Tagged: Jessica Chastain

Box Office Democracy: “The Huntsman: Winter’s War”

In my first year of reviewing movies I ranked Snow White and the Huntsman as the ninth worst movie of 2012 and by that time news had come out that neither star Kristen Stewart nor director Rupert Shane would be returning for the sequel, and I predicted that it would probably be a better movie. I was right, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a better movie, and it still isn’t a very good movie.   Freed from trying to retell a more famous story, there are some interesting choices made in the script— but it’s all overwhelmed by the crushing clichés of high fantasy. At its lowest points Huntsman is the slickest Lord of the Rings fan-film you’ve ever seen; at its highest it’s a kind of cute romantic comedy starring Nick Frost.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War wraps around the first movie with a little bit of an origin story and then the kind of sequel where you barely need to bring any of the cast back. The story now revolves around a previously unmentioned northern kingdom ruled by Freya (Emily Blunt) the ice witch sister of the evil queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) from the first film. Freya has a plotline so similar to Elsa in Frozen that it feels like the script was written by lawyers, everything feels just distinct enough while still constantly threatening to break in to a chorus of “Let it Go” at any moment. Freya, it conveniently turns out, raised and trained a whole army of Huntsmen (and Huntswomen) and her sociologically fascinating but completely implausible ban on the very concept of love ends up driving away Eric (Chris Hemsworth) and starting him on his journey that leads him to the first movie. We then skip ahead to after and Eric with one of the eight dwarfs from the first movie (Nick Frost) plus a new dwarf (Rob Brydon) end up on a convoluted quest to rescue the evil magic mirror to save the completely absent Snow White and save the world, I guess. Sara (Jessica Chastain) is Eric’s presumed dead wife who saves his life at a miraculous moment, and then just a bunch of fantasy junk happens until they have to wrap it up.

I feel like a crazy person typing all that up. There’s just an insane amount of idea bloat in this film and it struggles to find a focus.

Some of that struggle for focus is the result of not having a clear protagonist. Going strictly by the screenplay writing books it’s Freya, because it is the change in her attitude that allows the climax of the movie to happen, but she’s practically a Bond villain in terms of her scheming for the rest of the film and it’s hard to feel particularly invested in the well-being of someone who keeps a room full of people turned into ice sculptures. In terms of screen time (and billing) it’s Eric, but he doesn’t change his attitude one iota through the film— he’s right about pretty much everything all the time and is super capable and has no need to improve, he’s Aragorn with an axe. It’s probably supposed to be Sara, she has a clear narrative arc and she has the biggest impact on the events of the film but they try so hard to obfuscate her actions and intentions that it’s hard to connect with her. That along with the stilted narrative structure leaves the movie feeling like a series of vignettes and not like a cohesive narrative.

I did genuinely enjoy the love story between Nick Frost’s dwarf and Alexandra Roach’s. It was cute, and it felt clever, and most importantly… it didn’t feel like it was shaken out of the fantasy magic eight ball like every other piece of Winter’s War. It was the only thing that felt genuine or surprising. This was a movie full of twists and every one of them was telegraphed so far in advance and the one that might have been surprising was shown in its entirety in the trailer for the movie. That simple, silly love story was the only thing I liked, the only thing I will remember fondly in this overplotted mess, but it deserves to be recognized. If the next movie just takes those two characters I’d be first in line for more; otherwise, please put this series out of its misery.

Box Office Democracy: Crimson Peak

In almost four years of reviewing movies the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been in a movie theater was watching Mama, the 2013 horror movie produced by Guillermo del Toro. I remember very few of the particulars of that movie but what I remember quite viscerally was scene after scene of being transfixed by the action on the screen and wanting nothing more than for it to be over. Crimson Peak is the first movie since then to recreate that feeling so precisely, when the movie wanted to scare me I was consistently scared to what I believe to be the maximum level I can be scared while watching a movie. No matter what else I thought about the movie, it was completely successful at its objective and that’s worth a lot.

Guillermo del Toro seems as if he was put on this earth to make a movie set in a decaying Victorian manor house full of ghosts. It takes a little while to get to the titular setting, but once we’re there the movie is consistently breathtakingly beautiful. The house is falling apart, the roof is barely present in the main hall, the pipes run with blood red water, and the house is sinking in to a foundation of soft red clay and every little detail is the perfect visual metaphor for the story at hand. Crimson Peak has the perfect gothic look and it seems so effortless; like what Tim Burton would do if he could let go of being quite so precious.

I suppose if we keep the Burton metaphor alive, then Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain feel more than a little like a redux version of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, but that’s not giving either actor enough credit. Neither makes me feel quite as weary playing well-worn gothic archetypes, although between this and Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston should probably watch his step. Chastain is especially good in this and is playing so far against her normal type that she becomes almost completely enveloped in the role of Lucile. Lucile is a magnetic character that demands attention whenever she’s on screen, and while she never has to share the screen with one of the film’s grotesque ghosts I would say she’s even more arresting in the frame.

I’ve said that this movie is terrifying, beautiful, and has standout acting, but unfortunately the story is a little thin. The actual plot is very straightforward, and anyone who has regularly consumed any media at all in their life will know all the twists and turns of the plot in the first half hour or so. All roads lead in one direction and the film happily chugs along that path with no real diversion and a handful of pit stops to show off some horrifying ghost effects. It doesn’t make the movie less enjoyable to watch, it’s always the journey more than the destination with any piece of narrative, but it would have been nice to be surprised by something that wasn’t a specter bursting through a wall or floor.

