case against him might have some real traction.)

“Body of Lies” is, really, a story about two failed operations. (The biggest problem with the film is DiCaprio’s continued naivete and protestations; you’d think a guy this smart would learn what to expect from his idiot boss, and adjust. Most of the rest of us have.) The film splits time almost exactly between the two failed ops, but the second is much more interesting. It involves setting up an innocent Jordanian architect to look like a terrorist, and then waiting for the real terrorists to give him a congratulatory call. That sounds like a great setup to me; I wish Scott had taken the time to develop the character of the architect, his relationship with DiCaprio, and the trigger pull. But the time is already spent, and some scenes feel rushed through, one wonders if others were just skipped. Maybe someday there will be a Director’s Cut. The movie resolves with a clever twist that reinforces the overall point, but shows that Scott, ultimately, is more interested in making his political point than in making a great movie.

(Sidenote: But is it a political point, really? It’s likely to be called by some “Anti-American.” But “Body of Lies” shows us one patriotic American who is very good at this job – fighting terrorists – and another patriotic American who isn’t very good being his boss. I believe one of the great tragedies of our day is that it has become inherently, heatedly “political” to ever point out that someone in government has done a less than stellar job. For the record, I, not Ridley Scott, made the comparison of Crowe to Wolfowitz-– if you think it’s wrong, fine. I think you can disagree with me and still enjoy the movie.)

So “Body of Lies” is not great. It’s still pretty good. Ridley Scott may be a little heavy-handed with his politics, but he still knows how to tell a story on a screen. It is taut, crisply edited, and consistently engaging. It’s been hard for anybody to get Americans interested in movies about the Middle East, and in the last year or two I’ve seen a lot of above-average films (Stop-Loss, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah) mostly ignored by moviegoers. Scott takes a much more bankable route; “Body of Lies” functions perfectly well as a spy thriller, and fans of spy thrillers will not be disappointed with it. It’s not Scott’s best work – it’s about on par with last year’s “American Gangster” and certainly inferior to “Black Hawk Down,” “Blade Runner,” and “Alien,” but perhaps it’s as good a movie as he dared to make, given the subject matter.

Recommended

• To fans of spy thrillers, Bourne movies, Bond movies, etc.
• To anyone who’s seen “No End in Sight.”

Not Recommended

• If you’re sick of movies with a “political” message.
• If nobody’s going to get you to watch a movie about the war on Terrorism/War in Iraq, no matter how good or entertaining it might be.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Movies buy credibility with violence. How seriously a movie treats its violence will tell you how seriously its makers want you to take that movie. If only the bad guys get hurt, that’s Disney territory. If only the guys with guns get hurt, even amongst chase scenes and gun fights that surely ought to be causing serious collateral damage, that’s a summer action flick. And hurting innocent people and hurting them graphically, violently, onscreen? Well, now you’re in “Hotel Rwanda” or “Schindler’s List” territory.

That’s where “Blood Diamond” starts; within the first five minutes are some the most graphically violent, disturbing moments I’ve seen in a movie lately. Coupled with the opening map (thanks, wasn’t sure where Sierra Leone was) and bits of background given before the action starts that make sure you know this is a movie about REAL things happening in the world today, this is a movie that demands — loudly — to be taken seriously.

The problem is, it’s just not that serious a movie. We’re introduced to Danny Archer, and he’s a good deal more Danny Ocean than Oskar Schindler. And we are whisked along on an adventure story – complete with a McGuffin, a romantic interest, a sinister Colonel, and plenty of chase and fight scenes. And, really, as an adventure film, a sort of “Indiana Jones and the Pink Diamond,” it’s not that bad a flick. It’s just – well, that’s not the movie we were told (by the movie) that we would be watching.

But that’s the movie we get. Leonardo DiCaprio is a diamond smuggler, Jennifer Connelly (in the smartest, sexiest role I’ve ever seen her play) is a journalist doing a story on smuggling, and Djimon Honsou is an African with a diamond worth smuggling. They take turns using each other to get what they want and/or advance the plot. DiCaprio is decent in the amoral, “I don’t stick my neck out for anybody” role, and you get the feeling that if his luck holds, he might end up owning a cafe in Morocco in a few years. Connelly shows she can do more than look sad, but the real heart and soul is Djimon Honsou. He plays a normal guy just trying to raise a family and live quietly in a war-torn, corrupt, violent country. He is stoic, determined, and strong, but constantly swimming against the tide. Sort of an African Denzel Washington. Because he is so stoic, and because he wants little to do with Archer or any of the whites, there are only a handful of scenes that really belong to him. But the ones that do are far and away the most captivating, exciting and touching. Hounsu’s performance grounds the movie and gives it heart; without it, this would just be a story of white peoples’ adventure in Africa.

I come away from the movie feeling a bit of whiplash, between the cartoon violence of adventure movies (Leonardo sneaking up behind a guard and killing him before anyone notices) and the disturbing, realistic violence of “issues” movies (watching a young, blindfolded boy being ordered to pull the trigger on the gun he’s holding, killing the handcuffed man in front of him.)

But I want you to watch this movie, because I want you to think about traumatized families the next time you walk past the jewelry store in the mall. Diamonds are forever, so the story goes, but so is amputation. Edward Zwick, the director, is trying to straddle two worlds – he’s trying to make an “issues” movie that will sell, and he’s trying to make an action flick that will educate moviegoers about important current issues. This hybridization ends up being the major weakness of the movie, but I can respect the effort. It’s not a great movie, and in the end, it’s not an important movie either. But maybe it’s one you should see anyway.

Recommended

• if you can’t be bothered to read a book (or a newspaper article) about what’s going on in the world
• if you still have a crush on Leo
• if you’re looking for a decently made action flick with a social conscience (could be a good date compromise.)

Not Recommended

• if you’re squeamish about violence (you could just skip the first five minutes, though)
• if you’re sick and tired of movies that preach
• if you’re only interested in Oscar winners