The Spirit (2008)

Directed by Frank Miller. Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Paulson, Dan Lauria. Lionsgate.

A Christianity Today Movies review

By Steven D. Greydanus

Will Eisner and Frank Miller: two great tastes that taste putrid together?

A couple of decades ago, maybe. In the late 1980s, when comic-book giant Miller’s groundbreaking graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns was rocking the world of comic book fandom, I had the privilege as a cartooning student of studying under the legendary Eisner, creator of the seminal “The Spirit” series. In those days, there were no greater luminaries in my pantheon of cartooning heroes — “The Spirit” was Citizen Kane, The Dark Knight Returns was The Godfather — even though Eisner didn’t share the Miller love, and could be merciless to a cartooning student who submitted pages displaying a Miller influence (as I learned the hard way).

But the putrid taste of Miller’s solo directing debut The Spirit isn’t simply a collision of conflicting aesthetic visions. The putrescence is all Miller’s — and it’s been evident in his own comic-book work for some time now, which has increasingly degenerated into debased self-parody.

Miller reinvigorated comics in the 1980s with an approach influenced by film noir and martial-arts cinema, among other things. Over time, though, that aesthetic metastasized into the increasingly stereotyped, sadistic and/or sleazy worlds of Hard Boiled, 300, Sin City, and dreadful sequel/prequel extensions of his classic Dark Knight Returns.

These days, everything Miller touches becomes an extension of the Frank Miller Universe, a dark, gritty, rain-soaked, blood-drenched, camp satire of a film noir world populated with one-dimensional character types — musclebound toughs, brutal villains, exotic whores, venal authority figures, lethal femmes fatales — who speak in tough-talking clichés, have rough sex and kill and die in heinous ways, bereft of human interest but high in visual impact.

The movie version of The Spirit is a straightforward excursion into the Frank Miller Universe at its most reductionist, self-parodying and content-free. There are no characters or relationships, only placeholders where characters ought to be. There is no drama or conflict, only dueling line readings and cartoony brutality. There is nothing at stake and nothing and no one to care about, only a pointless, shapeless exercise in wildly veering moods and styles.

As reimagined by Miller, the Spirit (Gabriel Macht, The Recruit) is such a soulless cipher, he lacks even the self-awareness to realize that he doesn’t know who he is or why he does what he does. Why he wears a mask and fights crime; why he seems to be in love with any woman in his field of vision, only to forget her as soon as she’s out of sight; why he mysteriously recovers from any number of fatal injuries just like his more self-aware archrival, the villainous Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson in a twist on Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, where he played an abnormally fragile counterpoint to the indestructible hero).

The movie provides an explanation for the Spirit’s (and Octopus’s) invulnerability; as for the Spirit’s crimefighting, perhaps that doesn’t really need an explanation (Eisner himself never bothered to invest his protagonist with a psychologically compelling motivation, like Batman or Spider-Man). The thing with women, though, is just plain weird.

Perhaps it’s simply that women in the Frank Miller Universe are basically interchangeable bombshells with a few basic profiles: whore/moll, psycho killer, good girl. I’m reminded of a line from a very different movie that also fundamentally subverted its title character: “There is only one woman in the world, with different faces.”

Said faces here include Officer Morgenstern (Stana Katic), a bright rookie with a schoolgirl crush on the Spirit; Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega), a murderous exotic dancer who both loves and hates the Spirit; Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson), an Octopus henchwench whose attitude toward the Spirit I can’t remember to save my life (gosh, this movie is fading fast). More importantly, there’s Sand Serif (Eva Mendes), the Spirit’s tragic childhood flame, now a femme fatale with a soft spot for cops stemming from the murder of her own hero-cop father. (The conspicuously repeated term “Electra complex” obviously recalls the Elektra that Miller created as Daredevil’s lover-turned-enemy — but the Serif character in Eisner really does have that soft spot and that history.)

There’s also Dr. Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson), whom convention would designate the Spirit’s “true love,” if this Spirit were capable of such a thing. Ellen understands the masked man’s strange fickleness of mind and heart, and evidently loves him for what he is, or what he is capable of offering her, which is not much. Ellen’s father, Commissioner Dolan (Dan Luria), wants to protect his daughter from the womanizing Spirit, but she’s content to love her hero from afar, which might suggest something about what kind of father Dolan was, if you stopped to think about it, which you most certainly should not.

I don’t object to Miller reinventing the Spirit as a rooftop-bounding, deathless super hero. It wasn’t Eisner’s vision — Eisner saw the Spirit as more of a James Garner “Maverick” type, and at one time hoped to see Garner play the character in a feature film — but the spirit of “The Spirit” could survive such a transformation.

After all, “The Spirit” wasn’t really about the Spirit fighting crime. Not infrequently he was a supporting character or even a cameo appearance in a series that was really about creating effective, memorable short stories in a variety of moods and tones — comic, melancholy, exciting, chilling — often with a startling or surprising ending. Eisner’s most important influences weren’t Warner crime films or crime writers like Dashiell Hammett, but the short stories of O. Henry, Bierce and Dickens as key influences on his style.

I do object to Miller using The Spirit as a receptacle for recycled bits and pieces of his own artistic history, such as the “My city is my lover” shtick from Daredevil, among others. There are also in-joke references to other cartooning legends such as Steve Ditko and Harvey Kurtzman; occasionally even Eisner himself is referenced (“What’s ten minutes in a man’s life?”, a nod to a Spirit story called “Ten Minutes”).

Worse, The Spirit fails to do the one thing that defined Eisner’s entire career: It doesn’t tell a story. There’s a lot of action, all more or less revolving around a quest for a MacGuffin — but a narrative logic never emerges and so there is never a story or even a world to engage. There’s just a lot of imagery, dialogue and violence.

Macht gives a performance that suggests he could conceivably play a hero, in a movie that had one. Jackson chews the scenery shouting such dialogue as “No egg! On my face!” Of all the women, Paulson comes the closest to creating a character, but is saddled with stupid devotion for a character she knows has that effect on all women and is incapable of standing by any of them. At no time does anything resembling a point threaten to emerge.

Here is an anecdote that is more interesting than this movie and probably than the preceding review. Some twenty years ago, I submitted the Spirit to an exercise in Frank Miller style — and showed it to Eisner. I drew a page of the Spirit with each panel representing a different artist’s style, the joke being that the Spirit was aware of being represented in foreign styles, and was trying to find the culprit responsible (me, of course).

One of the panels was a wide, low close-up on the Spirit’s angry eyes, a shot borrowed from Miller’s visual playbook. Reflecting Eisner’s skepticism of Miller’s work, I made the Spirit furious about being represented in Miller’s style: “Miller … Miller, I swear … you’ll pay for this.” Eisner thought it was hilarious. If only he had known.

Intense comic-book violence; some profane and crass language; brief nudity and some suggestive content.

The Tale of Despereaux (2008)

Directed by Sam Fell and Robert Stevenhagen. Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Watson, Tracey Ullman, Kevin Kline, William H. Macy, Stanley Tucci, Ciarán Hinds, Frances Conroy, Frank Langella, Richard Jenkins, Christopher Lloyd. Universal.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

There are in children’s literature two beloved, gallant mice who love honor and chivalry, both of whom this year have found their way onto the big screen as computer-animated characters. One is Reepicheep, who appeared in this spring’s Disney–Walden co-production The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. And the other is the eponymous hero of Kate DiCamillo’s enchanting The Tale of Despereaux.

DiCamillo is also the author of Because of Winn-Dixie, which was honorably brought to the screen by Walden Media before the Narnia films, back when Walden still made faithful adaptations of acclaimed children’s books. The Newbery-award winning The Tale of Despereaux, with its emphasis on the magic of reading and stories, is the sort of book that might have attracted Walden’s attention, though Walden would have done it as a live-action production with CGI mice and rats. Instead, it’s a computer-animated cartoon from Universal, a studio with little experience in the form other than the non-cartoony The Polar Express.

While the big-screen Reepicheep, alas, bears little resemblance to the character Lewis wrote, Despereaux fares rather better. The movie, a quirky fairy tale with echoes of The Princess Bride as well as various murine (mouse/rat-related) animated films (Ratatouille, Flushed Away, even The Secret of NIMH), is maybe two-thirds true to DiCamillo’s Newbery Award–winning story, with strange, at times surreal departures from the book. As for Despereaux himself, DiCamillo’s frail, wide-eyed romantic has become a fearless action hero.

But where the big-screen Reepicheep is merely sarcastic and cocky, the movie Despereaux is endearingly sincere. Here is a mouse-hero who is truly serious about honor, devotion and courage, in a movie that feels like a storybook rather than an action movie — a movie that, in addition to honor and devotion and courage, is also about longing, imagination, resentment, contrition, forgiveness and redemption.

It’s also a trippy movie in which the kingdom of Dor celebrates the annual Soup Day festival like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, rain magically stops falling when the queen dies and a sort of magical food golem helps the royal chef create new soups. Excuse me, did you say a magical food golem? Why yes, I did, and what’s more, he doesn’t just make soup: He gets an action scene late in the film.

What the heck? Who reads DiCamillo’s book and thinks, “What this story needs is… a magical food golem”? Perhaps it was French director Sylvain Chomet, creator of the bizarre The Triplets of Belleville, who began work on Despereaux before being kicked off the project. Or possibly Corpse Bride co-director Mike Johnson, who replaced Chomet for awhile. Certainly such a surreal conceit would be more at home in Triplets or Corpse Bride than Despereaux. At any rate, it’s harder to imagine this invention coming from writer–producer Gary Ross (Seabiscuit) or from the final directing team of Sam Fell (Flushed Away) and Robert Stevenhagen (Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, The Road to El Dorado).

Too many cooks in the soup? Perhaps. Fans of the book may be frustrated by Despereaux’s unevenness and sometimes odd storytelling choices. Even so, the strange and wonderful quality of DiCamillo’s story is honored, if imperfectly.

Despereaux himself (Matthew Broderick) is different from other mice: He’s born with his eyes open, and his ears are enormous. This sets him apart from his peers, but it also means he sees and hears more than they do. More disconcertingly, he doesn’t cower and scurry like other mice — and he isn’t afraid of humans. In fact, he finds inspiration and elevation in human culture: To other mice, the books in the library are just so much edible glue and paper, but Despereaux reads the words — “Once upon a time” — and is transformed. Later, with visions of knights in shining armor and maidens fair dancing in his head, he meets a real princess (Harry Potter’s Emma Watson), and is smitten.

Though DiCamillo’s 2003 book came four years earlier, watching The Tale of Despereaux it’s impossible not to think of Pixar’s Ratatouille, which also features a computer-animated rodent with highly attuned senses and a misunderstood affinity both for human beings and their culture, in this case literature (and in the book music also) rather than cuisine — though there’s a parallel storyline involving a rat named Roscuro (Dustin Hoffman) with an affinity for fine cuisine and soup in particular.

Despereaux’s literary daydreams about knights and maidens have a stylized visual quality that parallels the bursts of color evoking Remy’s taste sensations. Despereaux even moves differently from other rats, like Ratatouille’s Remy, who preferred not to crawl on all fours — and they both have French names to boot, in a movie with long French word in the title (though Ratatouille isn’t named after a character).

