Look! Look! - Movies

Clever writing and lovable characters in City Island

Mary Vuk Sussman: City Island is a suspenseful and fun movie. I can understand why it has become a “word-of-mouth” hit. It made me laugh, shriek, and kick my feet. Directed by Raymond De Felitta, the movie takes more than a few unexpected twists and turns.

Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia), a tough-talking prison guard, is the patriarch of an Italian family and a third-generation City Islander. City Island, formerly a fishing village, is a residential community offshore from New York’s Bronx, with a small-town feel and great views of the Manhattan skyline. Both towns are showcased nicely.

Vince’s decision to try to fulfill a long-denied desire to be an actor and secretly take acting classes in Manhattan gets the story off and running. The action careens hilariously out of control, and even flirts with tragedy at times. All of the characters have secret lives which eventually get out of the closet and into play. Garcia turns in a very good performance as Vince. Julianna Margulies, who plays Vince’s wife, Joyce, and Emily Mortimer as Molly Charlesworth, Vince’s classmate and confidante, are vibrant and convincing in their roles. Alan Arkin is perfect as Vince’s crusty old drama teacher.

Larry Sussman: You want to hug this movie because it is filled with nutty, yet believable characters who I found myself talking about two days after I saw the movie. You care about them and don’t want to nitpick about their wacko quirks. You believe that prison guard Vince, a hard-ass on the job, would hide a cowardly past secret from his wife. You watch the family yell at one another during dinner over minor problems knowing that the shouting is used to hide far more destructive skeletons.

You are so wrapped up in the characters and laughing so hard at their faults that you willingly suspend disbelief. That’s good writing. It takes a clever author to write a movie based on a guard meeting a new prisoner and realizing that this is the son he fathered and abandoned some 25 years earlier. Vince also sees in his bastard son, Tony (Steven Strait), acting abilities that Vince realizes he has as well.

MVS: I liked hard-boiled Vince’s soft side. I liked tough, bitchy Joyce better when she became vulnerable and showed how much she cared. All the characters got turned inside out so you saw their hurts and insecurities. There was danger in all of that, especially when they all “came clean” in the same scene, which was scary and funny at the same time. The movie is all about outward appearances falling away or in some cases being put on for purposes of acting.

LS: My favorite character was Molly, Vince’s confidante in acting school, who sees possibilities and depth in Vince that his wife could not possibly imagine. What an ego boost for a man in his forties meeting a beautiful younger woman who tells him about his potential and is not conning him. She inspires him to act and create memorable characters. The notion that a guard could use his experience to become an actor is great movie escapism.

MVS: Molly was a wonderful character, a good foil for Vince’s insecurities even though she proved to be more complex and enigmatic at the end than we first realized. But I think that she is a con artist even though she gives Vince a good steer. We never really get to understand her whole story. Vince was my favorite character. I felt for him as he faced up to two sarcastic teenage children with plenty of adolescent troubles and a bored and suspicious wife, and his own doubts and insecurities about himself. There was nobility in Vince when he took Tony home with him from the prison, even though Vince doesn’t have the guts to reveal to Tony his true paternity. There was courage in Vince when he decided to take the acting classes, and cowardice when he said instead he was playing poker. His foibles made me laugh a lot, but I really felt for him.

LS: Vinnie, the son (Ezra Miller), also gives men who lust after zaftig women a funny role model. De Felitta has his characters smoking, which in most modern movies would tell the audience that these are bad guys. Here, it’s just another example of people’s faults.

This movie, finally, is about second chances. We always will need prison guards; we can do without actors. Vince wasn’t around for Tony for the first 25 years of Tony’s life. But Vince still has something to offer the son he never knew. That’s a stay-at-home lesson that should give second thoughts to many hit-and-run fathers today.

MVS: I don’t know that this movie actually provides that lesson, but I did think it was funny and very lively.

Mary and Larry Sussman are married. The couple will deliver future film review dialogues.

No sympathy for Greenberg

Larry Sussman: The movie Greenberg explores the agony of returning to the path not taken, but failing to resurrect your life. Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is a 40-year-old carpenter from New York City who goes back to Los Angeles after a nervous breakdown and tries to right his past mistakes. I believe that Greenberg falls flat, and so does the movie.

Mary Vuk Sussman: I agree that Greenberg has failed to grow up. He doesn’t really progress or even regress as a character. He does seem to learn a few things, but it’s hard to believe that he is a changed man at the movie’s end. I don’t think the movie is a total failure. But like a lot of satire, it sort of leaves you cold. from afar. It’s a good movie for cynics.

