Adopted for the screen by Polanski and Yazmina Reza from the latter’s stage play “God of Carnage,” the film is set almost entirely in a well-appointed Brooklyn apartment, yet it only feels claustrophobic at definite, story-appropriate moments. Polanski directs without calling undue attention to how the film is staged, but it really is a marvel of construction, utilizing a great variety of angles and composition, pulling one character or another into the foreground and then gently pushing the others around the apartment.

Likewise, it’s photographed beautifully by Pawel Edelman — Polanski’s colloborator on The Pianist, Oliver Twist, and The Ghost Writer – in a quiet riot of shadows and light, gently showcasing all manner of earth tones and the color register between blue and grey. The production design by Dean Tavoularis, the costumes by Milena Canonero, the editing by Herve de Luze, and the music by Alexandre Desplat all serve to complement the material.

And what does that material have to say?

The young son of Penelope Longstreet (Foster) and her husband Michael (Reilly) was involved in a public altercation with the young son of Nancy Cowan (Winslet) and her husband Alan (Waltz). The Longstreets hold the Cowan boy responsible, and the Cowans do not disagree; they have signed a statement to that effect. The meeting between the two couples in the Longstreets’ apartment has concluded amicably, but one thing leads to another, and they end up spending hours talking, fighting, persuading, cajoling, accusing, vomiting, and blow-drying.

Their dispute is sparked by differing views on parental training, with Penelope incapable of controlling her outrage at what she perceives to be the Cowans’ shortcomings. Michael endeavors to play the role of peacemaker when Penelope and Nancy begin exchanging evil glares and snide remarks, while Alan, an attorney, remains focused on his cell phone as he negotiates a very bad business day with his partners.

Throughout the movie, allegiances shift continually, with the discussion serving as a roiling sea of discontent. The couples initially stand firm with one another, and then their mutual defenses get chipped away, with everyone seeking solace and/or confirmation from whoever is open to their point of view in that particular moment. So, the argument slides from Penelope and Michael as a team to Penelope and Nancy finding common ground, and then Penelope finding herself standing alone; on the other side of the room, Michael shifts his allegiance freely from Penelope to Alan to Nancy, depending on which way the conversation twists.

The performances are exquisitely modulated, as are the quicksilver changes in tone from comic outrage to physical disgust — I nearly had to leave the cinema during the vomiting sequence — to moral one-upmanship to philosophical disputes to drunken banter to nasty arguments.

Polanski brings it all home with verve and craftmanship, and the running time simply evaporates. It’s all very funny, infused with genuine wit, and filmed with sufficient style to keep any devoted cinephile happy. Carnage may only be a snapshot of a particular place and time, but it’s a marvelously-detailed snapshot, played out with lively, fire-breathing color.

– Originally published at Twitch.

Tall, dark, and handsome, Brandon (Michael Fassbender) appears to be leading an enviable lifestyle in Manhattan. He has a good-paying job, resides in a modern high-rise with lovely city views, and wears beautiful clothes. He exudes a degree of self-confidence, walking naked around his small apartment without bothering to draw the drapes.

Yet it quickly becomes apparent that Brandon is not happy. Despite having the type of good looks that inspire women to gaze at him longingly, he pays for prostitutes, surfs for porn on his home and office computers, and adjourns to the men’s room at work so he can masturbate. And there’s no indication that he’s actually enjoying his multitude of sexual encounters.

In short, Brandon is an “orgasm addict,” to borrow the title of a song by British band the Buzzcocks. He’s moving through life like a sexual shark, always in search of his next release.

Early on, Brandon listens to — and ignores — messages on his answering machine from a mysterious woman, perhaps an old girl friend. Later, the mysterious woman turns up in his shower, surprising Brandon. But that surprise compared to our surprise when the woman turns out to be Sissy (Carey Mulligan), Brandon’s younger sister.

Sissy has problems of her own, but the chemistry between her and Brandon is a bit off. They treat each other not as siblings, but as old lovers might, and it’s queasily disturbing. Sissy’s presence serves as a catalyst, forcing Brandon to deal with reawakened memories and self-destructive behavior. He’s made a long series of bad choices over many years, and it’s taken a heavy toll on his mental and emotional stability.

Fassbender and director Steve McQueen previously teamed on 2008’s ‘Hunger,’ a dark drama based on the real-life story of prisoners who went on a hunger strike to protest their treatment. ‘Shame’ is not based on true events, but it has the powerful veracity of real life, and is all the more powerful for being so realistic and harrowing in its depiction of an all-consuming addiction.

In an extraordinary performance, Fassbender bubbles forth with emotional pain. He’s struggling mightily to keep it under control, channeling his energies into sexual activity to disguise his feelings and try to dissipate his raging depression. But his thin veneer of respectability is melting under the heat of his pent-up desires; he may be having sex all the time, yet it’s all accomplished without true satisfaction.

Mulligan is rather terrific as his sister, a miserable woman who deals with her own problems with a different type of socially unacceptable behavior. She’s in just as much pain as her brother, but he refuses to provide her with what she wants.

