Crime, History, War: Violence Leaves Its Mark
American Sniper (2014) 2.5/4
Incurious and hyper-macho, stilted and scandalously blinkered, American Sniper is a solidly-staged and unexceptional picture, crammed with action, heart-pounding moments, and familiar dramatic situations. It’s a gripping, straightforward character study that could have been so much more.
In the wake of 9/11, Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper, The Place Beyond the Pines, Silver Linings Playbook) hones his pinpoint accuracy into a life-saving, battlefield-shredding weapon that turns him into a legend. Despite a marriage to Taya Renae (Sienna Miller, Foxcatcher) and the birth of a daughter, Kyle returns to Iraq for four tours of duty and becomes increasingly distant from his family. Unable to adjust fully to civilian life, he begins coaching wounded veterans, stepping toward a tragic demise.
A lesser actor might have made American Sniper into an unthinking piece of jingoism. Cooper, beefed up and twanging like a true Texas cowboy, rarely flinches and never chest-thumps, carrying the full weight of Kyle’s so-called achievements. Stewing, taciturn, and totally precise, he’s poured a lifetime of craft into stilling his character’s heartbeat. American Sniper is a companion piece to The Hurt Locker in subject and theme, but not in quality. As Kathryn Bigelow’s war triumph found revelatory depths in Jeremy Renner, so American Sniper hinges on Cooper’s restrained yet expressive lead performance. Though it fails at being a great film, it’s no fault of its star.
Tauntingly tough-minded and expertly choreographed in unfussy style, American Sniper is a crackerjack piece of efficient filmmaking, crisply delivered and rarely dull. It’s one propulsive, life-and-death sequence after another, in which sandstorms make the fog of war quite literal. It’s a potent declaration that director Clint Eastwood (Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima), at 84, can pull off politically apolitical pragmatism, and is not ready to be classified as an old master. Eastwood wisely trains the camera on Cooper’s face and keeps it there.
Still, if Cooper does his utmost to make a one-dimensional character interesting, American Sniper gives the impression of having not so much been directed as dictated: it stares so fixedly down the rifle sight that it is guilty of tunnel vision. The focus on Kyle is so tight that no other character comes through as a person, and the scope is so narrow that larger questions of policy are left entirely off the table. Far from fashioning a critique of US involvement in Iraq, Eastwood seems distracted past the need to show the ramifications of so much killing.
Furthermore, Eastwood adapts Kyle’s memoir by hammering it flat. Despite a delicate handling of Kyle’s internal struggles on home soil, deeper complexity lies just out of frame. Eastwood honours his subject without getting under his skin. Thus, we watch a drama about an idealized soldier, a patriot beyond reproach, which bolsters Kyle’s legend while gutting the man himself. The message is disappointingly diluted, the moral context hampered by a surprisingly blundered view of the world around its central character. Blunt and effective, it’s the story of a lone gunslinger facing down his nemesis in a dusty, lawless place.
Films with “American” in the title have an astonishingly successful record at the Oscars: American Beauty swept in 2000, American Graffiti and American Hustle were Picture/Director nominees, and even American History X, American Splendor, and American Gangster landed major hardware. American Sniper is another bald lunge to score more Academy gold. As its American cousins can attest, and lest we forget Shakespeare’s warning: uneasy is the head that wears a crown.
A Most Violent Year (2014) 3/4
Agreeably hellish, pleasingly pulpy, and antiseptically tight, A Most Violent Year is a treacherous, exacting anti-thriller with a rich sense of time and place; a nocturnal fantasy that confounds the mobster mold; and a sterling essay in inner strength. Beautifully, almost stubbornly understated and overflowing with a heightened sense of reality, it drifts breezily and never feels rushed.
In New York City, 1981, Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis), an ambitious immigrant, is the hard-working owner of Standard Oil, an up-and-coming heating oil company. When his trucks are repeatedly hijacked by competitors and Assistant District Attorney Lawrence (David Oyelowo, Middle of Nowhere) investigates Standard for price fixing and tax evasion, his wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain, Take Shelter, The Tree of Life, Zero Dark Thirty), urges Abel to fight fire with fire. Refusing to stoop to violence, Abel struggles to protect his business and family during the most dangerous year in the city’s history.
Expertly controlled, tightly coiled, morally nuanced, and marvelously constructed, A Most Violent Year wastes little in time living up to its name, though it’s a small-scale film with deceivingly big stakes: the violence of the title is more implied than seen. It’s so well made, multilayered, and focused as an endurance test that we refuse to turn away from the events unfolding before our eyes. Seductive and ablaze with threat, three days of snowballing misfortune culminate in an inevitable ethical confrontation of epic proportions.
A Most Violent Year provides ample room for its central pair to flex their professional dominance. Bled of their self-assurance, drop by drop, Isaac and Chastain are dynamite together; their scenes crackle and radiate genuine heat. Isaac is an implosive powerhouse in a world where nothing is held sacred. His subdued, charismatic performance evokes Al Pacino as the young Michael Corleone. Chastain is unsurprisingly splendid: her Armani-clad mafia princess is a Reagan-era Lady Macbeth.