The subterranean metropolises of Mouseworld and Ratworld may remind viewers of co-director Fell’s Flushed Away, with its miniature London underground. Visually, though, The Tale of Despereaux is more stylishly rendered than Flushed Away, with a beguiling look that, despite some animation stiffness, evokes picture-book illustration. Perhaps reflecting the studio’s previous experience with The Polar Express, based on the book by writer–illustrator Chris Van Allsburg (cf. Zathura), Despereaux is often reminiscent of Van Allsburg, who created similarly lavish but strangely chilly spaces much like the castle of Dor, for instance. Other times, notably in Mouseworld, I thought of the warmer styles of Maurice Sendak and Cynthia Rylant.

The picture-book feel is fitting, since whereas Ratatouille and Flushed Away are more or less urban comedies, The Tale of Despereaux is a fairy tale. What is most gratifying about the movie version is that it’s actually a fairy tale — not a Fractured Fairy Tale, not an ironic deconstruction of the genre in the mode of Shrek, Enchanted and Happily N’Ever After — but a sincere morality tale in a folk storytelling mode, with dark themes — the jealousy of the serving girl Miggery Sow (Tracey Ulmann), the vengefulness of Roscuro, the harshness of Mouseworld and the cruelty of Ratworld — to do the Grimm Brothers proud. Voiceover narration by Sigourney Weaver, often drawing directly from DiCamillo’s text, helps the effect (though Weaver’s sensible cadences aren’t necessarily the best match for the DiCamillo’s earnest, confiding literary voice).

The filmmakers subvert their source material in other ways. The book’s protagonist is precisely an unlikely hero: weak, sickly, less timid than other mice but still quite capable of fear and even prone to fainting. By contrast, the movie Despereaux is a natural hero of the Hollywood sort: one who never feels fear, and whose speed, grace and reflexes would do him credit at the Jade Palace in Kung Fu Panda. Unlike DiCamillo’s hero, who is well aware of his shortcomings, the movie mouse not only doesn’t know he’s small, he thinks of himself as a giant. Even his portentous birth in the movie contrasts with his unpromising beginnings in the book.

Roscuro’s story has been revised in a way that diminishes his inner struggle, making his treachery harder to understand and diminishing the crucial theme of light and darkness. The movie also untangles the book’s overlapping timelines, telling the story front to back in a way that undermines the sense of discovery (sort of like reading The Magician’s Nephew before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and knowing straight off where the wardrobe and lamp-post come from, who Aslan and the White Witch are, etc.).

All in all, though, The Tale of Despereaux is sprightly, charming family entertainment for the holiday season, and a fine finish to a movie year of somewhat better fare for family audiences than we’ve seen in some time.

Moderate animated menace and scariness; some stressful family situations (parental death and separation).

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Directed by Scott Derrickson. Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Jaden Smith, Kathy Bates, John Cleese, John Hamm, Robert Knepper. 20th Century Fox.

By Steven D. Greydanus

“I’m here to save the earth,” says Klaatu in Scott Derrickson’s action-movie remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still.

It’s the kind of line you might expect of an enlightened being who comes down from the heavens with a message for mankind — particularly one like Klaatu who is known from the original film for such Christ-like acts as dying and coming back to life, and who is played here by Keanu Reeves, no stranger to sci-fi Christ figures.

However, it turns out that the enlightenment this Klaatu brings is a little less inspiring than that of his 1951 counterpart. Keanu–Klaatu isn’t much concerned with the human propensity for suspicion and violence, nor is he the type to be impressed by the lofty aspirations of the Gettysburg Address during a visit to the Lincoln Memorial. (He does admire Bach, perhaps for his mathematical elegance.)

When Klaatu says he’s here to “save the earth,” he doesn’t mean he wants to save human beings from themselves. He means he’s here to save the earth from us. Yes, it’s The Happening all over again, but with an alien plague of nano-locusts instead of unexplained suicides. Humans are a virus, and Keanu is the cure?

The remake isn’t a bad movie. The xenobiological and geopolitical implications of the premise have been developed with some care and intelligence. The special effects are well conceived and executed, and the story represents a credible effort to honor the original while contributing something new. Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) effectively builds and sustains a sense of thoughtful tension — until the screenplay lets him down.

Then you have a character who protests, “As scientists, we can’t consent to that.” Right, because scientists have never done anything unethical, goodness knows. And there’s Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates) saying “We have the situation under control,” when she not only knows perfectly well that they don’t, but has said so, so that Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) can reply, “You’re not in control — you don’t know what he’s capable of,” even though Jackson actually does have a pretty good idea what Klaatu is capable of. Later Jackson tells Helen, “I make no promises. I still answer to the president. You’re on your own.” What does that even mean?

One of the nice touches in the first act, as the U.S. government scrambles to respond to detection of an extraterrestrial object on a collision course with the earth — and then to the unexpected nature of that object when it touches down in Central Park — is the clear sense that even the world’s leading experts are in over their heads, that no one can confidently formulate the correct procedures in a wholly unprecedented situation. Military personnel on the brink of first contact shakily request rules of engagement, and a surgical team looks with nervous bewilderment at a possibly dying extraterrestrial, wondering what interventions they might safely attempt. No one knows. The government has assembled the best and brightest, and they’re smart enough to know that no one on the planet has a clue.

But then at some point military policy impacting the security of the planet appears to be in the hands of a mustachioed colonel (Robert Knepper) who is not an important enough character to have a name, but whose yahoo status may be suggested by his southern drawl, and whose arrogant belief that he knows how to handle giant robots from space in Central Park threatens to usher in an apocalypse. A colonel? Shouldn’t there at least be a general or two on the table, or a Department of Defense emergency council, or something? What happened to the Secretary of Defense? Heck, what happened to the President and the VP? I know they’re squirreled away in secure locations, but who exactly put Colonel Mustache in charge of planetary security? (An officious cop who tries to arrest Klaatu also has a mustache: a token of officious authority, perhaps?)

In the original, Helen Benson is a government secretary and a single mom who meets Klaatu incognito and has no idea who he is. Here she’s reinvented as an astrobiologist on the government’s short list of who to call in case of alien invasion, who knows exactly who Klaatu is from the beginning. Her son, now her stepson, is named Jacob (Jaden Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness) rather than Bobby, and is given absent-father issues that make him resentful of his stepmother and hostile to the alien, whom he doesn’t know is Klaatu. “We should kill him,” Jacob declares. “Just to make sure. That’s what dad would do.”

This kind of thing would have tended to undermine humanity’s chances of making a positive impression on the Klaatu of the original, who was the alien equivalent of a humanist, and whose beef with mankind centered on our proneness to suspicion and violence. That Klaatu was concerned with the complexities of human nature, which is what an extraterrestrial envoy ought to make us think about. But Keanu–Klaatu isn’t an ambassador for altruism, except in the broadest sense of eco-friendliness. The closest he comes to commenting on man’s inhumanity to man is when he says, “You treat the world as you treat one another.” I would have preferred “Be excellent to each other.”

The low point of the movie’s persuasiveness is the single scene with Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese) — in the original an Einstein-like scientist who impresses Klaatu with his highly evolved thinking, here a caricature of professorial enlightenment. Helen decides to bring Klaatu to Professor Barnhardt when Klaatu professes his disappointment with earth’s leaders. “Those aren’t our leaders!” she protests earnestly. “Let me take you to one of our leaders!” (What? Since when is earth a noocracy, governed by the wise or intelligentsia? Perhaps she is trying to pull a fast one, or perhaps she’s using a mental reservation, meaning “one of our leaders” in the sense of “one of our leading thinkers.”)

At any rate, when they arrive at Professor Barnhardt’s house, we hear piano playing in the background. Helen points out Barnhardt’s Nobel Prize — “for biological altruism,” she says, which sounds made-up, possibly to impress Klaatu, but turns out to be a real-world area of study involving the basis of behaviors in any species that benefit other individuals at the expense of the acting individual.

Then comes the scene in which Klaatu sees Barnhardt’s chalkboard, covered with equations and formulas, realizes how close he is to enlightenment, and begins erasing and making corrections. Then, suddenly, there is Barnhardt, gravely watching Klaatu from behind. After calmly observing for a few moments without a word, Barnhardt calmly joins Klaatu at the chalkboard and begins writing alongside him, like two brilliant musicians performing a duet, as if he solves equations with extraterrestrials every day. All the while the piano-playing continues in the background — a recording, it turns out, not Barnhardt’s own playing. Misdirection or storytelling mistake? I couldn’t tell.

Barnhardt makes the case for allowing humanity to face its crises and try to rise to the occasion. Mankind lacks the will to change, Klaatu contends, but Barnhardt objects that “It’s only at the precipice that we change.” Later, bidding them farewell, Barnhardt offers Helen the Zen-like recommendation, “Convince him not with reason, but with yourself.”

Huh? Even if this works, why should it work? Even if Klaatu ultimately recognizes that “there is another side” to humanity, when did humanity become the issue? I thought the issue was earth in the balance.

The movie is considerably helped by Connelly, who brings conviction and intelligence to her role, and by Reeves, whose detached persona effectively expresses Klaatu’s alienness to his human body. As in The Matrix, Reeves plays a character with christological overtones who gets a slimy, naked Verbum caro factum est birth scene, and has to learn to use his human muscles for the first time. I like Klaatu’s succinct answer to a question about what his natural form is like (“Different”).

Klaatu’s flickering CGI globe spacecraft, which Derrickson ushers onscreen with Spielbergian awe, effectively updates the flying-saucer imagery of the original. The giant robot Gort, also CGI, isn’t nearly as interesting, although the plot does come up with a novel way of using him.

A few scenes suggest christological resonances, as when military laser sights appear on Klaatu’s palms like stigmata. The first time Reeves appears onscreen, in a prologue set in 1928 in which he plays a human being whose DNA becomes the basis for Klaatu’s human body, he’s wearing a beard that could have given Klaatu a Christ-like appearance, but for some reason Klaatu grows hair on his head while remaining clean-shaven. The death-and-resurrection motif of the original has been omitted, or at best conflated with the incarnation imagery.

A couple of brief soundbites offer religious context. Reactions to the extraterrestrial manifestation from religious leaders range from apocalyptic warnings to optimism and calls for understanding; an televised image of Pope Benedict suggests that he is among the voices of calm.

Klaatu’s own message, though, is anticlimactic. Even when he takes a stab at profundity, it falls flat. “Nothing ever truly dies; the universe wastes nothing,” he says in a key scene. “Everything is simply transformed.” Not only is that irrelevant to his larger message, it actually undermines it: If nothing ever truly dies, why is it so all-important to save the earth?

The movie cleverly dovetails the title incident with its own message. At the same time, it seems to lack the courage of its convictions. When the original Klaatu temporarily brought all technology on earth to a grinding halt, the movie made a point of noting that critical systems like airplanes and hospital technology were spared. Given this Klaatu’s willingness to implement an anthropological Final Solution to the environmental problem, I have no trouble accepting that he might not go in for such tender-hearted hair-splitting. Yet this movie only shows us the effects in centers of commerce, government and military locations, and so forth. Whatever happened with the hospitals and airplanes, it’s part of the story, and shouldn’t have been ignored one way or the other.

I don’t object in principle to Keanu–Klaatu’s message. It’s just not a very interesting or enlightening thing for an ambassador from the universe to say. It’s sort of a letdown, not unlike like having the pope show up at your house only to check the batteries in your smoke detectors. There’s nothing wrong with that. You just hope he has more on his mind.

