Review: The Kids Are All Right

Originally Posted August 17th, 2010

Arriving just in time to send the summer off in style, the year’s biggest art-house flick not involving Swedish goth hackers is The Kids Are All Right. The film, about the mounting struggles two women in a domestic partnership face when the biological father of their children reenters their lives, is both familiar in set-up, yet fresh in how it approaches the usual tropes of a modern family drama, with a maturity that’s both thoughtful, and warming.

Without preaching, The Kids Are All Right, manages to draw a well-realized portrait of a self-described “unconventional” family that deals with the same issues a thousand straight families have dealt with in other movies. Themes of love, growing up and sexual identity are all addressed here, and the film has nothing terribly new to add to the discussion of child rearing, just that a same-sex household faces the same hurdles as any other marriage. The film’s near ambivalence as to which sex combination makes up a family lets it stay more focussed on being one of the most sophisticated and delightful films of the summer.

Annette Bening and Julianne Moore star as Nic and Jules, a lesbian couple raising two teenagers in the wine-soaked hills of present-day California. Like many others living in relative luxury, their daily life is filled with quarrels about minor things, mostly involving their kids, but their's is a relationship that’s built on a solid foundation of trust, the likes of which is formed only after spending many years with another person.  Nic’s perfectionism as the main breadwinner of the household can put her at odds with Jules’ more lenient approach to things, but their little spats dissolve almost effortlessly.

The strength of their relationship with one another seemingly carries over to their children, in parent-child dynamics that ares open and communicative, which alone is uncommon for most pictures dealing with parenting at middle age. There’s a moment where, after giving her rendition of a Joni Mitchell tune at the dinner table, son Laser jokingly tells Nic not to quit her day job, before returning with a compliment. It’s little moments like this where the kids channel the mostly tolerable embarrassment of living with your parents when you’re almost an adult, and they do so without ever resorting to the levels of overwrought angst and drama that commonly define onscreen teens.

Their daughter's final summer at home is interrupted when Laser, wanting to learn more about their biological father, gets in contact with the sperm donor that was used to conceive the half-brother and sister. The donor, Paul, played with relaxed aplomb by Mark Ruffalo, takes a shining to his two offspring, and quickly becomes increasingly involved in their lives, as well as those of Nic and Jules. Paul, an organic farmer and restaurant owner, while laid-back and maybe a little dim, is basically a nice guy who’s finally beginning to see what he’s missed out on by leading the bohemian life of the handsome bachelor, and the film respects him enough to create a character instead of just a roguish wedge used to drive a family apart. He inevitably does, of course, as everyone but Nic seems incapable of getting past his free-spirited charm, but again, the film is far too mature to let a single person be responsible for all the developing cracks in the household. Rather, The Kids Are All Right, serves as a lesson on how all the unspoken crap a family accumulates through the years can boil over when a new element is added to the status quo.

What’s most admirable about director Lisa Cholodenko’s picture is how little of the picture is centred on the idea that it’s one single issue that leads to this families eventual breakdown. The fact that the central relationship in the film is a homosexual is never given much mind by the characters, and any opinions on the idea of a same-sex family are left to the viewer alone. Having two mothers for parents is played for laughs where appropriate, mostly in bringing Paul up to speed on the situation, but it’s for the most part regarded as inconsequential, as you’ll quickly get used to Joni and Laser referring to their mothers in the plural. Similarly, having one kid born from each mother sets up an obvious dynamic of child against child as a proxy comparison of the mothers. Again, The Kids Are All Right doesn't take the simple route, and has far more much fun in showing how family members can be eerily similar, even if genetically unrelated . The main plot points of the film, such as the appearance of Paul and the looming end of Joni’s life at home, are seen as not the real issue here, they’re merely events that continue to chip at the foundations of one family's normal.

