essays

[National Review Online; July 20, 2008]

Diminished Capacity

Stars: 2

Rated: NR

Genre:  Comedy

Theater Release: July 4, 2008, Plum Pictures / IFC Films

Directed by: Terry Kinney

Runtime: 1 hour 28 min

Cast: Matthew Broderick (Cooper), Alan Alda (Uncle Rollie), Virginia Madsen (Charlotte), Dylan Baker (Mad Dog McClure), Bobby Cannavale (Lee Vivyan)

There’s virtually nothing harmful in “Diminished Capacity,” a mild comedy about the difficulty of selling a rare baseball card when you’re a picturesque old geezer with a faulty memory. The most appreciative audience will be, in fact, not the one that is interested in geezers, but the one that is interested in baseball; more specifically, interested in baseball fans and their fanaticisms (particularly the incandescence of those devoted to the “Lovable Losers,” the Chicago Cubs).

The story begins with Cooper Zerbs, mild-mannered editor with a Chicago news syndicate, who intervenes in a fight between a girl and a drunk coworker and ends up with a concussion. When we meet him, he’s been convalescing for months, but still doesn’t notice that the words of love in a strip cartoon should be coming from the mouth of the woman, not the dog. However, he has a new worry; his mother says that eccentric uncle Rollie is becoming more unhinged, and she needs Cooper to wrestle him into the kind of eldercare known as “benign confinement.”

Cooper arrives at the ramshackle family home in rural Missouri to find that Rollie is continuing his longterm hobby of collecting poetry from fish. He has set up an old typewriter on the pier, with an unbaited hook tied to every key; on occasion the keys are tugged, and Rollie attempts to extricate words from gibberish. (This quirk inspires a lovely opening title sequence.) He’s convinced that the fish are poetic prodigies; they are “deep.” But now he’s developing new hobbies, such as drying socks by turning on a propane burner and letting it hiss for long minutes as he tries to strike a match. Cooper’s mom has reason for concern.

Rollie is determined to finish his life at the old house, and plans to finance that by selling a 1909 Chicago Cubs baseball card given to him by his grandfather. A baseball memorabilia convention is conveniently taking place in Chicago that weekend, so Cooper and Rollie plan to make the trip to find a good buyer, even though they both suffer some degree of “dim cap.”

But that’s not all. Charlotte, Cooper’s one-time love, now divorced, is also going to Chicago that weekend, to attempt to sell one of her paintings to a restaurant chain. Once they arrive at Cooper’s apartment, they acquire two more companions: Charlotte’s bum of a brother, Doug, who has been trying to steal the card, and Stan, the formerly-drunk and now deeply penitent coworker, who keeps Doug in line. They troop off to the convention, where they talk to “Mad Dog” McClure, a passionate Cubs fan and square-dealer who recognizes the card’s value and offers to bring them some serious buyers, and Lee Vivyan, an angry loudmouth who tries to cheat them of the card.

We’re now up to 6 colorful characters, and I’m leaving out Cooper’s mom, Cooper’s editor, Charlotte’s son, and rustic, gun-toting neighbor Wendell Kendall. Some of these are shoehorned into the story so quickly that their peculiarities seem not so much intriguing as artificial and arbitrary. A story that began as modestly interesting becomes merely agitated, as the second half of the film involves chases and fights that look oddly lame and suspense that isn’t suspenseful.

I wonder if all this just worked better as a book. The novel was written by Sherwood Kiraly (who also wrote the screenplay, with additional material by Doug Bost). In the book Cooper serves as narrator, and his impairment transmits the story in a style that is quiet, compact, and uncomplicated. This can be charming (“Uncle Rollie was the kind of man other men gather around, if only to get mad”), but on the screen Broderick can only signal this inner state by looking befuddled or blank, his shiny dark eyes resembling those of a teddy bear. It’s hard to center a movie around a character whose main attribute is vacancy. Alda is admirable as Uncle Rollie-indeed, it’s hard to fault anyone’s performance-but the deeper themes that should be part of such a story are simply missing. There is real poignancy to the loss of memory in old age, but the film skirts that and opts for sentiment instead.

And, unfortunately, it delivers the sentiment in a hokey way. When Charlotte tells Cooper that he and Rollie should use the money from the card’s sale to reopen a local restaurant, Cooper delivers this clunky line: “Y’know, we just got tested at the doctor. We came out slow and slower. What the hell makes you think we can pull something like that off? You’re dreaming, OK? We’re not restaurateurs; we can’t even keep track of a piece of cardboard.” Thank goodness, we’re spared a concluding sequence showing the gang laughing their way through a madcap evening at the wildly successful restaurant. There are some things I’d rather not have to try to forget.