Sci-fi disaster footage and occasional violence; a scene of slimy alien metamorphosis; a few instances of profanity and crass language.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Directed by Robert Wise. Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, Billy Gray. 20th Century Fox.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

From the 1950s, the golden age of science fiction, alien first-contact stories have generally embodied one of two paradigms. At one end of the spectrum is the invasion or hostile-alien scenario, typified by War of the Worlds. At the other end is what might be called the alien-envoy or enlightened-alien scenario, exemplified by The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Stories of the first sort typically imagine life on earth as a happy but fragile oasis in a hostile universe of unfathomable threats and evils; in those of the second sort, earth itself may be revealed as a chaotic or primitive backwater, in need of enlightenment — or judgment. Hostile-alien stories include the Alien movies (an “invasion” of another sort), The Body Snatchers and Independence Day. Enlightened-alien stories include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and K‑PAX.

Viewed politically, War of the Worlds is widely described as a Cold-War paranoia fable, thus a “conservative” movie, while The Day the Earth Stood Still is often interpreted as a critique of Cold-War paranoia and a plea for global unity (specifically on behalf of the United Nations), and thus a “liberal” film. On a religious level, War of the Worlds expressly credits divine providence rather than military preparedness for human survival, while The Day the Earth Stood Still holds mankind answerable to a higher power for its barbarism and cupidity. Each of the two films explores and develops a basic existential insight: that we are a privileged people in a world of darkness, unable to sustain ourselves, dependent on a higher benevolence; that we are a lawless and wayward people, weighed in the balance of a larger moral order and found wanting.

Based on a short story by Harry Bates and directed by Robert Wise (The Sound of Music), The Day the Earth Stood Still envisions the arrival of a wise and high-minded visitor from the stars named Klaatu (Michael Rennie). With his message of peace, death-and-rebirth story arc and ascent into the heavens, Klaatu is a sci-fi type of Christ — and the movie suggests that, as with Christ, mankind is unable to accept Klaatu on his own terms, and violently rejects both the messenger and the message. (The christological parallels are ironically weakened by a piously motivated caveat, added at the behest of devoutly Catholic Production Code head Joseph Breen, about resurrection belonging only to the “Almighty Spirit.”)

While Klaatu is rejected by the ruling authorities, he is welcomed and accepted by ordinary, decent private citizens like a widowed Department of Commerce secretary named Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her son Bobby (Billy Gray), with whom an incognito Klaatu — going by the christologically freighted pseudonym “John Carpenter” — shares a boarding home. Klaatu also finds reason for hope for mankind in its best sentiments and aspirations, such as the words of the Gettysburg Address inscribed in the wall of the Lincoln Memorial, and its scientific humanism, embodied by the Einstein-like Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe).

More thoughtful and restrained than most sci-fi of the period, The Day the Earth Stood Still has aged better than almost all of its peers. The seams show in a few places, notably its startling predication of universal peace on a benevolent police state, surely a solution at odds with the movie’s liberal aspirations. Yet the film’s evocative power rises above its limitations. The low-key special effects are still effective, and the eerie Bernard Herrmann score sets the mood perfectly. Decades later, it remains a thought-provoking, worthwhile parable.

DVD note: Just in time to capitalize on the theatrical release of the 2008 remake, The Day the Earth Stood Still is newly available in a two-disc special edition and in Blu-ray. A welter of special features includes a pair of commentaries — a director interview with Wise conducted by “even-numbered” Star Trek movie writer Nicholas Meyer, and an analysis by a panel of film and music historians — making-of featurettes on the film and the theremin-based score, an audio reading of the original Bates short story “Farewell to the Master,” a documentary on flying saucers and more.

Some menace and stylized violence.

Quantum of Solace (2008)

Directed by Marc Forster. Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini. Columbia.

A Christianity Today Movies review

By Steven D. Greydanus

The 2006 smash hit Casino Royale was James Bond’s Batman Begins, a darkly masterful, psychologically layered origin story that threw to the winds the tongue-in-cheek camp stylings of earlier franchise installments and completely rethought its iconic but flawed hero and his world from the ground up, taking seriously the rough edges that had previously been papered over with a wink.

If the unconventional title Quantum of Solace, more redolent of “Star Trek” cerebralism than the id-driven 007 world, held out any hope that the much-anticipated follow-up would be in any way analogous to The Dark Knight — that is, an even more ambitious crucible for the newly minted hero, a soul-searching exploration of chaos and order in a world of escalation, failure and incalculable exigencies — well, no such luck.

Where Casino Royale was the longest Bond movie ever, Quantum of Solace is the shortest ever — and the title track by Jack White and Alicia Keyes bearing the distinctly Bondesque title “Another Way to Die,” is at least one of the most abrasive and unpleasant ever. (Also, as was pointed out to me by CT Movies critic and inveterate list-maker Peter Chattaway, Casino director Martin Campbell was the oldest director ever of a Bond film, while Quantum director Marc Forster is the youngest.)

The result may not be the least consequential Bond flick ever, but it has no pretensions of topping or even rivaling Casino’s landmark contribution to the Bond mythos. Compared to Casino, Quantum is unquestionably a disappointment, a coda to its formidable predecessor. Compared to Bond films for the last twenty years or so, Quantum is… a decent post-Bourne action thriller, I guess. Ferocious car chases, rooftop pursuits, brutal combat sequences, elegantly choreographed stunts, a parade of exotic locations… Quantum does all this, with credible panache. Just don’t expect to care like you did in Casino.

Quantum does extend Casino’s cold, cynical tone as Bond finds himself adrift in a trust-no-one world of military intelligence blind spots, blunders and conflicts of interest. There is some attempt to develop a post-9/11 context for Bond’s adventures in the sinister secret organization “Quantum,” whose absolute invisibility and seemingly all-powerful reach are all the more implausible precisely because of the realism of MI‑6’s fallibility.

Daniel Craig is still the quintessential James Bond, cold, ruthless and somehow lacking in complete humanity. “A blunt instrument,” M (Judi Dench) called him in Casino, and villainous Mr. Greene (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ Mathieu Amalric) of Quantum, ostensibly an environmentalist–philanthropist, contemptuously describes both Bond and the heroine du jour as “damaged goods.”

The latter is Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a reckless, fragile femme fatale among equally fatales hommes, a woman who, like Quantum’s Bond, is driven by revenge. In one significant way, Camille might be among the most interesting Bond Girls, precisely because she might be, in a sense, the only Bond Girl who isn’t.

To be sure, in Casino Bond had little time for women, and in Quantum he has almost none. But there would ordinarily be little doubt that Bond could have pretty much any woman he wants, certainly by the end of the movie if not sooner. When Mr. Greene confides to Bond, with mixed resentment, envy and contempt, that Camille “won’t sleep with you unless you give her something,” the natural thought is that he doesn’t know Bond. But, by the same token, we don’t know Camille.

Alas, whatever plus Camille might represent is undermined by the inclusion of a token bedroom scene (token is definitely the word) involving an insultingly gratuitous plaything of a Bond Girl, a dewy, strawberry-tressed MI‑6 agent named Fields (21-year-old Gemma Arterton)… and only in the end credits does the film admit that, yes, her name is Strawberry Fields.

Fields confronts Bond in Bolivia wrapped in a knee-length trenchcoat and no other visible clothing, looking remarkably like a centerfold in some Playboy feature on International Women of Mystery. Isn’t that just the agent you would assign if you were MI‑6 to take Bond in hand, under arrest if necessary? (Answer: Pierce Brosnan Bond, yes; Daniel Craig Bond, no.)

Fields is easily the least credible approximation of a professional woman in a Bond film since then-28 Denise Richards tried to pass for a nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough. Not that Fields doesn’t seem smart or self-aware, but Bond can’t be bothered even to make a show of flirtation or romancing her, and she obligingly follows him into the bedroom to help him, um, look for stationery (what a line)… and then finds herself naked and smilingly self-remonstrating with her back to Bond as he kisses her from behind?

The scene is just as problematic on Bond’s end. Consider: Fields is the first woman he’s been with since Casino — and the first woman with whom we see this Bond get physical in whom he has neither ulterior nor emotional interest. (The direct chronological dovetailing of the two films leaves no room for hypothetical other women in the interim.)

In Casino Bond began ravishing one woman because (as she knew very well) he wanted something from her, but when circumstances changed he left her on the floor with a bottle of champagne. Then came his beloved/hated Vesper Lynd, for whom he fell body and soul, who saved him and betrayed him and left him a hollower shell of a man than he had been before.

Given that history, meaningless, perfunctory sex with Fields may not be implausible on Bond’s part — but at least it represents some sort of turning point. It should mean something to the screenwriters, if not to Bond. But it doesn’t. It’s like a relic of the pre-Casino franchise, tossed in because you can’t have a 007 movie with no sex.

Just as bad is a nasty postscript that echoes the discovery of the villain’s wife in the hammock in Casino, among other such scenes in Bond history, except that here it’s pointless and unconnected to Bond’s callousness toward women. Quantum even has M making some disparaging remark to Bond (something like “See what your charm has done”), which is stupid, because this time Bond’s charm had nothing to do with it.

M’s role is bigger this time out, but her relationship with Bond is less prickly and more cartoony than in Casino. Quantum also brings back Casino’s Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini), who, in a key scene that would have been even more important in a better film, urges Bond to “forgive” Vesper and himself.

Quantum also takes a turn toward the political: It turns out that the U.S. willingly colludes with military coups in foreign countries if they think there’s oil in it for them, and the British will do whatever the U.S. wants them to. Curiously, Quantum’s evil plot oddly resonates with a key plot point in Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa: In both films a third-world community living in desert terrain is threatened by a hidden group with controlling access to the earth’s most precious resource — a substance beside which even diamonds and gold or oil are seen to be of little worth.

Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) directs his first action feature in a style clearly modeled on the Bourne and Batman films, all tight closeups and fast edits. For some reason he intercuts action scenes with other images: an underground chase sequence in Siena is punctuated by that city’s Palio horse race; a melee at an opera house is counterpointed by scenes from the opera; and Bond’s climactic duel in a burning desert fortress is intercut with the heroine’s own battle to the death.

Quantum isn’t a complete waste. Craig’s charisma holds up even when the screenplay lets him down. And while there’s nothing here to compare to Casino’s opening parkour chase sequence, the chases and fight scenes are entertaining and sometimes strikingly well staged. Three years ago, Quantum of Solace would have been a pretty good Bond flick. Two pair isn’t a bad hand. It’s just anticlimactic after a royal flush.

Brutal, sometimes deadly hand-to-hand violence, and gunplay and vehicular violence; brief sexual content including attempted sexual assault (no explicit nudity) and references to rape; some obscene, crass and obscene language.

Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa (2008)

Directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath. Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Cedric the Entertainer, Andy Richter, Bernie Mac, Alec Baldwin. DreamWorks.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

Released ten years after Pixar’s pioneering Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film, DreamWorks Animation’s 2005 entry Madagascar is a credible contender for the dubious distinction of being the first truly lame computer-animated cartoon (if you don’t count the lame but non-cartoony CGI realism of the non-comedy fantasies Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Polar Express).

A listless, strangely cheap-looking affair lacking even the modicum of heart and energy — to say nothing of the visual interest — of a Shrek or Shark Tale, Madagascar’s tale of four Central Park Zoo animals making a break for the wild and winding up shipwrecked on the titular island was nevertheless a major hit with undemanding family audiences. And where there’s a hit, sure as rain, there must be a sequel.

Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa reunites the ensemble cast of the first film, and more money and effort has been thrown at the script and on the screen. The characters look about as good as they could be made to look while still resembling their original incarnations. The story — in which our heroes, the paramilitary penguins (once again the funniest and liveliest part of the mix) and a few of the lemurs escape from Madagascar in what’s left of a wrecked plane, only to crash it again in Africa near a wildlife preserve — is more competently crafted, building to a traditional climax where the original sort of petered out in the third act.

It’s also a bit of a hodgepodge, combining elements of The Lion King, Joe vs. the Volcano, Happy Feet and some romantic comedy that I’m sure must exist but which I haven’t yet identified. To wit:

The Lion King: A lion cub is separated from his kingly father due to the machinations of a scheming rival and grows up far away from the pride, never learning the ways of adult lionhood. The rival succeeds in taking over the pride, after which the plain goes from a paradise to a dustbowl. In this case the cub is Alex (Ben Stiller), whom a flashback prologue reveals was born in Africa but fell prey to poachers and wound up in Central Park Zoo by mistake.

Joe vs. the Volcano: A hypochondriac New Yorker who thinks he’s about to die of a terminal disease volunteers to throw himself into a volcano as a sacrificial victim to bring blessings to the local natives, only admitting his true feelings to the girl he loves just before his imminent death. This would be Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer), while the girl is… well, wait for it.

Happy Feet: A macho animal father is chagrined by his son’s unbecoming affinity for dancing — a misunderstood habit that is socially suicidal among his fellows, but turns out to be critical in engaging human beings. This, again, is Alex, whose Central Park Zoo antics don’t fly back on the wildlife preserve.

More significantly, Madagascar 2 not only recalls Happy Feet’s satire of religion, it also makes the latter’s coy coming-out subtext look tame compared to its own overt running theme of sexual diversity.

Not once but twice in Madagascar 2 we are told that “Love transcends all differences” and “Love knows no boundaries.” Thus, for example, that Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith) the hippo’s interest in meeting males of her own species, whether in the zoo “breeding program” or among the wild hippos of Africa, sends Melman (David Schwimmer) the giraffe into jealous indignation, since (the filmmakers have now decided) the awkward Melman has always carried a torch for Gloria.

In Africa, a sensual, ultra-macho hippo (husky-voiced rapper will.i.am) named Moto Moto (which we’re told means “hot hot”) expertly puts the moves on Gloria, who responds with all the “take me” willingness of a hippo who hears her biological clock ticking — until she realizes that Melman’s sweet devotion makes Moto Moto’s Barry White on-the-make style seem shallow. Ultimately, Gloria realizes that she’s traveled halfway around the world to find that the perfect guy for her was always right under her nose. Haven’t we seen this before in some chick flick where the heroine decides to ditch the stud and stick with the platonic/gay best friend, or something like that?

This builds to a scene in which Melman, convinced that he’s dying and preparing to offer himself as a sacrifice to the gods of the volcano, stands decked out in garlands and a kind of veil that gives him a distinctly bridal look — a connection reinforced when Gloria snatches him from falling to his death and stands holding him in her arms like a groom carrying a bride across the threshold.

This is immediately followed by, yes, a wedding scene, with the bridal Melman apparently marrying Gloria — though it turns out that another even more mismatched “couple” is apparently getting hitched (whether it’s a double wedding or misdirection wasn’t clear to me). Madagascar 2 repeatedly “pairs” the crisp-talking penguin Skipper (co-director Tom McGrath) with — I am not making this up — a hula-dancer bobble-doll.

Prior to the mock wedding, I thought the Skipper–doll theme reached a low point when the chimps, negotiating labor benefits with the penguins, produce “incriminating” photos of Skipper and the bobble-doll in their bid to secure maternity leave. I guess sexual blackmail knows no boundaries either. Incidentally, the photos are produced in response to Skipper’s objection to offering maternity leave on the grounds that (with a glance under the table) the chimps are “all male.”

Then there are further cross-dressing jokes, from an opening scene with King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen) of the lemurs popping out of a cake dressed as a girl chortling “I’m a female! Which of you is attracted to me?” to a closing gag in which Alex, reunited with his leonine father Zuba (Bernie Mac), convince rival male Makunga (Alec Baldwin) that a lady’s pocketbook is a “man-bag” and get him to put it over his shoulder as a prelude to a butt-kicking.

All told, Madagascar 2 crosses the line from poor taste to propaganda. It’s family entertainment for the posthuman family, whatever that may entail (love transcends all differences). A generation raised on entertainment like this will find the passage of California’s Proposition 8 incomprehensible.

Then there’s Julien’s religious commentary. Just prior to taking off from Madagascar in their salvaged plane, Julien advises the passengers to “pray to your personal god this hunk of junk flies.” In Africa, proposing the volcano sacrifice, Julien performs an extended comic dramatization of a volcano god satiated with sacrifices while a hospitable worshipper insists that he take more. Later, concerned that his sacrifice proposal hasn’t worked, Julien exclaims, “The science seemed so solid!” Finally, an alternate “sacrifice” occurs at the very moment that the problem is solved, allowing Julien to believe that the gods have heard him, though we know the real explanation. None of this is as subversive as Happy Feet’s anti-religious themes, but it doesn’t help either.

I see I’ve left out, among other things, Marty (Chris Rock) the zebra’s identity crisis on learning that all African zebras look and sound exactly like him. Does this mean even female zebras sound like Chris Rock, or that there are no female zebras? At this point I’m not sure I want to know.

Recurring cartoon violence; some crude/suggestive humor; parental-separation themes.

The Express (2008)

Directed by Gary Fleder. Rob Brown, Dennis Quaid, Omar Benson Miller, Darrin DeWitt Henson, Charles S. Dutton. Universal.

A Christianity Today Movies review

By Steven D. Greydanus

The Express is a rare inspirational sports film that remembers who sports are supposed to inspire: other people.

While in many ways the story follows familiar genre conventions, The Express isn’t just about individual achievement, following your dreams, or coming together as a team. It isn’t even just about facing social pressure and overcoming racist opposition, like many earlier racially aware sports films (Remember the Titans, Glory Road, Pride, etc.).

The Express is aware that what Ernie Davis (likeable Rob Brown of Finding Forrester) does out on the field matters not only to him and his teammates and family, to his coach, Ben Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid, solid as always), or even to the other team. It matters to anonymous fans of color who come to his games or who spot him in the team bus from an adjacent bus on the road. “Now that’s something, for colored folk around here to open a newspaper and see your name, Ernie,” his brother Will (Nelsan Ellis), an NAACP activist, points out to him.

In a way, The Express is not the story of a football player, or of a team, but of a number. The number is 44, the number of the white and black Syracuse jersey worn by three great black running backs from 1954 to 1966. The number passed from the legendary Jim Brown, who has been called the best running back of all time or even the best football player, period, to Davis, the “Elmira Express,” the first black player to win the prestigious Heisman Award (some have felt Brown should have won it first), and finally to future Denver Broncos great Floyd Little.

The Express is about passing the torch. In 1950 the torch is carried by Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers, whom young Ernie (Justin Martin), growing up in Uniontown, PA, sees in storefront televisions and posters. Ernie struggles with stuttering, and it means something to him that Jackie “is doing a lot without saying nothing.”

Later, moving to Elmira, NY, Ernie finds his outlet in small-fry and high-school football, and idolizes Brown, who has just graduated from Syracuse and signed with the Cleveland Browns. Syracuse coach Schwartzwalder, trying to fill the hole in his roster, recognizes Davis’s stellar talent, and realizes that every college team in the country — every integrated team, that is — will be after a high-school player of his caliber.

So the coach turns to a secret weapon: Jim Brown himself (charismatic Darrin Dewitt Henson), whom Schwartzwalder shrewdly persuades to go to Elmira and help recruit Davis for the Orangemen. What good is Jim’s success, Schwartzwalder somewhat cynically argues, if he isn’t willing to give a helping hand to the next kid? It’s an argument Jim grudgingly accepts for one reason: He knows Schwartzwalder is a good coach who will help Davis reach his full potential. Throughout the film Jim is a welcome presence in the background of Davis’s career, and toward the end Davis has a similar opportunity to pass the torch to another up-and-coming player.

There is also a passing of torches from Ernie’s grandfather Pops (terrific Charles S. Dutton), a dignified patriarch who with his wife raises Ernie and Will until Ernie is twelve, when — to Ernie’s evident chagrin — their long-absent mother shows up with a new husband to take the boys back. The film doesn’t tell us whether she was widowed or divorced (according to Wikipedia, Ernie’s parents were separated when his father died in an accident), but the awkware reunion scene effectively engages themes of family stability and instability, of absent fathers, unreliable mothers and grandparents who step into the gap. Things ultimately work out, though, and Ernie’s whole family provides crucial support at important turning points.

Pops is a firm believer in hard work, study, and achievement, and he doesn’t let Ernie’s stuttering problem exempt him from taking his turn reading the Bible during evening devotions. One evening Ernie painstakingly sounds out a verse that will come to resonate with the spirit of his life: “But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Cor. 15:10).

Ernie does work harder than the others. He’s like a deer on the field, dodging, twisting, leaping between, around and over opposing players. Actor Brown, a college football player himself, is persuasive in the role, and stellar cinematography and sharp editing convey the drama of the action even to a sports outsider like myself while maintaining a fan-pleasing authenticity. (I know this because I brought my sports-loving father to the screening. A sports non-fan myself, my definition of a good sports film is one that my dad and I both enjoy. The Express has the goods.)

Ernie is one of three black players for the Orangemen, along with Jack Buckley (Omar Benson Miller of Miracle at St. Anna, very funny), his best friend on the team. Jim warns Ernie that Syracuse won’t be an easy place for him, and naturally Ernie faces antagonism on his own team as well as on campus. He even clashes with Schwartzwalder, who recognizes his strengths but has a pragmatic attitude about the world they live in. Quaid’s performance is one of the film’s highlights; I don’t know how many movie coaches could deliver what Jack later calls “the white-girl speech” without coming off like a Hollywood heavy, but Quaid manages to combine complicity with bigotry and a measure of sympathy in a gratifyingly nuanced way.

Despite this, if The Express has a flaw, it may be pushing its salutary depiction of race and racism just a bit too far. Among other things, it might have been nice to see at least an occasional incidental white character who didn’t evince some sort of racism.

From what I’ve read about Davis’s life, his actual relationship with Schwartzwalder may have been more congenial than the film suggests. Another fictionalization concerns an important game against West Virginia University that really occurred in Syracuse, but in the film is moved to Morgantown to provide an ugly scene of virulently racist West Virginia fans throwing rubbish at the integrated Orangemen, while the WV Mountaineers take brutal cheap shots at Davis and the referees make one skewed call after another. (West Virginia fans have cried foul at this license, though it seems to be true the Mountaineers weren’t integrated at that time.)

Certainly the resistance Ernie faces at the Cotton Bowl in Texas, including not being allowed to stay at the hotel with his teammates — or the country club where the award was given — is factual. (Ernie’s teammates’ reaction to the latter snub is among the film’s most gratifying moments, though I learn that, in fact, it was not unanimous.)

Nicole Behaire is appealing but underused as love interest Sarah Ward, who has a couple of nice scenes but isn’t in the movie enough to make it entirely clear, in a mildly sensual bedroom scene late in the film, whether they’re married or just lovers (apparently the latter is the case). In a PG film, this moment seems somewhat out of place, though it would have been less so if they were married.