The lingering power of ‘Shame’ is that it makes us wonder what Brandon will do with his life. It’s haunting to consider the consequences if he continues to make the wrong choice, again and again and again.

– From my review at Dallas Film Now.

Oddly, perhaps, Hugo outwardly pushes away intellectual analysis, presenting itself as a simple fantasy. Yet it’s an intelligent children’s story that refuses to pander, and enraptured many of the young ones at an advance screening I attended. While it can be taken at face value, the film contains layers of meaning waiting to be unwrapped.

While I was watching Hugo, I was both fascinated and distracted. Its subject is time, and it refuses to hurry, so that allowed opportunity for my contradictory feelings to war with each other. My own sense of wonder insists that Hugo is a must-see in theaters, in 3D if you can, even if its imperfections sometimes undermine its own good intentions.

Young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield, believably stressed) is an orphan living inside the walls of the Paris train station in the 1930s, a whiz kid who was brought up by his clockmaker father (Jude Law) to become a magician of space and time. Hugo is blessed with an innate sense of mechanics; combined with his father’s training, he is well-positioned to keep all the clocks in the train station running on time.

Notwithstanding his abilities, Hugo is an orphan during the Great Depression, so he lives a precarious day-to-day existence, stealing food from markets and passing delivery carts, and also hiding from the persnickety Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen, in a generally restrained performance). The Inspector suffered a debilitating leg injury during the Great War, forcing him to wear a metal leg brace that occasionally locks up on him, and serving as a bell on a cat’s neck for Hugo.

What commands Hugo’s interest is a toy shop in the station run by the snarling Georges (Ben Kingsley, who is sharp and affecting). It’s not so much the toys, though, as what’s inside them: gears and pendulums and nuts and bolts and screws and things. Hugo’s fascination is more of an obsession, but when Georges catches him stealing and demands the contents of his pockets, it’s Hugo’s notebook — with drawings of a mechanical man — that steals Georges’ attention.

The notebook becomes the driving force for the narrative, as it provides the key to the short, difficult life story of Hugo, as well as the locked door leading to Georges’ past life, a door that he desperately wants to keep closed.

Hugo gains a friend in Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz, delightfully not Hit Girl), who has lived with “Papa Georges” and “Mama Jeanne” (Helen McCrory) since her parents died. Isabelle loves books, frequently borrowing classics from the alternately kindly and stern book shop owner Monsieur Labisse (the great Christopher Lee). But she greatly desires “an adventure,” something that Papa Georges actively discourages, and so when she hears of Hugo’s woes, she decides that she will help him.

In turn, Hugo introduces her to a different way of life. Among other things, he sneaks her into her first movie (Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!), something that Papa Georges forbids. Isabelle can’t understand why — the cinema experience is altogether delightful to her — and that eventually leads to the uncovering of Georges’ past.
Adapted by John Logan from “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” a Caldecott-winning book written and illustrated by Brian Selznick, and first published in 2007, Hugo feels like an elegantly stripped-down big-screen version, allowing plenty of room for Scorsese to color outside the lines.

Scorsese has never before ventured into such family-friendly territory, and has seldom featured children, or even young teens, in major roles. (When he has, it’s been on the grittier side, as with the smart-ass Tommy (Alfred Lutter III) in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and the wise-beyond-her-years prostitute Iris in Taxi Driver (Jodie Foster, who also played opposite Lutter in Alice.) Scorsese struggled to bring life to the stiff The Age of Innocence, a PG-rated period piece from 1993 that faintly resembles Hugo in its archaic code of conduct and the press of societal manners.

Hugo is a more lively, friendly, vital affair, though it also suffers from a gentle distancing from the harsh realities of the times. It’s an optimistic view of life; despite the hard times Hugo has experienced, he remains resolute in his determination to remain connected to his late father, and dismisses his evident hunger and dismal living conditions as facts of life, to be endured until he can complete one last great project.

The bittersweet edge of the story is forgotten, however, when Hugo pitches forth into the eye-opening early days of the cinema, when imagination had to be handcrafted and the only limitations were life itself. Lovingly recreated, they absolve Hugo from its sins, establishing it as a lovely movie in love with movies.

Hugo is not “pure cinema.” It’s just as concerned with story and characters as it is with the visual delights that are poured onto the screen. It may, in fact, be too much in love with movies to qualify as great cinema itself, too distracted by the possibilities to remain reined into the central focus of the family at the heart of the story. In that, it’s pure, late Scorsese, which means it’s still essential viewing.

Hugo, which also features Michael Stuhlbarg, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Frances de la Tour, and Richard Griffiths in small roles, is now playing wide across the U.S. Check local listings for theaters and showtimes.

– First published at Twitch.

The Descendants, which opens in the U.S. in New York and Los Angeles today before expanding in limited release on Friday, revolves around Matt King (George Clooney) as he deals with changing family dynamics and the responsibilities of property ownership. He’s a wealthy man who is not ostentatious about his inherited material prosperity and doesn’t want to spoil his children. He’s so wrapped up with his ideals, though, that he doesn’t realize how far he’s drifted away from his family.

