GONE GIRL

Gone Girl
Grade: A

Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, Patrick Fugit, Tyler Perry and Missi Pyle

Premise; A down-on-his-luck author’s wife suddenly disappears from a house showing signs of a violent struggle. As details of the couple’s fractured marriage come to light, many are quick to jump to the conclusion that the man is a killer. But all is not what it seems.

Rated R for language (including some sexual references), violence, blood and other disturbing images, sexuality and some graphic nudity

Rarely has a movie been so repulsive and so magnetic at once. Gone Girl, the new thriller from Director David Fincher (auteur of other gut-punches like The Social Network, Se7en, Panic Room, and the English-language Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is a hideous, terrifying, ugly, perverse, twisted film about how false facades, faded hopes and fierce pride can tear people apart. Based on a bestselling novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the screenplay), Gone Girl is an absolute jaw-dropper, a shocking yet amazing film that is almost as sensational as the sensationalism it depicts running rampant through a region gripped by an apparent small-town crime. I knew it had already impressed at the box office, sparked talks of potential Oscar nominations, and become a must-see-to-believe moviegoing venture in the vein of The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects and The Crying Game, but I wasn’t quite expecting that.

It will take some time to stop tasting the bile this movie caused me to generate. That said, I can’t deny that, in some ways, the bile tastes pretty sweet.

Plot

It’s not really worth talking about the plot, because the ride is crazy-brilliant, but the basics are simple enough. At a little hamlet in Missouri, a bored, depressed former author, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), comes home from a mid-morning journey downtown to find his front door open, his living room coffee table shattered, signs of blood in his kitchen, and his gorgeous big-city wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), missing. Of course, the police are soon involved, and detectives Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) and Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) each quickly suspect that the calm-bordering-on-indifferent Nick is hiding something, quite possibly the murder of a woman it’s soon clear he barely actually knew. He didn’t know she kept a journal. He didn’t know if she had any friends in town. He didn’t know she knew about his affair with a barely-legal former writing student of his (Emily Ratajkowski). Because Amy was the inspiration for a best-selling children’s books series—Amazing Amy, penned by her forbidding, hoity-toity parents—the case of her disappearance quickly becomes a national phenomenon, with notable television personalities (Missi Pyle, Sela Ward) and know-it-all neighbors (Casey Wilson) eager to give their two cents as to why Nick is obviously guilty, why he should be given the death penalty, never mind prison. While many want to believe the case is open and shut, a desperate Nick, his unfailingly loyal twin sister (Carrie Coon) and acquired big-city lawyer Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) slowly begin to find clues indicating Amy might not be dead. In fact, she might not even be under duress. But her found journal contains nothing but paranoia, accusations, dread, and fear. It also says “This man (my husband) may murder me.”

What Works?

For those who admire editing, pacing, and direction, Gone Girl is something close to Christmas morning. David Fincher allows the film to build slowly, with an opening narration of a man wondering what it would be liked to split his wife’s skull—plus curiously-restrained performances in the early going—making it clear something is afoot. Just what isn’t revealed until later, when the film has gathered the dramatic momentum of a train racing downhill. Gone Girl features twists, turns, and sad truths so effective you sometimes want to leave the theater, but I dare anyone to walk out without knowing the full story. And this full story will leave you agape. Unlike most movies in which the cut to a sustained black screen lets people slowly realize the movie is, indeed, over, Gone Girl’s credits begin immediately, the scrolling words hitting the clenched audience like a slap in the face. It’s then that you realize this movie—a white knuckle exercise for nearly all of its 2.5 hours—is going to haunt you almost beyond words with its dicey resolution.