I’m deeply impressed by Crimson Peak, and I sincerely hope that del Toro goes and does a few more things before returning to horror. I would love to see a Pacific Rim sequel or another Hellboy movie or if he still has the desire to do an endless fantasy epic after his adaptation of The Hobbit fell through I would gladly watch that. I could use another 30-month break before I have to squirm through a collection of scenes as scary as I was given in Crimson Peak or that he influenced in his work on Mama. I’m delighted to get to watch a master work the way del Toro makes horror movies but I’m afraid I just don’t have the constitution— and more than that, I’m afraid to see what he’ll do to scare me next time.

Box Office Democracy: The Martian

I really enjoyed watching The Martian when I was sitting in the theater, but that love has faded quickly in the days since. There’s a high amount of amazing spectacle and suspense to keep audiences engaged but there’s an emotional emptiness to the film that makes it feel inconsequential in the long term and hurts the film. Ten minutes after I thought it was an Oscar contender released too early, two days after it feels like just another movie, and in a couple months I doubt I’ll be thinking about it at all. I suppose this is what Ridley Scott is these days and it’s so sad that the man who made Blade Runner and Alien is making such hollow science fiction these days.

The set pieces on display in The Martian are as good as anything I’ve seen this year. From Martian sandstorms to daring space stunts to random bouts of explosive decompression it’s a thoroughly arresting film. The action is interesting and it’s fun to hear all of the characters try and scheme their way out of impossible space problems. The interplay between Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is particularly crisp and feels if not what actual NASA meetings are like certainly what I would like to imagine them to be.

The problem with all these fascinating situations is we never get to see any real emotional reactions. Matt Damon is supposed to be almost certainly doomed millions and millions of miles away and with the exception of brief moments we never see him particularly sad or on the precipice of despair. We never see that reaction from anyone on earth either, neither from the people at NASA or from a member of his family, the stakes of the movie are so high but without seeing someone really care they don’t feel like anything. The Martian ends up feeling like a series of math problems to be solved and not like a life or death situation, and while approaching them like math problems might be what gets them solved from an institutional standpoint it doesn’t make for an effective movie.

There’s a chance I’m being too hard on this movie. It’s quite likely that “enjoyable but forgettable” actually describes a movie that’s more or less good, but I can’t help but hold Ridley Scott to a higher standard. I know he can make movies that are more affecting than this but seems trapped in a downward spiral of spectacle over substance that kicked off with Robin Hood, spread through Prometheus, hit critical mass with Exodus, and now has left us with The Martian a movie that barely seems to care about how little it cares.

Box Office Democracy: “Interstellar”

Interstellar is a movie that in the hands of most directors would be a failure. It’s a movie about space and time that assumes an awful lot of knowledge on both subjects from the audience. It’s a movie with a moral compass that swings so wildly that at the end I can only point to three characters and say I absolutely know how the film wants us to feel about them. There’s a healthy dose of paradox and deus ex machina flowing through the third act of the movie. Even good directors would mess this up; this script could have been Neill Blomkamp’s Waterloo. Christopher Nolan turned it in to one of the best science fiction movies in years. I was delighted to watch this movie and hope that every bit of Nolan’s post-Batman career can be this enjoyable.

It must be quite hard to make a movie about space travel. No one in the audience has ever been in space and I have no reason to believe that any of the depictions we’ve seen in movies over the years have been particularly accurate. Instead of trying to one-up Gravity or anything Nolan seems content to draw upon the history of the depictions of space in film. Scenes in Interstellar felt like they could have been in Alien, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nolan decides to use our shared visual vocabulary to tell quick, expressive stories out of fleeting shots. I don’t mean to suggest that he sits back and only uses images from other directors, far from it; the wormhole and black hole sequences are mind-bendingly wonderful images. Nolan puts more on the table than any director in the genre since Kubrick. It’s the most I’ve been impressed with just sheer directorial force of will in recent memory. Nolan elevates this move more than any acting performance could ever hope to.

It’s a good think Nolan is here because the acting is not the strength I thought it would be. We may be waist deep in the ongoing flood of latter-day Matthew McConaughey’s talent but he feels like he does little except not mess up this movie. He’s not bad or anything but he doesn’t bring anything to this part that any equivalent leading man couldn’t have brought unless Nolan thinks that halfway drawl was essential to portraying this engineer/rocket pilot. Unfortunately this kind of stretches across the cast; I only thought Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and John Lithgow did work that was above replacement level in their roles. The cast is an embarrassment of riches and has the kind of cast that defies belief. I have a strong feeling this cast will one day be looked at like The Godfather or Murder on the Orient Express as one of those films where it’s just unbelievable the top to bottom talent they got. I wish I could come away raving about more of the performances unfortunately they’re all just really good and not spectacular.

It’s hard to walk out of a movie that’s almost three hours and not think it’s a little bloated and Interstellar is no exception. There’s a subplot that slowly worms its way in to the main plot that is just not as clever as either of the Nolan brothers think it is. It leaves us with a very long scene where the characters figure something out that was pretty obvious two hours ago. The script is just a bit shy of being as clever as it thinks it does and those moments become a little more obvious when you’ve been sitting for over two hours.

These are little, meaningless, complaints. Performances that are very good but not great, 15 minutes that could be easily trimmed from a 169 minute movie, trifling little nothings. This is a masterpiece of filmmaking and the bar that I will be measuring science fiction against for years to come. It’s a spellbinding, emotionally gripping, visually arresting piece of filmmaking that is, as of now, the best film Christopher Nolan has ever produced.

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