In broadening its scope beyond a single salient issue, The Kids Are All Right encounters its only real difficulty by adhering to the usual elements of the family drama, and beyond the premise, there’s not a whole lot about it that's groundbreaking. Affairs are had, tears are shed, and everything eventually gets more or less resolved by one big speech (granted, it’s a good one), which is a synopsis fitting of a hundred other pictures. While the film smartly refuses to exploit its premise for the sake of novelty, it makes this unconventional group's story feel surprisingly familiar, albeit one that’s better realized than most. Cholodenko’s dialogue is written for real people, youthful and realistic without straining to sound hip, and the script goes for modest, consistent laughs as opposed to great big gags that cash-in on setup. The acting is top-notch, most notably from the two leads, as Jules' strikingly poignant moments of self-reflection are countered with Nic’s social boozing, including a particularly funny tirade about California's progressive environmentalism. The state itself is gorgeously captured across expansive vistas and lavish meals, but the quality of the dialogue and acting are what give the film its own distinct flavour.

Much like the bottles of wine prominently displayed in the film, The Kids Are All Right is at first glance, a known quantity, featuring the usual bullet points found in most family dramas, seemingly distinguished only by a twist on the common premise. But thanks to Cholodenko’s charming characters and smart script, the rest goes down smoothly. The perfect summer film for the thinking person, The Kids is more than alright.

4 out of 5

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko

2010, USA

Review: Zodiac

Originally Posted June 27th, 2010

For two years, the San Francisco Bay area staged a desperate manhunt to stop the man responsible for a series of bizarre and brutal murders, between 1969, and 1971. In cryptic letters to newspapers, the killer boasted of his attacks, and made a variety of new threats involving school buses and bombs. The man, calling himself The Zodiac, would become a lightning rod for a restless American psyche otherwise occupied with the ongoing war in Vietnam. Yet, before any arrest could be made, the letters stopped, and The Zodiac vanished. With only one other authentic letter appearing in 1974, the crimes of the bay area boogeyman would quickly fade from public consciousness. To this day, the case remains open in three counties, and no arrest has ever been made.

The "one that got away" is a common component of police procedurals, usually involving a burnt out dick warning another detective not to get too deep into the job when doggedly pursuing of a killer. Losing oneself in a mystery can come at the cost of relationships and sanity. The next time you tell someone a really good brain teaser, keep the answer to yourself and see how long it takes for them to try and pry it out of you. This is probably the main reason why filming the story of the Zodiac murders has taken more than thirty years. The killings were shocking, twisted, and captivating, which are buzzwords most producers like to see on a poster. The problem: any film about Zodiac would have no ending. To this day, the true identity of The Zodiac is unknown. Now, imagine how frustrating Se7en would have been if it had ended without ever revealing the killer's identity. So it’s no small feat that David Fincher has taken the investigation that never ended and turned it into one of the best films of the last decade.

Zodiac’s greatest strength, and some would argue its greatest weakness, is its commitment to portraying the events surrounding case as truthfully as possible. The film is based on the real life accounts of Robert Graysmith, who was a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle during the height of the attacks. Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) would become more and more involved in the case as the police investigation died down. His novel of the same name is the blueprint for Fincher’s version, and it is replicated in painstaking detail. Even some of the stranger facts, such as the curiously large number of sweaters worn by Zodiac victim Michael Mageau, are included to make the stranger than fiction details of this real case all the more puzzling.

The film covers more than twenty years, starting with the first Zodiac letters and extending all the way into the 1990’s. In retelling the accounts chronologically, the majority of the film’s action sequences take place within the first hour, and even then there are only a handful. By the time lead detective Dave Toschi (Ruffalo) appears to investigate the one and only confirmed Zodiac killing in San Francisco, audience members should be prepared for an onslaught of the red stuff, and I mean tape, not blood.  This is a film where the big police victory isn’t getting the man, but is instead getting a warrant. The attention to detail given to the investigation will probably discourage viewers used to watching police paperwork covered in a quick montage.  “No need for due process right,” jokes Toschi after watching Dirty Harry, whose villain was based on Zodiac. While certainly less sexy than an episode of CSI, putting the viewer in the thick of the investigation’s minutiae properly emphasizes how easy it is to get crushed under the day-to-day of working on one case.