Talk About It

1. “Diminished Capacity” introduces us to baseball fans who have a consuming intensity about the game and its artifacts. Does this outlet for love and loyalty substitute for something better? Is it fair to call this idolatry?

2. It’s been said that loss of memory means loss of personality. As the history that organized a personality fades, the person loses touch with the sources of love or joy that previously fired his emotional life, and may become stuck in a single condition such as fear or anger. But occasionally those losses do a person good; for example, when the reasons for long-term resentment are forgotten, the person may recover an earlier sweetness. Have you seen someone helped by the loss of memory in old age? 

3. “Diminished Capacity” is about memory, but on a subtler level it’s also about being remembered. Rollie says that he has almost forgotten his grandfather, but when he looks at the baseball card it is as if the man is standing in front of him. At the conclusion, a line from “Ol’ Man River” is cited: “He don’t plant ‘taters, he don’t plant cotton, and them that plants them are soon forgotten.” What does it mean to be remembered? What one thing would you hope would be passed on to future generations about you?

The Family Corner: There is occasional language, of the milder sort. Also, a couple of fight sequences, but not bloody and somewhat comical.

[National Review Online, June 27, 2008]

I can just tell that this is going to be one of those reviews where the hardest part is coming up with the first sentence. What’s the main thing to say about WALL-E, the latest offering from that most excellent animation studio, Pixar? That it’s surprisingly, delicately, effectively, poignant? That, for that reason, younger children may not quite get it? That the Wall-E character is genuinely charming, and his originality has not been siphoned off by ET or Short Circuit’s Johnny 5? That the film succeeds in making an ecological statement without being annoying? That, despite all those worthy elements, there’s just something missing—a plot, perhaps?

Click to read more ...

[National Review Online; May 16, 2008]

Every once in awhile, a movie improves on the book on which it is based. In my bold opinion, Prince Caspian , the second Disney film drawn from C. S. Lewis’s beloved Chronicles of Narnia, is such a movie. Criticism of C. S. Lewis is rightly taboo, but facts are facts: Prince Caspian , the book, is a dud.

Click to read more ...

[Christianity Today Online, April 25, 2008) 

Summary: In this comedy a single thirty-something organic foods executive can’t sustain a pregnancy, so she hires a ditsy surrogate to carry her baby to term.

Stars: **

Rated PG -13

Genre: Comedy

Released: April 25, 2008 by Broadway Video

Directed by: Michael McCullers

Runtime: 96 min.

Cast: Tina Fey (Kate), Amy Poehler (Angie), Greg Kinnear (Rob), Dax Shepard (Carl), Romany Malco (Oscar)

Baby Mama

By Frederica Mathewes-Green

When Chinese food was first becoming popular in the US, some decades ago, a saying quickly became a cliché: it tastes great, but an hour later you’re hungry all over again.

Some comedies are like that. As long as you’re in the theater, you could be laughing more or less continuously.

Click to read more ...

[ChristianityTodayMovies.com; March 7, 2008] 

Stars: 2

Cast: Frances McDormand (Guinevere Pettigrew), Amy Adams (Delysia LaFosse), Ciaran Hinds (Joe), Lee Pace (Michael), Shirley Henderson (Edythe Dubarry)

*** 

Miss Guinevere Pettigrew does have quite a day. It begins on a blustery London morning in 1939, as Miss Pettigrew awakens on a bench in a London train station. She had lost her job as a governess the day before, and no job prospects are in sight. She gets a meal in a soup-line but it is knocked out of her hands; she collides with a stranger, and her suitcase spills across the sidewalk. With nothing left to lose, Miss Pettigrew forms the bold plan of trying to pass herself off as the applicant sent by an employment agency to be social secretary to nightclub singer and social luminary Delysia LaFosse. (The film is based on a 1938 novel which was reissued in England in 2000, making the author, Winifred Watson, a minor celebrity at 94.)

Click to read more ...

[ChristianityTodayMovies.com; February 29, 2008] 

[Cast: Jessica Lange (Arvilla), Kathy Bates (Margene), Joan Allen (Carol), Tom Skerritt (Emmett), Christine Baranaski (Francine)]

Oh boy, a movie about a 1966 Bonneville convertible! That’s the car my sisters and I learned to drive on. Ours was silver with a black interior, purchased brand-new off the showroom floor with every possible extra. We called it the Batmobile. It’s in retirement at Louisa’s place now, but I like to think of it as resting up.