A lot of movies spin their wheels fast and careen out of control. Writer-director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, All Is Lost) has no such inclination. A Most Violent Year’s minimalist approach will take many viewers aback, as their expectations are thwarted by Chandor’s almost perverse pleasure in stopping shy of the boiling point. A Most Violent Year is all about the simmer. Chandor also has a golden touch with actors that’s beginning to rival Clint Eastwood. Chandor sets a tempo that allows Isaac to play his character with restraint while giving Chastain the time she needs to manipulate behind the throne.
Capturing the jaundiced look of the Scorsese-Coppola crime era, Bradford Young’s cinematography is staggering, transforming bleak wastelands and mansions into visions of light, as if we’re seeing everything like Abel does, America as beauty incarnate. It’s all muted grey tones and darkness-drenched interiors, camel-coloured tans and browns as though made on location in 1981. It’s not a flashy film, just a very good one. The abrupt bloodshed and flowing black fuel is straight out of There Will Be Blood.
A Most Violent Year is not a revolutionary or thematically dense motion picture, and a stronger pulse under the lapels would make us care much more. Yet Chandor follows the psychologically penetrating tradition of Alan Pakula and Francis Ford Coppola, observing crime as a microcosm of society. He’s got an eye on the vacant throne of Sidney Lumet, and he’s steadily stalking out a career in that direction.
The most interesting film of Chandor’s career thus far, another notch on the belts of Isaac and Chastain, and perhaps the best film of 2014 not to receive a single Oscar nomination. If A Most Violent Year fails, it fails with class and dignity, and its head held high. It makes you nostalgic for a time when the world was worse, and the films were better.
Selma (2014) 3/4
Measured, earnest, and levelheaded, Selma is an overdue tribute to a revered icon; a stately, sober depiction of the 1960s American civil rights movement; and a solid, if unspectacular, look at the grunt-work of activism. It’s vital correspondence with an impassioned and reverberating message.
Chronicling the tumultuous three-month period in 1965 and the epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama (including the well-known “Bloody Sunday” attack), Selma tells the real story of how leader, visionary, and 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo, Middle of Nowhere, The Butler, Interstellar). He led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights from President Lyndon B Johnson (Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton, Belle, The Grand Budapest Hotel) in the face of violent opposition.
With impressive texture and firepower, Oyelowo inhabits King like Daniel Day-Lewis inhabited Lincoln. Oyelowo brings humanity, grace, and torment to a historical figure who once seemed to loom too large a legend to make flesh on screen. Taking full advantage of his close physical resemblance to King, Oyelowo seems to penetrate into King’s soul and camp out there for two hours. Whether electrifying his congregation at the podium or calmly addressing his wife (Carmen Ejogo) with a sense of fatigue, Oyelowo is dynamite. In his hands, King is the man we knew, and never knew. Oyelowo is reason alone to see Selma; another reason is the superb Ejogo.
Writer-director Ava DuVernay (I Will Follow) shapes Selma with poise and integrity. In collaboration with Oyelowo, she gives us a human-scale King, whose indomitable public face belies currents of weariness and self-doubt, and honours his legacy by dramatizing the racist brutality that spurred him to action in order to right wrongs and overcome indignities. DuVernay cut her directorial teeth on small, intimate moments – like raindrops forming a thunderstorm – and these opportunities resonate most in Selma as well: a quiet funereal exchange at a coroner’s office between King and a compatriot includes the beautiful line of dialogue “God was the first to cry for your boy.”
Lived-in, resolute, and undeniably urgent, Selma is a moving and well-meaning film that never quite manages the greatness one expects, given its soaring subject material. Gravitas abounds, and yet it sometimes comes off as stolid. While DuVernay sidesteps the pitfalls of adulatory biopics, screenwriter Paul Webb’s script is dramatically uneven in its encapsulation of bygone events. The dynamic between MLK and LBJ is disappointingly off-kilter, and some of the casting is a bit of an overreach (the British Wilkinson and Tim Roth as Governor George Wallace seem out of place).
As psychologically acute as it is politically astute, Selma is most nimble when illuminating scenes rather than trying to explicate them. Yet racial strife is a subject that cries out for a more volatile treatment. The Alabama marching sequences and resulting violence, filmed where they actually happened, are too understated – almost journalistic – and the finale is so restrained that it’s jarring, rendering the actual four-day march something of an afterthought.
If there’s a temptation to canonize Selma and brush aside its less successful elements, that’s not surprising given its handsome presentation, its topical importance, and the heroic nature of the story, not to mention the ridiculous amount of time it’s taken for this story to reach the screen. It has all the hallmarks of a trophy winner, for better and worse. In the end, it’s probably drawn more praise and criticism than it warrants. Regardless, Selma is elaborately staged and phenomenally stirring, a spine-chilling reminder that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.
Vivid and timely, Selma demands to be seen, despite its flaws. To see it is to appreciate anew the burden of greatness. Needless to say, Dr. King’s message has never been more relevant. As cinema, then, Selma is mostly commendable; as cultural barometer, it’s beyond reproach.
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