It’s difficult to convey to viewers how exhausting time can be in a film. A fade out can cover unfathomable amounts of time in a matter of seconds, with the audience being no worse for wear. Spanning more than three decades, Zodiac is one of those rare films that makes you feel the weight of time passing as the investigation begins to slow down. At over two and a half hours, Zodiac will test your endurance. A skyscraper is literally built before your eyes during the time between major breaks in the case. In a brilliantly constructed transition, darkness is set to the cycling sounds of pop songs and headlines from 1972, through 1977, covering America’s “Horse with no name” to The Ohio Player’s “Love Rollercoaster”. In that time, the war in Vietnam ended, and America had a new pet serial killer, the Son of Sam (who had a TV movie less than a decade after being arrested). By the third act, it seems like everyone, including Zodiac, has moved on.

This is where the film picks up speed and moves from police procedural into territory more commonly found in modern thrillers, with Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith taking over the investigation. There’s still plenty of paperwork mind you, but as Graysmith and the case slowly start to unravel, there’s a sense of foreboding that gives reading old police reports a kinetic energy bordering on full-blown frenzy. Gyllenhaal proved himself capable of a slow-burn performance in DonnieDarko, but here, his transition from boy-scout cartoonist to obsessed detective is backed by visible signs of depletion, as his fresh face slowly darkens from restless nights spent hunting a killer the world has forgotten. The soundtrack shifts from era appropriate pop songs to morbid piano pieces, all while San Francisco is caught in a never-ending rainstorm. It’s not long before Graysmith begins receiving mysterious phone calls, and it appears his life is in danger. The tension reaches a crescendo in a scene inside a California basement. It’s one of the most suspenseful and terrifying ever filmed.

Beyond the facts of the Zodiac case, the film reaches into some fairly well worn territory about the way police work stresses relationships with family or coworkers. The friendship between Graysmith and criminal reporter (and one-time Zodiac target) Paul Avery (Downey Jr.) is mostly fictionalized, but their various tête-à-têtes make for some light comic relief. If Fincher is to be faulted with anything, it’s that he cheats a bit with his ending. The film gives a certain amount of closure to the killer’s identity, which, while true to Graysmith’s book, doesn’t properly do justice to the reality, which is far more intriguing. I had never heard of the Zodiac murders until watching this movie, and in a way, I wish I never had. The world let go, and it seems that we’ll never know the truth behind who the Zodiac really was. It’s an answer that I may not like, but it’s one I won’t be forgetting anytime soon.

5 out of 5

Directed by David Fincher

2007, USA

Review: The Avengers

It’s pretty incredible that The Avengers is an actual movie and that it came out in theatres today. How many successful movies have been made by combining two separate franchises, let alone four? Comic books have cross-pollination ingrained in their DNA, particularly Marvel’s, but it was hard to imagine an Avengers movie as being anything other than a cash-in starring a bunch of  easily affordable no-names playing some of the biggest names in comics. So when Marvel decided to give each hero their own film so as to set-up the characters ahead of time and actively build towards this one amazing-mega-ultra-team-up, it showed an actual commitment to the idea of turning a super-group of superheroes into the kind of event movie it deserved to be. Getting geek icon Joss Whedon to write and direct the whole thing seemed itself almost too good to be true.

Yet here we are, four years after The Avengers was first teased at the end of Iron Man, with the greatest convergence in cinematic entertainment, pretty much ever, ready to blow audiences away. So, how is it? Well... it’s good, quite good even. That might sound reductive but the fact that The Avengers doesn’t collapse horribly beneath its own ambitions is an achievement unto itself. We have the stars and co-stars of four separate blockbuster franchises all stuffed into one single picture. Robert Downey Jr. is as rakish as ever playing billionaire Tony Stark, who dons the crimson and gold armour of Iron Man once more, but this time he’s joined by supersoldier-turned fish out of water Captain America (Chris Evans), fresh from a nasty plane crash-related hibernation. There’s also Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the warrior prince from another planet who wields Shakespearean verse and a nasty hammer in equal measure, as well as the big green guy himself, The Hulk, being kept in check by Marvel newcomer Mark Ruffalo as the giant’s low-key scientist alter-ego, Bruce Banner.