LS: Noah Baumbach, the movie’s director and main writer, seems to think that audiences will empathize with Greenberg when he tries to re-examine important life decisions with his former band mate, Ivan Schrank (Rhys Ifans), and his old girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Yet both have moved on with their lives and do not give a hoot about Greenberg’s longings. Many close-ups of an anguished Greenberg do not make the audience care for this basically boy-like, selfish character. His moral reawakening comes too late.

MVS: I agree, he is somewhat thickheaded, and he is a slow learner, like so many of us. You start to wonder if he has a brain, especially when the lost, lovely, and kind Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig) falls for him, and he doesn’t have the good sense to love her. But yes, Greenberg’s attempts to reconnect with his rich high school friends are dismal failures. Yet there was something interesting when Ivan spoke about reconciling himself to the life he never planned, but Baumbach never really unpacked or explored it. I never understood why Roger left the California good life to live in New York. I was never clear on why Roger settled in Bushwick, a very poor section of Brooklyn, and chose to make a living as a carpenter. Why did he have a breakdown and what landed him in a mental hospital? Why would he want to go back to Hollywood to house- and dog-sit for his wealthy brother, Phillip? The movie starts to make some sense when Florence, a paid personal assistant to Phillip, enters the scene. She is a floundering college graduate who is as lost as Greenberg. There are some nice moments when their lives entwine over Mahler, a large brown German Shepherd Dog. But I had more sympathy for Florence (and Mahler) than for Greenberg.

LS: I also cared somewhat more for Florence, an aspiring singer, who is a sexy bed hopper. I felt far more for Mahler, when he becomes ill. Greenberg, on the other hand, is less lovable, and an unsympathetic hero is a fatal flaw. The movie also tries to explore deeper sentiments with characters mouthing forgettable lines, such as “Hurt people hurt people,” and “Life is wasted on people.” Regrettably, the Los Angeles/Hollywood setting, including an all-night drug party, didn’t resonate with me. I kept on thinking, “When is this movie, which is an hour and forty-seven minutes long, going to end?”

MVS: I agree that Greenberg doesn’t do much to warm the heart. I did like the “Life is wasted on people” line and have repeated it a couple of times since. The line was a throwaway, good for a laugh, but Baumbach never really ran with it. For me, the movie worked as satire. I laughed at the characters’ ineptness and emptiness as they muddled their way through it all. Greenberg doesn’t do much to make us feel better about the human race or even ourselves. It goes to extremes and exposes the troubles of selfish, immature, and alienated people and throws in a culture of wealth and privilege as a backdrop. Though the movie is set in or near the Hollywood epicenter of film culture, it is about every person who buys into this culture even from afar. It’s a good movie for cynics.

LS: If I want to feel cynical, I’ll watch when U.S. senators criticize the president’s upcoming U.S. Supreme Court nomination. I go to movies to escape, to root for made-up heroes.

MVS: Movies get controversial when they start to imitate life too closely.

LS: But sometimes they just get stupid.

Mary and Larry Sussman are married. The couple will deliver future film review dialogues.

Film: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer

Mary and Larry Sussman are married. The couple plans to deliver future His/Hers film reviews, though the format may change.

Her Take: A knot of terrible truths

By Mary Vuk Sussman

Intrigue and terror whip through The Ghost Writer like a howling nor’easter that threatens to swallow up the nameless ghostwriter played convincingly by Ewan McGregor. The Ghost’s curiosity, innocence, and desire to make a buck make him a believable character.

The Ghost signs on to finish the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) after his predecessor ghostwriter dies mysteriously on the job. The Ghost quickly trades the inner sanctum of the London publishing world for the rarefied air inside Lang’s island retreat on the U.S. eastern seaboard. Inside the stark modern beach house, we see picture-perfect views of the seacoast that blur the distinction between art and life.

The Ghost is immediately thrust into the former prime minister’s fishbowl world in which Lang is being accused of war crimes for his role in handing over terrorists to the CIA for torture. The Ghost unties a knot of terrible truths while panting in fear.

Kim Cattrall turns in a commanding performance as the former prime minister’s wily and beautiful personal assistant and mistress, Amelia. Olivia Williams is by turns pathetic and sinister as Lang’s cunning wife, Ruth. The haunting music by Alexandre Desplat is as relentless as the political storm engulfing the characters. The movie is based on a 2007 book by Robert Harris, formerly a British political editor. Roman Polanski directed the film and completed part of it while under house arrest in Switzerland.