In his alienation from friends and family, Matt King is related to Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) in Sideways. Like Matt, Miles is adrift from intimacy, though perhaps “driven away” is the better description; he’s a cranky, cantankerous bastard, and has a degree of self-awareness about his actions. Like Matt, Miles knows that he needs to make some changes, but he can’t quite figure out how he’s missed out, where exactly he went wrong, and what more he actually needs to do to find happiness and peace in his life.

And so it goes with Payne’s other films. About Schmidt explores a retired insurance executive (Jack Nicholson) who doesn’t know how he got so old — and why his daughter doesn’t seem to like him. In Election, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) finds his life spiraling out of control for reasons he can’t (or refuses to) fathom, and so he fixes on Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) as the chief culprit. And the titular character of Citizen Ruth, played by Laura Dern, never quite understands, or acknowledges, that she’s her own worst enemy.

Citizen Ruth marked the first feature colloboration between Payne and Jim Taylor, who were roommates in Los Angeles at the time. Payne, originally from Omaha, Nebraska, attended film school at UCLA, winning the Jack Nicholson Outstanding Student Director Award as a graduate student before earning an M.F.A. in 1990. The Passion of Martin, his thesis film, played the following year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Based on the short, Payne landed a one-year deal with Universal Studios, but nothing came of it. “What happens to people like me is, you do a film that attracts the attention of Hollywood, and they say, ‘Wow, we love the film you made–it’s so new and different! What do you want to do next?’ ” he told Independent Streak. “Then you give them a script, and they say, ‘Uh, nope, this is just too new and different.’ “

Taylor did some work in China for Cannon Films in 1987, returning to the U.S. and working first in development and then as a filmmaker’s assistant. He began doing temporary jobs, where he met Payne, and they eventually became roommates. They wrote short films together and starting writing Citizen Ruth. “Our collaboration grew out of our friendship,” Payne said. “The story that unfolded seemed to lend itself to our shared sensibilities.”

After winning big on “Wheel of Fortune,” a TV game show, Taylor went to NYU film school, continuing to work on rewrites for Citizen Ruth with Payne. Veteran producer Cary Woods loved Payne’s description of the film as an “abortion comedy,” and “bulldozed and browbeat Harvey Weinstein into making it” at Miramax.

Based on the positive response to Citizen Ruth, Payne and Taylor were able to get the job to adopt Tom Perrotta’s 1998 novel Election for MTV Films. About Schmidt was similar, in that Louis Begley’s 1996 novel (set in the Hamptons and Manhattan, by the way) was a property that had been set up with Jack Nicholson’s producing partner, and they were hired to write the script. In that case, the duo also made use of a thematically-similar script Payne had already written. For Sideways, Payne and producer Michael London had the rights to Rex Pickett’s novel, which was unpublished at the time. Payne and Taylor wrote the script on spec, and then shopped it around.

As he explained to Coming Soon, Payne’s company, financed by Fox Searchlight, optioned Kaui Hart Hemming’s novel The Descendants, around the time it was published in 2007. He was busy working with Taylor on another (as yet unproduced) script), so other writers were hired and director Stephen Frears considered making it.

By mid-2009, Payne and Taylor’s other script was done, but the financing wasn’t coming together, and Payne wanted to make a movie. “I had to start from scratch and find my own way into the story, make it personal to me if I could because it’s not my world, it’s not my story. In a way, my co-writer was the novelist, was Kaui Hemmings because I wound up being pretty darn faithful to the book.”

Payne and Taylor have also worked on more straightforward studio productions. Payne reportedly did a polish on Meet the Parents. A little later, Payne and Taylor earned “a nice paycheck” for spending four weeks writing a draft of Jurassic Park III, though little of their draft survived. “That director, [Joe] Johnston, and the studio–they’re not interested in movies, they’re interested in theme park rides,” Payne told Film Freak Central. ”I know that our script, and this sounds like sour grapes and it’s not, is much more interesting. All they wanted was action.”

The writing team also labored on the movie that became I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, spending a month on what Payne characterized as “a fix-it job” in an interview with the Boston Globe. “We were very proud of that. But it was completely changed by Sandler. He wasn’t involved when we wrote it. It wasn’t supposed to be two white guys. It was supposed to be a white guy and a black guy. We wanted Jamie Foxx and someone else – it could have been Sandler, it doesn’t matter. And they changed that and we were upset. And we also had what we thought was a better title, which was ‘Flamers.’ … In retrospect, I sort of wish I directed it.”

Even with the reputation that he’s established over a decade and a half, Payne still has to work hard to make the movies he wants to make, to protect his own fiercely creative visions. If all goes well, filming on Nebraska will begin next April; the story of an alcoholic father, to be shot in black-and-white, still needs a marquee name to fill the lead role. And after that, Payne hopes to make Wilson, adapted by Daniel Clowes from his graphic novel.

And after that? I’m imaging something … independent.

– First published at Twitch.