The cast is great, with characters effectively etched without the actors ever being too flashy. Recently celebrated for his directorial efforts like The Town and Argo, Ben Affleck essentially plays himself, but darker—a tall, charming, handsome American man, but one whose tense tendencies suggest a constant internal storm of bitterness and regret. Nick seems suspicious, but, despite his obvious flaws, you can’t help but be drawn to his side. That’s mainly because his romantic foil (a phrase that is a hopelessly flimsy attempt to describe the part), the gorgeous but frosty, impassive Rosamund Pike, looms over the picture as an increasingly-nightmarish figure. Her scenes in flashback suggest a woman who went into her union with Nick with her eyes open, but needed everything to be perfect for her to be satisfied. When it’s not perfect, she starts to fall apart, and it shows. Pike (whose resume includes a Bond girl and a Jane Austen heroine) is dynamite in the role, a likely slam-dunk for a Best Actress Oscar nomination. The two are ably supported by the likes of Coon as Nick’s tortured twin sister, who sees absolutely all her brother’s warts and stands by him anyway, Dickens as the blunt detective, and Perry as the cocky celebrity lawyer.

 
It’s hard to gush more about Gone Girl without allowing spoilers. As I’ve already said a couple times, what makes the movie so impressive is that it’s so enthralling despite the repulsiveness of some of its material. The movie’s most interested in revealing the thoughts that nestle into the corners of the mind, even between spouses in a marriage—it shows all fifty shades of the “do you really know them” question, including a few shades no one would ever want to admit to (needless to say, almost any couple that goes to this movie will feel a little rattled, and perhaps in need of a heart-to-heart chat or six). From the acting, to the editing, to the film’s two most memorable images (a murder most foul the audience can see coming from miles away but can do nothing but sit helplessly by and watch, and a screaming fit shown from beyond a glass window, so only the visual agony can make an impression), Girl is mesmerizing.

What Doesn’t Work?

Gone Girl is long and feels long, but this hardly matters, as you’re anxious for the movie to keep going until it comes to the conclusion you want to see. Whether it ever gets there, though, is the question. Needless to say, its themes are pitch black, so it’s not a movie that will leave you feeling cheerful. But looked at as the movie that it is, it’s hard to quibble with.

Content

Language. Sexuality. Some nudity. Blood. A bloody murder. Domestic squabbles. Gone Girl is full to the brim, plus it’s so dark overall it’s not an easy movie to recommend.

Bottom Line

I feel like I can’t write a very complete review of Gone Girl because A) This is not a movie for which anyone should want to issue or be issued spoilers, and B) the movie itself isn’t very complete; its open-endedness is part of what makes it so haunting. It’s well-acted, well-directed, very well-written, and it will spook the crap out of you, especially if you’re on a date. Even if you're not, consider this a spectacle you have to see to believe. Remember Se7en? The Usual Suspects? The Sixth Sense? The Crying Game? Movies you just HAD to see because of their sheer audacity? Here’s another.

Gone Girl (2014)

Directed by David Fincher
Written for the Screen by Gillian Flynn; Based on her Novel
Rated R
Length: 149 minutes

FURY

Fury
Grade: B

Starring: Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Jon Bernthal, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Pena and Jason Isaacs, with Alicia von Rittberg and Anamaria Marinca as the German women

Premise: A young army clerk with no combat training is mistakenly placed under the command of a hardened tank commander in the last weeks of World War II.

Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, language, disturbing images, and some innuendos

Intense. Macho. Electric. These were the main adjectives that kept running through my head as I watched Brad Pitt’s new World War II epic, Fury. But for one notable scene of exception, Fury is a hard-faced, dead-eyed, red-blooded war movie with the battlefield frankness of Saving Private Ryan or Enemy at the Gates. The main characters are all men, who are throughout the movie almost as dirty on the outsides as they are on the insides, haunted and twisted by the things they’ve seen and done. They talk with grim frankness about their lives, their hopes, and even their expectations of mortality. The battles in which they fight are terrifying, dark, unpredictable, muddled storms of shouts and screams and flashes and explosive projectiles. They’ve all seen things happen to the human body that no one should ever be able to imagine.