After his college days, Davis signed with Cleveland along with his hero Jim Brown, but they never had a chance to play together, as the film’s denouement makes clear. This tragic coda makes for a more poignant, less traditionally triumphant ending than sports films often have. Whether in spite of this or because of it, The Express ranks among the most moving and memorable films of its kind.

Sports roughness including recurring cheap shots; racist epithets; some profane and crass language; brief, mild sensuality.

The Lucky Ones (2008)

Directed by Neil Burger. Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins, Michael Peña. Lionsgate.

A Christianity Today Movies review

By Steven D. Greydanus

TK (Michael Peña) loves to work a crowd. As Teddy’s Roosevelt’s son famously said of his father, he wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. Actually, TK just wants to tell you about his remarkable experiences as the bride and the corpse, in his easygoing, no-really, I’m-not-BS’ing-you style. He’s just holding forth on the extreme gratitude with which his girlfriend responds to his almost mystical knowledge of how to touch a woman, and is verging into the subject of multiple women, when the roadside IED hits.

No one is killed, though TK’s weapon catches some shrapnel, rendering it useless and possibly saving his life. Then one of his buddies notices the slowly expanding patch of blood near the crotch of his fatigues, and the possibility suggests itself that the shrapnel-damaged weapon may be symbolic foreshadowing. Yes: TK has lost his mojo, in more ways than one, at least for the time being. Good luck getting him to talk now.

Colee (Rachel McAdams) lugs a fine guitar around with her, but she doesn’t play it. She’s more comfortable with her weapon in her hands, almost unsettlingly so, considering the frequency with which she thinks about having her weapon when she doesn’t — sometimes wishing she did, sometimes glad she doesn’t. The latter is probably the more sensible reaction.

Like TK, Colee has 30 days’ leave due to an injury, though she isn’t concerned about that; she was only shot in the leg. What matters is the guitar, which is not her instrument, but her mission: She’s determined to return it to the family of its late owner, a fellow soldier who was also her boyfriend. The story behind the guitar is almost as incredible as TK’s whoppers, the difference being that Colee believes her story completely.

Cheever? He’s done. Out. He’s done his duty, and he’s going home. No-nonsense, down to earth, a calm eye amid chaotic circumstances, Cheever (Tim Robbins) seems the most centered, together guy in the movie, if not the entire Iraqi deployment. Technically he’s injured too, and he doesn’t mind acknowledging that he hurt his back when a Porta-john fell on him from a forklift. Aghast at such candor, TK tries to explain to Cheever the necessity of having a better story for the ladies, but Cheever breezily brushes this aside. He loves that Porta-john; it saved his life.

The taproot of Cheever’s emotional strength seems to be his marriage. When Colee, examining a photo, cheerily observes that his wife is a looker, Cheever willingly agrees. “I don’t know what she’s doing with a guy like me,” he comments, “and I’m not going to ask.” Robbins is such a good actor that he sells the line as self-deprecating lover’s devotion, and it might not even occur to you to wonder whether this isn’t foreshadowing, too.

Colee, Cheever and TK are The Lucky Ones — the ones who lived and came home, or at least have lived so far. Of course it turns out that each of them has deeper wounds than the ones that brought them stateside; in fact, their real wounds are ones they had at the time they signed up, whether they knew it or not.

This could be the setup for a maudlin morass of introspective angst, but writer–director Neil Burger (The Illusionist) and co-writer Dirk Wittenborn want The Lucky Ones to be the Sideways or Little Miss Sunshine of the Iraqi war genre, and so Colee, Cheever and TK wind up together on a cross-country road trip of self-discovery. It’s the American road-movie comedy as self-help therapy, and if it’s a little glib about the trio’s various issues and how they’re addressed, well, that’s the nature of the genre.

Harder to overlook are the lapses that suggest the filmmakers don’t necessarily understand their own characters much better than the civilians they encounter in their travels. The first key turning point, a painful reunion scene, is off-puttingly unconvincing; for a man like Cheever to be that wrong about the whole fabric of his life either defies belief, or at least requires more explanation or insight than the filmmakers have to offer. At one point I found myself pondering the long-shot possibility of a character suffering from a personality-altering brain tumor or something, which is as sure a sign as anything I can think of that the story isn’t working.

Then there’s Colee’s Southern-fried fundamentalist religiosity. Colee drags her male companions to a vaguely Pentecostal-type service and even makes a point of asking for prayer, and she has very definite ideas about morality and eschatology — so definite that she warns Cheever that if he commits suicide, he will go, not merely to hell, but what is apparently worse, to “the lake of faahr.” Yet when the nature of TK’s injury becomes clear, Colee begins a frank, extensive analysis of practical erotic possibilities for “pleasuring” his girlfriend, including considering a “threesome,” possible paraphernalia, and so forth — without raising any moral considerations at all.

Later, Colee makes a point of engaging the services of a trio of friendly itinerant “sex workers” to try to help TK get his groove back — though she had earlier been apparently disparaging of what she presumed were his prurient reasons for wanting to go to Las Vegas. And when she discovers another character in an adulterous one-night stand, her main reaction is good-natured merriment. What exactly is her religious background again? And I don’t care how uninhibited or plainspoken Colee is: Nobody without a mental disorder wanders into a strange church service and blithely announces prayer requests on sensitive subjects with that level of specificity, particularly on behalf of others.

After running through some pretty contrived paces for much of its running time, The Lucky Ones has some surprises in the last act that ultimately make it more satisfying than it might have been. Honor, sacrifice, and loyalty do count for something, and tough decisions characters thought they would never make turn out to be thinkable after all.

Refreshingly, The Lucky Ones avoids the pitfall affecting so many recent Hollywood offerings touching on this subject matter: it isn’t political. (The very presence of the famously outspoken Robbins as a Midwestern military man at least threatens to raise the political temperature, but it’s like what Harrison Ford said about kissing Anne Heche in Six Days, Seven Nights: “It’s called acting.”)

In fact, it isn’t until the very last scene that the film commits to particular locations in the Middle East; prior to that, when a civilian asks the three, “Were you over there?” it could refer to Afghanistan, or for that matter any of hundreds of oversea bases.

It’s one of the movie’s nice touches that civilians are genuinely appreciative of the soldiers’ service “over there.” On more than one occasion the protagonists’ veteran status gets them special treatment, and it becomes a running joke that they can’t thank anyone without getting the reply, “No — thank you.” Over time this “Thank you” becomes a little shallow, but it isn’t insincere. The movie is like that too, I think.

Some profanity and frequent crude and/or sexually explicit dialogue; sexual situations including a brief adulterous sex scene (no explicit nudity) and a scene involving negotiations with prostitutes; a roadside bombing and a brief barroom scuffle.

Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

Directed by Spike Lee. Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Valentina Cervi. Touchstone.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

Spike Lee probably made few friends in Hollywood over his spat with hometown favorite Clint Eastwood regarding the absence of black soldiers in Eastwood’s twin World War II epics, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. Still, Lee has a valid point about the absence of black Americans in the Hollywood iconography of World War II.

If filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was right that the only way to critique a movie is to make another movie, Miracle at St. Anna is Lee’s critique of an entire genre. It’s a point Lee makes from the first scene, where we see a black veteran watching an old John Wayne movie on television. The juxtaposition itself is enough to make the point, though Lee can’t resist hammering it home. “Pilgrim,” the vet mumbles with quiet irony, adding unnecessarily, “We fought that war too.”

It’s a slightly heavy-handed misstep in a film that runs confidently though unevenly over a mountain of material, stepping right more often than it steps wrong over its 160 minutes. As a contribution and challenge to the World War II genre, Miracle at St. Anna compares reasonably well to most Hollywood efforts. As is often the case, Lee seems to relish biting off more than he can chew, and the ambition and scope of this effort is worth the bits that don’t quite fit.

Like Saving Private Ryan, the story is bookended by a pair of harrowing battle scenes and wrapped in a latter-day framing story, with an aging veteran looking back on the nightmare of his youth. The first firefight is a familiar battle-line sequence fought over a river crossing; the other is a more unusual sequence, in the narrow cobbled streets and alleys of a village in Tuscany.

What primarily differentiates Miracle at St. Anna is its focus on troops from the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, the Buffalo Soldiers Division. Following the novel of the same name by James McBride, who adapted his own story for the screen, Miracle is set in the Tuscany countryside when the Buffalos were among the Allied forces pushing back the Nazis and liberating the Italians in 1944.

Unlike Ryan and many American World War II movies, Miracle focuses not just on the American soldiers and their enemies, but also on the civilian populace of the region, with whom four American troops live for several days after being cut off from their division behind enemy lines. Among these are partisan members of the Italian resistance, led by an underground hero called “the Great Butterfly” (Pierfrancesco Favino) as well as civilians, old men and women and children. In one key sequence, a dramatization of a historical massacre of 560 civilians at the titular village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, there is also an anonymous Italian priest, archetypally saintly in extremis, shepherding his flock to the end.

As with many team stories, the main characters fall into a familiar pattern of mind, spirit and flesh; of ego, id and super-ego. Ranking officer Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke) is the steady, commanding voice of reason. Thoughtful, devoutly Catholic Puerto Rican Cpl. Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) embodies conscience and spirituality. Arrogant, egocentric Sgt. Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy) represents challenging, unruly carnality; he’s pointedly skeptical of Aubrey’s idealism, and he repeatedly puts the moves on a village beauty named Renata (Valentina Cervi) with a crudeness that repels Aubrey, who is also attracted to her but respects her.

Then there’s lumbering, simple-minded PFC Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), who, in a story with a white protagonist, would surely be a “magic negro” (a term popularized by Lee himself), but here can be called a “holy fool,” with a slow wit and superstitious notions masking a nearly mystical purity and prophetic conviction. Train’s devotion to a decapitated bit of statuary (which becomes the MacGuffin driving the 1983 framing story) becomes quasi-sacramental, dressing Catholic sensibilities in a folk Protestant idiom.

Train is the one who finds a wounded Italian boy named Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi) under a pile of rubble in a shelled-out ruin and insists on taking him with the division. Angelo calls Train “Chocolate Giant,” and the two childlike souls share a bond that grows as the film progresses.

Race, of course, is a major theme. As the Buffalo Soldiers advance, they are “welcomed” by anti-morale propaganda broadcasts from “Axis Sally,” a sultry-voiced American traitor who cheerily assures them that the Germans have “no quarrel with the Negro,” ridicules them for fighting for a nation that doesn’t want them, under white commanders who don’t value them.

“Sally” even promises them food and every comfort if they lay down their weapons, though in fact the defending Nazi forces barely have food (or ammunition) for their own needs. Aubrey evenly reminds his men what they’re up against: a racist regime that regards them as subhuman — “monkeys, apes, baboons.”

Later, Aubrey angrily quarrels with Bishop over black advances and the importance of fighting for America. Yet even he has to admit that it is in Italy, a foreign country, that he feels free to be simply a man and not a Negro for the first time. The point is undescored by a flashback to a scene in the American South, in which the four uniformed soldiers of the 92nd are denied service at the front counter of a café where four Geman POWs have just been served.

Alas, “Sally” isn’t wrong about everything. It’s true that some, if not all, of the white commanders don’t value the Buffalo soldiers. Through the callous indifference of one racist officer, Aubrey and his men wind up under mortar fire from their own side.

As he usually does, though, Lee avoids one-sided stereotyping. Not only are there decent and not-so-decent characters on both sides of the race line, there is also moral variation among the Nazis and the Italians.

