The Way Back is exactly what one might expect it to be… except Colin Firth is awesome-he’s often good but rarely awesome, and out of the various actors here, he does the most notable work. Ed Harris is good, but not as good as he could be, plus (SPOILER) his character seems doomed to die before the story is through, and then it just never gets there, i.e. he doesn’t die, so the throughline isn’t complete. Though his throughline is complete, Jim Sturgess’ also lacks a real conclusion… like the recent version of True Grit, the ending jumps abruptly ahead so that the actor we’ve been attached to doesn’t get to be in his own denouement, and that doesn’t sit well here—it didn’t sit well with me in True Grit, and it sits even less well here, and that marching through history montage that leads up to it, well, that was visually a bit lame and storywise a bit pointless. I think the whole sequence would have been better served as a simple onscreen text letting us know what happened with his character. Now, it is worth mentioning that there is a very un-Hollywood thing going on in the middle of this movie (again, SPOILER) in the ending for Saoirse Ronan’s storyline. While the text at the beginning of the film pretty much guarantees she isn’t making it to India, the fact that she dies as she does was a nice touch that just wouldn’t sit well in an audience-tested, producer-noted Hollywood film. The other actors, mostly unknowns (at least here—I haven’t checked if they’re all, like, seriously famous international actors), do good work, but the film, as I have already said, plays out just as expected as far as where it’s going. If you know anything going in, it’s that these men make it over the Himalayas, so while there’s some question as to which of them succeed, the central plot has only one place to go.
The Company Men is a good ending for a trilogy that includes Capitalism: A Love Story and Inside Job. It’s a nice fictional piece for those who need to vent about the economy and how lives are ruined by jobs lost… and like some rather silly complaints on its IMDB board, yes, it is about some relatively rich guys and we are expected to feel for them when they lose their jobs. Affleck’s character is not actually that rich but just keeping up appearances with a salary that, while it is certainly higher than average, does allow him to have a nice house and Porsche (for which he’s still making payments)… really, the notion that we can’t feel sorry, even for Chris Cooper’s character, who though he also isn’t necessarily “rich” clearly makes even better money than Affleck’s, or at least has invested his money better, being many more years into his career, or even for Tommy Lee Jones’ character, who actually qualifies as rich and is at least partly responsible for the layoffs that start the film. But, the thing is, this film actually takes the time to comment, more than once, on the fact that executives make far more money than their work should be worth compared to what the workers under them make. This movie is not suggesting these men should be rich. If anything, the movie comes out very much against executives making huge salaries, companies getting so huge that workers are just names on lists, easily gotten rid of when mergers come along and there are redundant positions. All that being said, this movie is not as good as it should be, given the actors involved. And, given certain similarities to The Illusionist (that almost got me doing a blog just comparing the two), it is worth mentioning that this film doesn’t necessarily take the time to really dwell on a lot of the issues involved. The Illusionist is more of a meditative piece about three men who can’t find work doing what they used to do, one of these men being suicidal… (and here there be spoilers) while The Company Men is more of a simple American drama that just happens to be about three men who lose their jobs and one of which ends up being suicidal. Sure, there is some dialogue about executive pay and very explicit conversation about how the layoffs are wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily invite one to really think about the issues involved. That’s why I say it would make a good companion piece to Moore’s Capitalism and Inside Job, a nice rage-at-the-economy sandwich, and then you could watch the Illusionist to decompress and depress (or get depressed, but that wasn’t as poetic).
Dogtooth is a strange film… and when I call a film strange, that is saying something. The setup is simple: a brother and two sisters (designated as older and younger, no names) are kept from knowing anything of the outside world by their parents, so much so that they don’t know that cats are not the most dangerous animals around, able to kill easily a grown man. So much so that when they learn words like telephone (offscreen, sometime before the start of the film) or pussy, their parents make up meanings for them that have nothing to do with reality; a telephone is a salt shaker and a pussy is a big light. Also, zombies are small yellow flowers, sea is a chair, etc. These children are not allowed to be normal, and come across often as very young children while played by adults and clearly meant to be teenagers. They are rewarded for winning various challenges with stickers, and are with viewings of old family videos or listening to American music that father claims is their grandfather and which he deliberately mistranslates into Greek for them. The film contains sex, numerously implicit and a few times explicit, and a few sudden bits of violence (one of which sent a guy, almost running, out of the theater… I guess he has a problem with tooth injuries). The film is clearly intended to be some sort of commentary on how parents (or even government) can seriously mess up our lives, and there may be some very specifically Greek angle to this that I don’t get, but mostly it seems universal enough. But, ultimately, absent an in-story explanation for why the parents have taken their protectiveness to such extremes, absent a conclusive ending (the last shot, like Inception’s famous top, cuts to black before we know just how it’s going to go), it’s hard to be sure just what the filmmakers wanted to say about the subject. The movie is not for everyone… hell, it’s not for much of anyone, though apparently the Greeks loved it, and the Academy has nominated it for Best Foreign Language Film (it won’t win, and really, I’m not sure what the Academy members who nominated it were necessarily thinking in picking this over some of the other qualified films). Of course, having seen it once, knowing what it’s getting at (and being the guy who did a whole blog justifying A Serbian Film), I kinda want to see it again, to see if it stands up better on repeat viewing…
Of course, I’m of a mind that a film should work the first time. But these days, we often know so much about a film or the people involved in making it before we see it that it’s hard to really judge too objectively.
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