I went to see the cinematic “Bonneville” filled with hopeful nostalgia, but, I regret to say, it’s a really crummy movie. Though the car appears in the film, it’s mere eye candy for a story about three middle-aged women (“middle,” that is, if you know lots of 120-year-olds). They’re using the spiffy vehicle to make a road trip from Pocatello, Idaho to Santa Barbara, California. Though road-trip movies have been overdone, it could still have been enjoyable, especially as a comedy retaining down-to-earth, wisecracking Kathy Bates. But “Bonneville” is also burdened with a *serious* plot element, one that feels contrived and manipulative.

It’s that Arvilla has just lost her husband, Joe. After his retirement, Joe became an adventurous traveler, and began taking Arvilla around the world. Death came while they were on a trip to Borneo. As the story opens we see Arvilla coming home in a taxi, clutching a container of Joe’s ashes. She had made him a promise to scatter them, the where and how left unspecified.

But Joe has a daughter from his first marriage, Francine, who feels strongly that he should be buried next to her mother, in the family plot in California. She offers Arvilla a deal: turn over the ashes by the time of the memorial service next week, and I won’t sell this house. (The house was left to Francine in a pre-Arvilla will, and a theoretical later will amending that can’t be found.)

Since the unseen Joe looms large throughout the film, what kind of guy was he? Francine tells Arvilla that perhaps Joe never made a new will, since there were many things he said he’d do but never got around to, like moving to where he could be part of his grandchildren’s lives. Later we learn that Joe had programmed Arvilla’s phone so that a call from Francine would trigger the sound of a screaming raptor. Pretty hostile behavior, and there’s no obvious reason why Francine deserves it. Apparently she is Joe’s only child.

There’s also something creepy in the fact that Arvilla has placed his ashes in a pottery jar Joe purchased on one of his travels, one that had originally held the hearts of human sacrifices. Later, Margene recalls the time Joe gave her a gift of a shrunken head. My guess is that a shrunken head makes a hilarious gift only if it’s not Caucasian. If it were, it would be too obvious that you are holding the decapitated head of a young woman, say, or a child, or even an old man like Joe.

The film gives away this alternate view completely against its will. We are herded toward thinking that Francine must be in the wrong, because she’s uptight and wealthy. (How wealthy? One day we see her and her husband playing tennis next to the porch of their home; the next day, the view from the porch shows a swimming pool. Wow.) Her father is presented as her opposite, an adventurous free spirit who won’t be chained to the expectations of narrow, proper people.

Does that sound familiar? It’s the same narrative Baby Boomers internalized decades ago, when “narrow, proper people” meant their parents. Now that those foils are fast disappearing, Boomers are swinging around to paste the label on their children. (Another Jessica Lange film, “Big Fish,” preaches the same sermon.) Once a rebel, always a rebel, even if you have to invent someone to rebel against.

From the moment that Arvilla and her friends Margene and Carol hit the road, I knew exactly what was going to happen [SPOILER ALERT]: Arvilla would go ahead and scatter Joe’s ashes, and fool Francine by handing her a jar containing ashes of some other kind. I didn’t foresee exactly what those ashes would be, and it is a moment of piercing cruelty—if you see Francine as a real, grieving person, that is. But “Bonneville” is determined you’ll see things only from its jerryrigged perspective.

“Bonneville” does have its bright points: Kathy Bates is operating in a different, more authentic universe than the rest of the cast, and provides some genuine laughs. The color scheme of the movie is consistently attractive, too, if unrealistic (when the women are in an autumn environment, they wear harmonizing outfits of orange, brown, and khaki green; when they’re at the beach, they’re all in white, beige, and light blue. And I sure don’t think the ’66 Bonneville came in burnt orange.) Joe’s ashes have gotten the Hollywood treatment, too. My husband, a pastor, has had occasion to deal with cremated remains (“cremains,” in the funeral industry’s cute little euphemism). What Arvilla keeps tenderly releasing to the wind is ashy and fine as dust; what you’d be more likely to see, on looking into the shoe-box-sized container, would be dried, pulverized bone, with some chips disconcertingly larger than others.