His Take: Engrossing political thriller

By Larry Sussman

The Ghost Writer is a movie for people fascinated by political intrigue who desire to learn more about a country’s foreign misadventures and to see political leaders, who normally can hide their blemishes, exposed. Many political reality movies have been filmed, but to the credit of director Roman Polanski, this film’s contemporary storyline and seemingly respectable villains keep the audience engrossed.

The viewer becomes an investigative reporter following GPS directions, doing Google searches, and uncovering “oh-my-gosh” political revelations. The rhythmic music is enveloping and scary. The movie also has several laugh-out-loud funny scenes, such as when the ghostwriter, overwhelmed with the messy manuscript assignment, says, “The words are all there. They’re just not in the correct order.”

The story initially involves a tight publishing deadline to complete an autobiography of an embattled ex-English prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). Lang offers to pay $250,000 to an English ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) to finish the rewrite in four weeks. The original ghostwriter died of an apparent suicide. But when the rewrite starts, the International Court of Justice begins a criminal investigation of the Lang administration’s earlier counterterrorism actions. The new ghostwriter also finds evidence suggesting that Lang was more loyal to the CIA than to Britain.

The movie reminds the viewer of the current British scrutiny involving former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to ally Great Britain with the United States in the second Iraqi war.

Mesmerized by Avatar

I admit to having been a holdout. I didn’t want to see Avatar because I am neither a science fiction/science fantasy buff nor a dedicated follower of the latest in film technology. But I saw it anyway, not so long ago, in a nearly deserted theater on Super Bowl Sunday (dare I admit to that, too?), donning my 3D specs with a bit of Missourian show-me defiance. And, yes, I was mesmerized and mystified and had little difficulty buying into this fabulously sensual and beautiful film directed by James Cameron.

Former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair. Sully regains use of his legs, and then some, when he agrees to participate in a bizarre experiment in which his DNA is mixed with alien Na’vi DNA and steps into his hybrid avatar body. The avatar body is controlled remotely by Jake’s human self but the avatar looks like a Na’vi, the indigenous species of Pandora, a distant moon. The hybrid can survive in the rare Pandoran atmosphere that is toxic to humans. When the human “controller” “sleeps” in what looks like a tanning bed, his avatar is active in Pandora.

Pandora is home to a rare mineral, unobtanium, coveted by the humans, who are prepared to destroy the Na’vi, kill the fauna, and defoliate the flora of Pandora to realize their avaricious ends. It is strict scorched-Pandora policy. Greedy humans are rubbing their hands together while waiting in the wings to claim the spoils. Paraplegic Sully is supposed to be a pawn in their game. He is a gung-ho ex-Marine who will be brave and loyal and serve as a good infiltrator in his avatar body, helping the fanatical corporate/militarist/nihilists realize their nefarious goals.

The animation is stupendous and seamless. The landscape is eye-poppingly dramatic and the viewer goes flying on a breathtaking and exhilarating visual adventure.

Pandora is a lush land of forests and floating mountains, filled with Na’vi and the most amazing wild animals ever seen. We learn to love the Na’vi and their Edenic forest primeval as Sully adopts their ways while under the tutelage of Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), a beautiful Na’vi woman tasked with making a proper Na’vi man out of avatar Jake, who acts like an oafish and ignorant human at the outset.

The cultural and sentimental education of Jake eventually gives way to an epic battle between the forces of good and evil, which tug and pull on Jake’s human/avatar selves, forcing him to make ethical choices.

The blue Na’vi beguile with beauty, sincerity, and sensitivity. They also exude a wholesome sensuality and have Herculean strength. The over-civilized and over-armed earthlings have hearts of stone and seem to have more bombs than brains.

The movie explores a number of high-minded themes, sometimes without much nuance. Such criticism, however, does not count for much because once you enter the world of this extravagantly imaginative film you are engulfed by its tsunamic power and a willing suspension of disbelief overrides such objections.

It is not surprising that a few vocabulary words acquired during the recent Iraq war enter the script. The war is on our minds and director Cameron’s as well. No surprise either that Avatar has been nominated for nine Oscars. It’s just one of those movies that will be praised, remembered, and re-viewed often. The Oscars ceremony is March 7.