But wait, there’s more! Increasingly prominent S.H.I.E.L.D director Nick Fury gives Samuel L. Jackson greater opportunity to give grim looks from his one good eye, and has a new assistant (Cobie Smulders) to boot. Superhero scout and franchise connective tissue Agent Phil Coulson continues trying to get his ragtag team of metahumans together, and Thor’s scientist pal Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) is in tow as well. Then there’s the pair of assassin types, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who’ve been promoted from cameos to full-time world savers. Phew. Even at an arguably excessive 140 minutes, there is a lot going on in The Avengers, with no less than a dozen characters to introduce, both to each other, and audiences still a bit foggy on which one’s the time-displaced WWII vet and which one’s the Norse god.

Despite all the necessary groundwork laying that would hamstring the film’s leading up to it, The Avengers still has so much to get viewers up to speed on that it makes for a talky opening hour and a half. All the more reason to be thankful that it’s Whedon filling in the speech bubbles, as while his direction is clean and focussed, it’s his words that the movie really needed. Rather than settling for a glossy, one-shot crossover, great effort is made to develop the relationship each hero has with the others, while simultaneously maintaining the personalities established in each solo ventures before bringing them into the greater world of super-dom as a whole.

Whedon keeps things light, if not always brisk, with his trademark brand of self-aware humour, including more than a few riffs on costuming, which is funnier when coming from a guy wearing stars ‘n stripes pajamas. Getting everyone to play nice together is the story’s real conflict, as such varying powers and personalities create plenty of friction aboard S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fancy new flying helicarrier. So once Thor’s mischievous brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) steals the Tesseract, a cosmic MacGuffin that’s been popping up all over the Marvel movie universe, with the intent of leading an extraterrestrial army to earth’s front door, the real threat is whether the heroes be able to survive each other long enough to save anybody else.

It leads to more than a few surprise turns to the established Marvel formula. There’s an emotional and political murkiness throughout, as S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intentions are rarely transparent, and the personal conflicts bear out into much more globally conscious ones. The final act is as action-heavy as ever, with a full-blown intergalactic war ripping apart downtown Manhattan, and these setpiece closers were often the weakest link in the previous efforts, but here, it’s the culmination of 10 hours worth of set-up, so the catharsis is almost unparalleled. It’s a whole lot of CG destruction by monsters whose motives are about as vague as their species name, but it doesn’t matter because holy crap, Hulk just punched a mecha-baleen whale in the face! And wow, Thor just chip-shot an Acura into five aliens! With such a diverse array of badasses, the action beats switch fast but hit hard, even at the 2-hour mark. It’s raw spectacle, pure and simple, but because so much care has been put into making us love who’s putting on the show, it makes for one hell of a pay-off.

And through it all Whedon has, quite improbably, found a way to make every member of the all-star line-up relevant and matter. Hawkeye’s bow and arrow looks pretty measly when compared to the 8-foot tall Hulk, but his accuracy helps out in plenty of situations where smashing can’t. Perhaps most surprising is Johansson as Black Widow, who showed up in Iron Man 2 mostly just as eye candy, but now gets to quip and kick-ass along with everybody else. The team spirit that the Avengers is based on manages to not just survive, but invigorate the big screen translation, and you’ll know it once you see the requisite but charming after-credits sequence (of which there are two, so be sure to stick around). The story itself is simple and occasionally contrived (true to comics, mind-control is a big factor), but it’s built on a foundation of wonderful characters whose interactions within that story are what keep you engaged, be they flashy or funny.

It might seem odd to end talking about another comic franchise but the recently released final trailer for The Dark Knight Rises will likely play before your screening of The Avengers. It gives a stark comparison between what Christopher Nolan is doing with Batman and what Marvel has done with The Avengers. While Nolan wants to create a case for artistic filmmaking within the blockbuster framework, Marvel has once again done what they’ve proven themselves best at; making fun, highly entertaining comic book movies that are effortlessly easy to enjoy. Nolan might be pushing the expectations for the genre, but The Avengers reminds us that just because something’s a spectacle, doesn’t mean it can’t be satisfying. Even better, you can bet there will be plenty of new Avengers fan ready to assemble when the team’s next outing arrives in the (hopefully not too distant) future.

4 out of 5