The visual center of the drama is Jessica Lange’s face, and unfortunately she’s had that thing done where the zone from eyebrows to cheekbones has been ironed out sideways with extra starch. You’d think any actor would especially prize and protect control of the myriad subtle muscles around the eyes, but this surgery pins everything back so tightly that the eyes look taut and masked. The rest of Lange’s still-lovely face is soft and believable, and it’s a shame she didn’t leave well enough alone. She’s an actress of substance, with two Oscars on her mantelpiece, and could have easily sold us on the beauty of a natural older face. This surgery doesn’t even deliver what it promises: it doesn’t make anybody look young, just weird.

“Bonneville” seems carefully constructed to get older women to come out to the movie theater, and self-consciously adorable “Red Hat” ladies will eat it up. They may be able to bring some men with them, with the car providing catnip for the guys the way Brad Pitt did for female viewers in “Troy.” For anybody else, the film is a bust. The ’66 Bonneville was a great car, but these talented ladies deserved a better vehicle.

Talk About It:

1. For every movie about breaking free from authority and being true to yourself, there’s a movie about loyalty to friends and family no matter what. Why are we so ambivalent about commitment? How can we know God’s calling in these situations?

2. Scripture teaches that we must not favor either the rich or the poor (Leviticus 19:15, “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great”). We know well that we should be kind and compassionate toward the poor. But how should we treat the rich?

3. Early Christians associated the burning of a body with desecration; burning was for garbage. Christ’s incarnation and bodily Resurrection taught, on the contrary, that the body was worthy of honor (in sharp contrast to Gnostics, who regarded the material world with contempt). Should Christians prefer to bury a body intact? Or is cremation as valid an option?

[First Things; February 5, 2008] 

Even if you go around with one or several fingers stuffed into each ear, you will not be able to exclude the words “Hannah Montana” from your field of consciousness. No American citizen is permitted to be unfamiliar with the words “Hannah Montana.” What you are permitted is to be uncertain of what the words mean. Unless you made the decision to have a seven-year-old granddaughter about now, without taking sufficient forethought for the consequences.

I’ve resisted learning about the Hannah Montana industry until recently, despite the acquisition of my own seven-year-old granddaughter, herself a Hannah.

Click to read more ...

I love movies like this. But, sad to say, I didn’t love this movie. I hoped I would, but one clunker after another kept accumulating—a hackneyed character here, a stupid line of dialogue there—until it was sounding like a sneaker in a dryer.

That’s too bad, because this format has been the foundation of some terrific, thought-provoking films. You take a sizeable number of characters, most of whom have never met, and set their stories in motion. As the multiple plots unfold, each character is being drawn closer to the center, where a resolution awaits that, in the best of these films, can be simultaneously unexpected and inevitable. Let’s coin a term and call them “drawstring” movies, a subset of the genre known as “ensemble” films.

Click to read more ...

[Christianity Today Movies; December 21, 2007] 

This will sound like an odd thing to say about a comedy, but “Walk Hard” is an ambitious movie. It starts with 6-year-old Dewey Cox picking up a guitar in a rural general store and belting out a blues number, and proceeds to show him singing with his polite high school band, then going through an Elvis phase, on into protest songs, Dylanesque songs with incomprehensible lyrics, rock, hard rock, frenzied growling rock, music like the Beatles in their India phase, music like the Beach Boys—oh, you name it, it’s in there. So in addition to telling a hilarious, fast-paced story that hits all the clichés of singer-biography movies (lots of drugs, lots of rehab, lots of wives, plenty of costume changes, hairstyle changes, and the accumulating wrinkles of age), the film must also deliver spot-on music parodies. What’s more, this is music that audience members know very, very well, so it’s not like parodying, say, Puccini. Those watching the film could sing the original models of these songs in their sleep. The performer, too, must be top-notch, and not just a good actor but a singer able to go from Bobby Darrin to Bob Dylan, John Lennon to Johnny Cash, in a heartbeat.

Well, it works. If only for the music numbers, this movie deserves a standing ovation. Much of the credit goes to John C. Reilly, an actor with a rubbery face and the voice of an angel. He played simple, good-hearted men in two of my favorite recent movies, “Magnolia” (1999) and “The Good Girl” (2002), but it was in “Chicago” (2002) that I first heard him sing, and the sweet sadness of his “Mr. Cellophane” placed a heart at the center of that frantic, heartless story. In “Walk Hard,” Reilly has to produce a seemingly-impossible range of vocal styles, and does it well. The material he has to work with is excellent too, as perfect in exemplifying these many genres as the songs of “A Mighty Wind” were to the folk scene. Give the “Walk Hard” soundtrack album to your hippest musical friends this Christmas (the ones hip enough to not mind some double-entendre lyrics) and they’ll be delighted.