In one notable touch, Renata’s father, a blustering old Italian patriarch — a benighted Archie Bunker type, perhaps — still proudly identifies himself as a Fascist and praises Il Duce for making Italy a world power, blaming him only for “getting into bed with Hitler.” (He also blusters against a neighbor whom he accuses of being a witch and putting the evil eye on him, though in fact, according to Renata, she prays for him every night.) I was reminded of the black-and-white way that Pan’s Labyrinth demonized the Fascists, and appreciated Lee’s humanizing touch.

Along with the long-overdue attention to the black veterans of the 92nd, Miracle at St. Anna makes welcome, positive use of Catholic themes and images in a genre that too often recently has made the Church appear only as a sinister power.

The stumbles of the opening act are aggravated in the coda, where again Lee doesn’t trust viewers to get the point until he’s underlined it two or three times, and an extraneous character makes an unnecessary speech that is goofy in its pretentiousness. The heavy-handedness also affects Terence Blanchard’s sometimes intrusive score.

But the strengths of the main part of the film carry it past its lapses and excesses. Striking images highlight key scenes, such as an inverted helmet bobbing downstream past corpses in the water after the opening firefight, where Lee lingers on the dark-skinned faces of the slain, as if saying, “Remember them too.”

Miracle at St. Anna may not be a perfect film, but it’s a more than honorable and rewarding achievement, and worth watching.

Graphic wartime violence including a massacre of civilians; much obscene language and a few profanities; brief partial nudity and sexual content, including a brief bedroom scene.

Burn After Reading (2008)

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. John Malkovich, George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins. Focus.

By Steven D. Greydanus

Burn After Reading reminds me a little of the Darwin Awards. It’s morbidly absurdist, thoroughly pointless, and can certainly be funny at times, even acutely so, with a freakish bathos that can be hard to look away from. But if you don’t feel a little queasy for laughing, and perhaps you should, you might at least feel bothered that someone wanted to put the whole thing together for your amusement.

The Coen brothers vacillate between poles of darkly comic drama (Blood Simple, Fargo) and darkly dramatic comedy (Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou?). Following the Oscar success of their nihilistic (as I see it) No Country for Old Men, the Coens have swung back to the comic end of the spectrum.

Whether or not it’s as nihilistic as No Country, Burn After Reading certainly isn’t going to do anything to mitigate the Coens’ long-standing reputation for misanthropy. It’s yet another film in which dim-witted losers spiral haplessly toward disaster, which in this case nearly all of them deserve — not just for being stupid and shallow, but for being venal, faithless or self-centered. The Coens’ characteristic saving grace, common decency, is in painfully short supply here.

Adultery, divorce, blackmail, treason, betrayal, breaking and entering and an extremely bizarre sex toy are the order of the day. This may make it sound as if something important is at stake, but it isn’t. No actual national secrets — just a disc with what two characters are convinced is highly classified material, but turns out to be something far less momentous. And since every spouse cheats and pursues or contemplates divorce, there’s not much at stake there either. (There is a moment of something like pathos when the most promiscuous character in the film, who often talks of divorce to appease his usual lover but has no actual plans to leave his wife, realizes that she’s planning to leave him.)

The only thing that is really at stake, as the film suddenly reminds us with a jerk in the last third or so, is lives. Even that might seem small beer with this gallery of nitwits, but it can’t be a coincidence that the two characters who meet the cruelest fates are the only two that approach likeability. Only stupidity, not selfishness, seals their doom; if characters were punished on a moral scale, they’d have been the only ones standing at the end.

Dressed up as an intelligence caper thriller, Burn After Reading opens with familiar rat-a-tat computerized titles and a God-shot of planet Earth swiftly zooming down through clouds to CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, dropping through the roof to follow a pair of clicking dress shoes on a marble floor.

None of these early elements is unusual in itself, but the dramatic drop from the on-high opening emphasizes the extreme low angle at the end of the shot — a disclaimer, perhaps, announcing no lofty intentions, no larger perspective. The Coens offer a worm’s-eye view on the lives of characters who aspire to be more than the worms they are, but can’t rise above themselves. Even when events filter up to a slightly higher level as a CIA boss (J. K. Simmons) gets occasional reports on the muddled proceedings, no pattern or meaning threatens to emerge.

A star-studded cast plays an assortment of buffoons who dress and posture sharper than they are. John Malkovich bristles with righteous maverick indignation in the first scene as CIA analyst Osbourne Cox who falls from grace, but despite his bluster he’s no more than a faulty cog to be replaced. Tilda Swinton, considerably icier here than as the White Witch, plays Harry’s domineering wife Katie, a pediatrician with the bedside manner of your least favorite grade-school teacher.

George Clooney dials down the class and charisma as federal marshal Harry Pfarrer, a self-deprecating, shallow skirt-chaser who is inexplicably having an affair with Osbourne’s wife Katie — inexplicably, not on his end (he’ll sleep with anything), nor because she’s not the type to have an affair (of course she is), but because Harry has not a trace of the drive and ambition Katie’s Type-A sort requires in a lover. (In reality, Katie would be having an affair with another doctor at her practice.) Harry’s wife Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel), an author of children’s books, describes Katie to Harry as “a cold, stuck-up bitch,” and Katie describes Sandy to Harry the same way, and both are right.

The eye of the storm, or the epicenter of the sinkhole, is Linda Litzke (Francis McDormand), a lonely fortysomething addicted to dating sites and obssessed with the plastic surgery she’s convinced will kick her social life into action, if only she can get the financing for it. McDormand is so good that she humanizes this bimbo (who endures perfunctory first-date sex with a cold fish, apparently because she lacks the gumption to say no) for at least the first act or two, until it becomes clear that she’s not getting any better.

That leaves Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), a bubble-headed personal trainer at the gym, as well as sad-sack gym owner Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins), whose only foible is loving Linda and being afraid to tell her. There’s a minor McGuffin, a lost CD-ROM at the gym that Chad is thrilled to discover contains what he’s sure are highly classified CIA files. Delighted at finding himself in the right place at the right time, Chad basically wants to do the Good-Samaritan thing and return the files to their owner, Osbourne Cox, though he wants to be as cloak and dagger about it as possible. But Linda hears the word “reward,” and visions of surgical enhancement dance in her head.

The characters’ moronic choices provide both the plot engine and the humor. There’s an attempted dropoff of the disc followed by a car chase, glimpses of a mysterious figure in a parked car who always seems to be driving away the moment he’s noticed, intrigue at the Russian embassy, and a number of break-ins. The joke is that none of this is as exciting or important as it sounds; it’s only some of the characters who think something important is happening. As if trying to emphasize the perceived significance, the characters use a lot of foul language, which is also deployed for humor value (ironically, the funniest bits involve one of the milder crudities).

There’s also a lot of bed-hopping, but nothing that works as a bedroom comedy, since there are no surprises and none of it matters. As with many Coen films, there’s also an element that doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere, in this case Harry’s lewdly bizarre workshop project, a twisted hint of something other than self-aborption that’s nevertheless hard to see as anything other than misguided on every level.

As with almost every Coen film, almost every element seems deliberate and carefully chosen. Whatever they do, either it works for the viewer or it doesn’t, but they don’t ever really fail, exactly.

For me, Burn After Reading works in fits and starts. I appreciate its ideosyncracy and creativity. I appreciate it; I’m not sure I like it. I can see where Coen fans may adore it. Maybe the very shock value of the cruelty offers some kind of moral perspective. Or maybe it’s just mean. The Coens are happy to let you make of it what you will.

Much obscene and crass language, some profanity; a number of non-explicit bedroom scenes; a couple of instances of shocking and bloody violence.

Mr. Bean’s Holiday (2007)

Directed by Steve Bendelack. Rowan Atkinson, Emma de Caunes, Max Baldry, Willem Defoe, Karel Roden, Jean Rochefort. Universal.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

When it comes to brilliantly mindless slapstick humor, Americans don’t know Bean.

The rest of the world does, though. That’s why Mr. Bean’s Holiday, a charming and winsome G-rated family comedy that greatly improves on the cruder Bean: The Movie, outperformed such crass American hits as Knocked Up, Superbad and Norbit — at the worldwide box office. Yet it barely made a ripple in the United States, where we like our hit comedies dumb and dumber, not dumb and smarter.

That’s a shame, because Mr. Bean’s Holiday, starring Rowan Atkinson as his signature alter ego, is a treat — sweet, good-hearted, genuinely clever. Atkinson is a credit to the tradition of Chaplin, Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis — and even if you don’t like Jerry Lewis, that’s still a good thing.

Bean, the character, is a pure imbecile — not morally pure to be sure, but with the basic disposition and unquestioning incomprehension of a two-year-old: single-mindedly in the moment, innocently malicious, probably nearly inculpable in his fundamental self-centerness.

Naturally, he unknowingly wreaks havoc everywhere he goes, but he does so with the perfect timing and conceptual wit of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. Early in the film is a brilliant shot in which Bean and a stranger, leaving an airport, each hail taxicabs and somehow wind up in each other’s cabs headed to the wrong destinations. It’s as perfectly conceived and executed as the classic scene in City Lights with the expensive car and the blind flower girl, and as casually tossed off.

Like Bean himself, the plot lurches from one misadventure to another, always with a vague goal of arriving at the French Riviera, Bean’s holiday destination after winning an all-expenses-paid holiday trip in a parish raffle. As good as Atkinson is, the film is mildly amusing for the first half-hour or so, but then catches fire in a hilarious scene in which Bean and a young boy named Stepan (excellent Max Baldry) earn some quick money doing street theater.

As he meanders along, Bean weaves an artless web inadvertently ensnaring other characters, starting with Stepan and his father (Karel Roden), a good-hearted French starlet named Sabine (winsome Emma de Caunes), and a narcissistic American film director (hilarious Willem Dafoe) — all of whom are on their way to Cannes, which, of course, is also where Bean wants to go.

Longtime Bean aficionados may find some of the gags familiar from the TV show and the earlier film. Others may feel (what seems plausible to me) that Atkinson has refined his act and given us “Bean’s Greatest Hits” in their ideal form, culminating in a delightful climax approaching feckless transcendence.

Slapstick violence; brief potty humor; mild danger to a child (separation from parents).

Bee Movie (2008)

Directed by Steve Hickner and Simon J. Smith. Jerry Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, Patrick Warburton, John Goodman, Chris Rock, Kathy Bates, Barry Levinson. DreamWorks.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

As bright-hued as it is dim-witted, Bee Movie is a scattered oddity of a film, combining candy-colored computer animation, occasionally laugh-out-loud absurdist humor and such profound stupidity about birds and bees — and flowers and trees — that kids watching it will actually lose “facts-of-life” IQ points. Which, for the record, is not a good thing.

Written by Jerry Seinfeld, reportedly after a chance joke to Steven Spielberg about “a B-movie with real bees” was taken seriously as a movie pitch, Bee Movie is as pop-culture savvy as it is biologically challenged. It’s an urban comedy about the circle of life made by filmmakers a generation too many removed from life on the farm, set in the same gender-confused universe as Barnyard, with its male “cows” with udders.

The plot centers on an apian protagonist who, much like Woody Allen’s ant(i)-hero in DreamWorks’ freshman CGI film Antz, is a nonconformist insect in a hive world of conformity. Honeybee Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld) doesn’t want to go into honey work. Good thing he’s a male, since drones don’t make honey. Oh wait, in this world they do. In fact, nectar gathering is the work of macho flyboy “pollen jock” bees who are idolized by adoring female groupies and envied by civilian males. In reality, of course, females do all the work, while male bees have no function but to mate with the queen, the only reproducing female in the hive. (I guess Barry’s “parents” adopted.)

That’s only the beginning. Every well-educated schoolchild knows that bees fertilize plants — that is, in gathering nectar they spread pollen from plant to plant, facilitating botanical reproduction. Bee Movie’s bees “fertilize” plants too, but in a completely different sense of the word — the sense in which farmers “fertilize” crops by spreading compost or other compounds on them. “Pollen” in this universe is essentially magic plant food; without it, plants start to wither and die, but, once “fertilized” by the bees, they recover and flourish.

What’s more, pollen is pollen, which means that every plant and crop on earth can easily be “fertilized” by pollen gathered from a planeful of roses from a flower show. That’s not even getting into the completely bizarre romantic rivalry for the human Vanessa (Renée Zellweger) between Barry and her human boyfriend (Patrick Warburton). Yes: It’s a romantic triangle with a bee, a girl and a guy. What’s more, Barry has a stinger (something male bees lack, having sex organs instead), so he’s got nothing to offer even a female bee. Are we stupid enough yet?

The boilerplate answer to all of this, I guess, is “Kids won’t care.” Well, my kids would. And if kids don’t care, they should. And their parents should care whether they care. That’s why God gave kids parents.

Bee Movie isn’t a complete waste. There are some genuinely funny bits, especially the nutty courtroom scene. I laughed enough to more or less balance out the annoyance of the stupidity. And there is something dreamily appealing about the flight sequences, with their roving camera and pastel-colored world. A scene set on the windshield of a moving car, though, may be the most persuasive in the film — a glaring reminder of the kind of human-insect interaction that likely represents the filmmakers’ first-hand experience with their subject matter.

Mild innuendo; rampant stupidity.

Henry Poole is Here (2008)

Directed by Mark Pellington. Luke Wilson, Adriana Barraza, Radha Mitchell, Morgan Lily, George Lopez. Overture Films.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

Does a water stain in the cheap stucco job on Henry Poole’s new house contain a miraculous image of the face of Jesus, as his neighbor Esperanza believes?

Henry (Luke Wilson), whose main intention in life is to be left alone, certainly by Esperanza (Adriana Barraza) and probably by Jesus too, thinks the idea is crazy. Esperanza, a devout, importunate older woman, thinks Henry is crazy. Staring at him with appalled bewilderment, she demands incredulously, “Mr. Poole, don’t you believe in God?”

It’s a question that never gets an answer, as far as I recall. Although Henry is commonly described in reviews as an “atheist” (with unbelieving viewers deriding the film’s portrayal of atheism), I recall no specific on-screen evidence that Henry is not, say, an agnostic, or a believer in God but not in miracles, or even a believer in miracles but not miracles like this one, or at least this particular miracle. Just what does Henry believe, or not believe, and why? Henry Poole is Here doesn’t ask and doesn’t tell. Perhaps the filmmakers don’t think it’s important, or perhaps they simply didn’t think of it.

All we really know is that Henry dismisses Esperanza’s conviction out of hand, without argument or explanation, while pretty much everyone else in the film has no trouble accepting the miracle also without argument or explanation. Pretty much nobody cross-examines their own views; almost nobody asks whether, granted that miracles happen, there are sufficient grounds to believe in this miracle, or whether, granted that they don’t, a particular event can really be ascribed to coincidence.

Like M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, Henry Poole simply divides the world into two groups of people: those who see signs and miracles, and those who see only coincidence. How either group arrives at or explains particular conclusions, not to mention how people decide which group they belong to in the first place, isn’t explored. We just get Henry with his arms folded defiantly across he chest intoning “Coincidence,” and everyone else serenely shrugging their shoulders saying “Faith.”

Among these are Dawn (Radha Mitchell), the pretty, single mom next door whose mute little girl Millie (Morgan Lily) lugs a tape recorder everywhere and hides out in a fort of concrete pavers behind the garage, and teenaged Patience (Rachel Seiferth), the heavily bespectacled checkout clerk who’s as talkative as Millie is silent.

Only Father Salazar (George Lopez), whom Esperanza drags into Henry’s back yard over Henry’s protests to certify the miracle, provides any sop to critical thinking. He’s initially less than confident about endorsing her interpretation, and acknowledges that the Church “by no means endorses frivolous claims of this nature.”

Yet Father Salazar ultimately seems more interested in subjective experience of faith and hope rather than in the nature of Henry’s stucco discoloration, and like absolutely everyone else in the film he just wants to help poor, depressed Henry. Henry might as well be wearing a nametag that says “Please Help Me,” and he has the misfortune to have moved into a neighborhood where everyone has more compassion and insight than awareness of social boundaries or personal space. They’re supposed to seem humane and sagacious in contrast to Henry’s neediness, but too often he comes off as the cynical straight man in a town of gentle kooks.

The worst offender is Esperanza, whose refusal to acknowledge Henry’s ownership of his backyard becomes annoying pretty much instantaneously. As far as she’s concerned, Henry’s stucco wall is a shrine, and she begins evangelizing, leading pilgrimages, and offering flowers. At last she makes a deal with Henry that involves promising to stay out of his backyard — but later she’s back with pretty much the whole parish, gushing, “Mr. Poole, God is bigger than a promise!” Coming from her that may not be surprising, but Father Salazar at least should have known better.

That brings us to the movie’s other possible miracles. At least one healing occurs in connection with the image that’s as readily ascribed to naturalistic causes as the image itself. But then a second healing seems unambiguously miraculous, though Henry lightly blows it off with another testy “Coincidence!” — which is silly, because at face value it would seem inexplicable even if there were no image.

In general, Henry Poole seems to want to leave events ambiguous and open to interpretation, making that one glaring miracle — along with Henry’s uncritical dismissal of it — seem like a writing mistake. There’s also a second glaring miracle, not of the healing variety, which the movie avoids certifying as such until the very end of the film, but which (following an initial misunderstanding) Henry never even attempts to explain naturalistically.

Then there’s Henry’s problem, which is also never explained, and by the end of the film is doubly inexplicable. Depressed and apathetic, Henry declares that he’s not going to be around for long, and is evidently determined to spend the interim drinking and sleeping. (Spoiler alert.)

Obviously, Henry has a problem common to many characters in existential comedies from The Bucket List to Last Holiday, though the most precise parallel may be Joe Versus the Volcano. Precisely what ails him, we never find out. What we do get is a flashback of Henry at the doctor’s office, learning that like nearly everyone he’s a little overworked, overweight and overtired, but otherwise perfectly healthy. Then, without explanation, there’s another flashback with a doctor cryptically explaining to Henry that his condition is rare, aggressive and untreatable. Henry apparently gets no second opinion and, months later, remains asymptomatic; and when I say that the culmination of the plotline, in a hospital room, takes a final inexplicable turn, I don’t mean it’s a miraculous one. At least Joe Versus the Volcano had a diagnosis (“brain cloud”) — and an explanation.

Although Henry Poole’s take on faith and miracles is about on the level of Signs, the filmmaking isn’t in Shyamalan’s league. Director Mark Pellington makes distracting directorial mistakes. Twice his camera pans around corners into Henry’s back yard to find people standing before the image; the approach suggests a point-of-view shot, implying that someone (probably Henry) is happening upon and discovering the adorers. But no, in both cases there’s no one there.

Then there’s the strange stucco-point-of-view shots, in which Pellington repeatedly films the characters staring directly into the camera, ostensibly looking at the image — which would be fine, except that hanging in the air between us and the actors is a drip of blood that’s supposed to be on the surface of the stucco, but seems to be suspended on a sheet of glass in front of the camera (unless it’s just CGI). The shots don’t work at all because we aren’t really seeing from the image’s point of view: Based on where the blood is in front of the camera, we would seem to be some distance behind the stucco and the wall, well into the house; yet we can see the drip of blood as well as the actors, as if we had X-ray vision that stopped exactly at the level of the stucco. A drip of blood on a sheet of glass just doesn’t translate to a drip of blood on stucco, because stucco isn’t transparent; the effect feels wrong every time Pellington does it. (It might be different if the drip of blood covered the entire image, if the whole shot were seen completely through the blood. Then we might be at the level of the stucco, really seeing from the image’s point of view.)

The rather melancholy thing is that Pellington, who suffered the tragic loss of his wife and was left to raise their daughter alone, seems to want to make a sincere spiritual statement about how things happen for a reason, or something. Sincerity is good, but it isn’t enough.

Henry Poole is Here isn’t unpleasant or offensive. It doesn’t heap scorn on believers, nor does it pillory unbelievers, really. Some viewers may enjoy its uncomplicated, light treatment of putative miracles and Hollywood healing.

But it never even gestures at the philosophical heavy lifting of exploring alternate interpretations of ambiguous events. Nor does it satisfyingly engage the vagaries of life in a world where healings, miraculous or otherwise, don’t always happen on cue. Neither particularly problematic nor particularly worthwhile, Henry Poole is, well, just there.

A couple of profanities and some mild rude language; heavy drinking.

The Terminal (2004)

Directed by Steven Spielberg. Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride, Diego Luna, Zoe Saldana. DreamWorks.

By Steven D. Greydanus

In spirit, The Terminal is a lot like Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s last collaboration, Catch Me If You Can: a modestly light, engagingly anarchic comedy with an undercurrent of tragedy rooted in infidelity and domestic breakdown. The Terminal also gives Hanks another chance to do a put-on accent, and to be funnier than he’s been in a long time.

However, the seams are more obvious this time around. The story wobbles between plotlines and characters that make emotional sense and ones that don’t. And the climax (hastily rewritten and reshot mere weeks before opening day) is pretty much unsalvageable. In Spielberg and Hanks’s professional hands the whole package remains passably entertaining, but much of it doesn’t bear thinking about afterwards — not because the premise is implausible, but because, granted the premise, characters do things that no one would, or should, do under those circumstances.

Loosely inspired by the true story of an Iranian refugee without documentation stranded for over a decade in a Paris airport, The Terminal hypothesizes a citizen of a tiny, fictional eastern European country whose government vanishes in a violent coup while he is en route to New York City. Viktor Navorski (Hanks) thus arrives in JFK Airport a citizen of no recognized country, with no valid passport or money, no legal documentation, status, or identity of any kind.

There seems to be no bureaucratically correct response to Viktor’s unique situation: no legal way to admit, deport, detain, or otherwise process him. He’s in limbo, and the boundaries of his world are the concrete and glass walls of the airport terminal.

To airport security, embodied in Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), the ambitious acting security chief, Viktor’s circumstance is a daily nuisance. To Viktor, it’s his whole life.

In today’s post-9/11 world, this premise seems both charmingly naive and satirically topical. But Spielberg is more interested in feel-good comedy than social commentary, and so the story focuses less on Viktor’s bureaucratic predicament than on the mechanics of how he actually goes about the business of survival in the terminal as well as the people he meets there and the relationships he forms.

It’s a bit like Cast Away, except that for companionship there are real people instead of a volleyball and a photograph. The other difference is that where the point in Cast Away was in part how profoundly Hanks’s workaholic character was changed by his experiences, in The Terminal Viktor is already the most well-adjusted, centered character in the film, and the point isn’t how he changes or what he has to learn, but what he has to teach us.