The story begins as Cox, now an old man, is backstage with his guitar, awaiting his cue. As he stands with head bowed, leaning against a wall, the nervous stage manager reminds him that he goes on in two minutes. But Cox’s longtime friend and his band’s drummer (an unnamed character, well-played by Tim Meadows) tells him that, before he performs, Dewey has to think about every single moment of his life. This first laugh in the film sets up a pattern: characters enunciating exactly what the film is trying to get across, as if dimmer audience members are in danger of missing it. For example, the next scene shows young Dewey and his brother Nate setting out for a day of fun. Nate keeps saying things like, “It’s a good thing I’m going to live a long, long time!” and “Nope, nothing horrible is going to happen today!” The boys end up dueling with machetes in the barn, and with one swipe Dewey cuts his brother in half at the waist; the unoccupied legs now stand beside to the top part of the torso, which is upright on the ground. Dewey tells Nate he’ll be OK, but Nate says, “I don’t know, Dewey, I’m cut in half pretty bad!” The doctor is unable to save Nate, and Dewey is so traumatized that he loses his sense of smell. “You’ve gone smellblind!” his mom exclaims.

A half-dozen years later, Dewey and his band are performing at the high school talent show, singing a mild number consisting mostly of “Take my hand.” From the first lines, however, the teens dance with abandon, while adults react with horror and rage. “This music is an outrage!” says one, and a preacher waving a floppy bible says, “You know who’s got hands? The devil! And he uses them for holding things!”

I could go on citing funny lines (well, one more: Dewey’s wife complains, “But what about *my* dreams?” and Dewey says, “I already told you, I can’t build you a candy house”)—but in the end, too many funny lines began to feel like a problem. Parody requires that the flaws of a typical music biopic be exaggerated, so the plot moves with absurd speed; good guys and bad guys are starkly distinguished, and idyllic and miserable moments follow each as swiftly as the bumps on a roller coaster track. The characters don’t have time to attain any weight of their own, and the breakneck story has no punch.

It’s only a comedy, of course, but it still could have been better. Compare “Walk Hard” with “Anchorman” (2004), another comedy produced by Judd Apatow. The idiots and egoists who populate the TV-news world of “Anchorman” are hilarious, but they also have their feet on the ground as real, consistent characters, with believable (if ridiculous) motivations. “Walk Hard” gets to feeling more like a spray of birdshot. One joke after another comes at you, not all of them successful, and around about the middle it began to sag. This comedy is less like Apatow’s usual work (off-color comedies with some surprisingly conservative themes, like “40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”) and more like such parodies as “Scary Movie,” “Epic Movie,” or even the granddaddy of this genre, “Airplane” (1980). A lot of “Walk Hard” is genuinely funny, and the music is truly impressive. But the substructure, the story and characters, are pretty thin.

I brought with me two youngish adult friends, who disagreed; they both thought it was hilarious, and one said it was the most she’d laughed since the first time she watched “Anchorman.” But, she said, next time she’d want to have the fast-forward button handy. Not only is there plenty of crude language, and a more than sufficient quantity of toilet humor (when Dewey gets his sense of smell back, he lingers joyfully over a handful of horse manure), but there is an naked orgy scene in a motel room during which a waist-down view of a man fills a corner of the screen. The filmmakers must have thought this uproarious because the same view recurs a minute later, but viewers over the age of 14 will not find it particularly clever. For some potential viewers, that bit of information will be enough to decide them not to go at all. It’s a shame that a film with so much that is genuinely entertaining, and musically impressive, will alienate viewers with a moment that isn’t even funny. “Walk Hard” could have traveled a lot further if it had avoided the low road.

[Christianity Today Movies,  Dec 7, 2007]

 
Movies are great at sweeping an audience up into intense emotions and experiences; even when a plot is flimsy, a good roller-coaster ride can be worth the price of admission. It’s not so easy to make a movie about something that isn’t happening. In “Grace is Gone,” what doesn’t happen (at least not for a very long time) is a dad breaking the news to his daughters that their mom is dead. We watch him not tell them in the living room, in the car, in restaurants, in motels, at an amusement park – he doesn’t tell them all the way from the upper Midwest to Florida. He grimaces and weeps, he calls his own answering machine to hear Grace’s recorded voice, but he can’t bring himself to get it out to the girls. The whole movie is like being stuck in bed with a cold.

Click to read more ...