There’s also a misguided subplot having to do with the reason for Viktor’s trip to New York, a personal mission that remains a secret for much of the film but seems to have something to do with a mysterious cannister that he carries around with him and sometimes kisses. The film has some creative tricks up its sleeve in this connection, but eventually missteps with phony drama threatening dire consequences for a number of supporting characters if Viktor attempts to complete his mission.

These consequences are so extreme and disproportionate that Viktor himself decides, reasonably and not terribly nobly given the stakes, that the mission isn’t worth the cost. But then a character makes a supposedly heartwarming sacrifice that, viewed rationally, seems inescapably misguided — and even if we ignore that, what about the other characters who’ve been threatened over Viktor’s mission? Are we meant to conclude that the mission is worth their grief too? Are we not supposed to think about them?

Fortunately, the film is actually less interested in Viktor’s mission than in the relationships he forms along the way. Those whose lives he touches include an attractive flight attendant named Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a trio of airport employees, and a pretty INS agent (Zoe Saldana). Only the flight attendant comes and goes; the others, like Viktor, are permanent fixtures of terminal life, except that they go home at night.

Viktor’s initial encounters with these individuals are the sort of impersonal public interactions that occur between people whose paths are unlikely to cross again. Of course their paths do keep on crossing, though at least one, the flight attendant, doesn’t notice right away. On numerous occasions Viktor notices her meeting a man with whom she is obviously involved; later he learns that the man is otherwise married.

As with Frank Abagnale’s parents in Catch Me If You Can, there’s something tragic and self-destructive about Amelia, who repeatedly warns Viktor to stay away from her for his own good. Their slowly developing relationship is handled with restrait and emotional intelligence, and is the film’s emotional center.

Less well handled, unfortunately, is a secondary romantic subplot, which starts out lightly farcical before taking a startlingly cartoony and unpersuasive turn in its approach to love and even marriage. A climactic moment in this subplot is so unearned that it doesn’t work even as cornball romance; for a brief moment I actually found myself wondering whether I could have somehow missed a set of earlier interactions and conversations that would have set up what the scene asks us to accept.

Then there’s Frank Dixon, the ambitious acting security chief, on the verge of a big promotion. Naturally it goes without saying that at some point Dixon will face an all-important performance evaluation, and Viktor’s embarrassing presence at the airport will threaten to derail his promotion. (Actually, it doesn’t go without saying; there’s some clumsy dialogue heavy-handedly foreshadowing this inevitable scene.)

Still, Dixon starts off as a human being, and doesn’t begin to go off the rails until about midway through the film. The first sign of trouble is a strange, contrived scene with Dixon roughing up Viktor over a photocopier. Tucci is a chameleonic actor and is capable of projecting menace (as he did in TV’s “Murder One”), but he failed to sell me on the idea of Dixon assaulting anyone, no matter how exasperated or angry he might be.

Over time, Dixon’s understandable annoyance at Viktor’s situation turns gradually into obsession, and finally becomes an all-out vendetta that he is willing to take to bizarrely vindictive lengths, leading to the phony dilemma mentioned above, and giving several characters an opportunity to flout Dixon’s authority and stand up for what they believe in, or something. By the end of the film, Dixon’s character makes no sense at all; he’s a plot device rather than a real character.

What helps carry the film in spite of these difficulties is Hanks’ performance and Spielberg’s expert direction. As familiar as he is to all moviegoers, Hanks still manages to sell us on his character’s ethnicity and heritage, accent and all. After the first ten minutes or so, it isn’t even distracting; I wasn’t thinking “Here is Tom Hanks putting on a Ruski accent,” I simply accepted the character. (A nice touch: At one point Viktor crosses himself in prayer, Eastern fashion, right to left.)

Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski make the most of their stupendous set, which is neither a real location nor a series of sound stages, but a giant replica built in the Palmdale desert. Of particular note is the use of all the airport’s glass; trailers have already shown off the delightful shot of Viktor looking at his reflection in the clothing-store window, his reflected head superimposed on the suited mannequins, but one of my favorite moments is another shot of Viktor and Amalia conversing in a bookstore, photographed through yellow-tinted glass.

What I like about this shot is the absence of what has become a familiar effect, the push-through. Thanks to computers and other techniques, movie cameras have been freed from all physical restraints, and are able to drift through windows, TV screens, mirrored surfaces, anything the filmmaker fancies. (A early instance of this technique was pioneered in Citizen Kane; a recent example can be found in the Boggart scene in the new Harry Potter movie.)

Watching this scene, as the camera closes in on Viktor and Amelia, still seen through yellow glass, I more than half expected a computerized color shift signifying the moment the camera pushed through the window. But it never came — the camera stayed behind the glass, underscoring the reality of the physical barrier, and by extension of the terminal as a whole. It’s a small thing, but it resonates with the sense in which the terminal itself is a kind of barrier or obstacle for Navorski, and perhaps also with the sense of other barriers and obstacles in the story that can’t, or shouldn’t, be breached.

Sexual references and humor; references to an adulterous affair; some crude language.

Brideshead Revisited (2008)

Directed by Julian Jarrold. Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Hayley Atwell, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi. Miramax.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

With its blend of wistful nostalgia for and biting satire of bygone English nobility, Evelyn Waugh’s magnum opus Brideshead Revisited is among the most celebrated English novels — more despite than because of its preoccupation with Catholicism, for which it ranks also among the most celebrated Catholic novels. Among fans of both sorts it is also much beloved as a 1981 British miniseries in eleven parts.

A feature adaptation of an acclaimed novel that has already been successfully and faithfully adapted as a miniseries is a perilous proposition for a filmmaker. Every omission, conflation and revision invites unfavorable comparisons to the longer retelling, as Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride & Prejudice had to contend with the 1995 BBC miniseries.

My view is that there’s always room for a retelling meant to be watched in one sitting, however abridged it must be. Character arcs must be abbreviated, some characters may get short shrift and wealth of incident and detail must be sacrificed. But key characterizations and incidents may stand out with new clarity and persuasiveness, and the spirit of the original may be well honored, if it’s done right.

Brideshead Revisited, directed by Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) from a screenplay by Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland) and Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones’s Diary), gets a few things right. The allure of the opulent elegance of Brideshead (York’s Castle Howard, as in the miniseries) for middle-class artist Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode, Match Point), and in particular the enigmatic appeal of Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell), for instance. The dry humor of Charles’s strained relationship with his eccentric father, for another.

Even the portrayal of the Flytes’ dysfunctional Catholicism isn’t without merit. Sebastian’s line “I’m not a heathen, I’m a sinner,” is not from the book (“half-heathens” is how Waugh’s Sebastian describes himself and his sister Julia), but I think Waugh might have approved.

Yet this Brideshead Revisited ultimately subverts Waugh’s subtlest and most subversive achievement: It offers all the foibles and puzzlement of the Flytes’ religious world, while all but obliterating the threads of grace running through their lives.

A Catholic convert and a fierce critic of modernity writing for a historically anti-Catholic secular culture, Waugh cannily offers an agnostic point of view — that of protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder — and, in the eccentric, extravagant Flytes of Brideshead, a portrait of a decadent, rococo Catholicism significantly confirming the prejudices of his age.

Readers who would be on their guard and skeptical of a portrayal of virtuous, sympathetic heroes of Catholic faith are drawn in by Waugh’s unsparing warts-and-all candor and critical outside perspective. Although Lady Marchmain reads aloud from The Wisdom of Father Brown, Waugh offers no Chestertonian priest with cherubic face and devastating theological, philosophical and psychological insights to overturn our preconceptions.

What Waugh does, almost imperceptibly, is to turn the tables on Charles, who slowly comes face to face with his own foibles and shortcomings, and begins to realize that for all their deficiencies there is something human and wholesome about the Flytes’ religiosity — something more to Catholicism and Catholics than guilt and superstition and ignorance. Fragile and broken as they are, these jars of clay hold a treasure after all.

The big-screen Brideshead is all jars of clay, little or no treasure. In fact, the so-called treasure turns out to be at the root of all their troubles. Thus the filmmakers include Sebastian’s conflicted guilt over his homosexual inclinations, but not his childlike affirmations of faith and declarations of the loveliness of the Catholic story. We get Julia’s outrage over the comment from Bridey (Ed Stoppard) about living in sin, but not her wish to have her own child brought up Catholic, even if the faith hasn’t done her much good. Young Cordelia’s chatter about buying an African god-daughter is retained, but her insightful commentary on the various characters’ spiritual trajectories is omitted.

Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) is portrayed as manipulative and ruthless, which is fair, but also chilly and unfeeling, which is not. It’s impossible to imagine this Lady Marchmain expressing acceptance of her son’s drinking and concern only for his unhappiness. Where her husband’s mistress Cara in the book expresses sympathy for Lady Marchmain, calling her “a good and simple woman” who has “done nothing except be loved by someone who was not grown-up,” the film’s Cara (Greta Scacchi) has only condemnation for how she has “suffocated” her family and ruined their lives.

Catholic screenwriting maven and blogger Barbara Nicolosi, in a scathing blog post, raises on a key issue: Where is the compelling, elusive “charm” of the Flytes, of which so much is made in the book? Where is the complexity, the sympathy for or insight into these flawed but human characters? What is Charles supposed to see in them, other than Julia’s beauty and the splendor of Brideshead itself?

For that matter, where is the complexity of Charles, the machinations beneath the diffident, deferential exterior? What do the Flytes see in him? The film includes a line about his appetites devouring the family among whom he initially seemed a sheep among wolves, but events on the screen offer little warrant for this interpretation. As played by Goode, Charles seems simply blandly forthright and decent, with none of the manipulative cunning of his Match Point costar Jonathan Rhys Meyers in that film, for instance. Charles cites “guilt” as his dominant psychological state, but the filmmakers don’t seem to know what he’s guilty of.

Why is Charles now a confirmed atheist, who, when Lady Marchmain suggests “agnostic” as a preferrable option, insists on “atheist”? This is a flat reversal of the book, where Sebastian announces Charles as an “atheist” and Charles clarifies his status as “agnostic.” As this revision suggests, the film’s general subversion of Waugh’s religious point of view seems to be a deliberate decision of the filmmakers.

Thus, for instance, we are twice told that Catholicism allows you to do what you like and then go to confession — a canard not found in the novel. Yet the story’s homosexual themes have been carefully expunged of the connection in Waugh to affective immaturity. (In the novel, Cara suggests that a boy who is not yet ready to love a girl may love another boy with “a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning,” and pointedly notes that Sebastian with his teddy-bear is “in love with his childhood.” And when Julia asks Charles if he loved Sebastian, Charles replies, “Oh yes. He was the forerunner.”)

Waugh wrote that Brideshead “deals with what is theologically termed ‘the operation of Grace’, that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself.” Grace may not be totally missing from the film version — the ending isn’t wholly betrayed — but however real it may be for the characters, there’s no sense that it feels real to the filmmakers, or the audience. It’s as if Waugh’s story has been filtered through the spiritual blindness of young Charles. The movie sees, but it doesn’t understand.

An adulterous bedroom scene (no explicit nudity); a few instances of rear male nudity; some crass language; restrained homoerotic themes including a fleeting same-sex kiss; self-destructive heavy drinking and its consequences; ambiguous religious themes.

Witness (1985)

Directed by Peter Weir. Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Josef Sommer, Lukas Haas, Jan Rubes, Alexander Godunov, Danny Glover. Paramount.