With three major battle scenes—one of which, involving a grounded dogfight of sorts between four tanks, feels completely original and all the more terrifying for it—Fury delivers the “goods” for the war film genre. But its more fundamental aspects suffer. Surprisingly for writer/director David Ayer, who’s written a string of notably-terrific screenplays including End of Watch, Training Day, SWAT, U-571 and The Fast and the Furious, Fury is undeniably weak when it’s not on the battlefield. Its major characters are all mostly clichéd types and are sometimes hard to tell apart. Their dialogue rings of predictability and blandness. Their fates are too easy to see coming.

And then there was that one major, rather pointless scene…

Plot

By April 1945, Allied Forces had penetrated Nazi Germany’s borders and begun encountering the dregs of the German army—including whole divisions made up of children threatened and coerced into defense by a desperate Nazi regime. Encountering resistance at every turn, the Allies spearheaded their assaults with armored divisions, rolling tanks over enemy barriers, trenches, and armies. Heading the crew of one such lumbering war machine is Sergeant Don Collier (Brad Pitt, solid), called “Wardaddy” by his peers and subordinates. A no-nonsense, tough-but-relatable SOB, Wardaddy is largely revered by his tank crew, which includes a Mexican the guys call “Gordo” (Michael Pena, sadly-underused), a religious southerner called “Bible” (Shia LaBeouf, barely recognizable) and a greaseball hillbilly called “Coon Ass” (Jon Bernthal, Shane from TV’s The Walking Dead). Seasoned veterans all, the crew of the tank called “Fury” (the name is painted in white capital letters along the barrel of the main cannon) barely has time to mourn the loss of one member when they’re given a less-than-worthy replacement, a clean-cut clerk/typist named Norman (Logan Lerman, very impressive) who has only been in the Army for eight weeks. Norman’s main skill has been typing; he’s barely even seen a gun, let alone fired one on enemy troops, and he’s never seen the inside of a tank.

Looked on with scorn and malicious humor by the tank crew, Norman is miserable within days, at one point begging for Wardaddy to kill him rather then make him abuse a captured Nazi prisoner to prove his toughness. But when a Nazi artillery raid kills some seemingly-innocent civilians in an attempt to kill a meager handful of soldiers, Norman discovers the inner anger and bile to actually pull the trigger with enemy soldiers in his sights. One of the forward machine gunners on the tank, Norman soon impresses the crew with his work in battle. But individual skill may not matter much when the crew of the Fury soon finds themselves alone behind enemy lines, facing armies of enemy soldiers that even the fearsome Wardaddy isn’t sure they can defeat.

What Works?

As I mentioned, Fury’s at its best on the battlefield, particularly in a late-act encounter in which the movie’s claim that German tanks were better than American tanks seems proven true. This scene, in which three American tanks charge a bigger, more powerful German tank across a field and try to evade its deadly shells, is electrifying in its breathless, brutal intensity. Its astounding cocktail of booming cannons, barked orders, yells of pain and the shocking sight of almighty tanks being reduced, in an instant, to a shattered metal box full of fire, raises the hairs on the back of the neck. All of Fury’s battle scenes are logistically straight-forward, so the geography and placement of the major players is always easy to understand, and the scenes are uncompromising in their brutality (the suddenness with which a man’s head is blasted off at one point made me jump in my seat).

Though war movies tend to be more about the orchestrated mayhem, there are almost always a few consistent characters audiences can attach their interests to. Based as it is mostly inside a tank with a set crew at close quarters, Fury helpfully gives us five people who are in nearly every scene. Though Pitt gives a rock-solid performance whose haunted edge is impressive given the actor’s swagger in his other notable WWII film (2009’s Inglorious Basterds), the real star is the fresh-faced Lerman. Given the plumb role of a newbie who must grow to deal with the horrors he experiences, Lerman, for the second time this year (after March’s Noah), gives an exceptional performance of real weight, convincing in an entire spectrum of intense emotions including sudden fits of rage and anguish. Sometimes physically forced to do terrible things, Lerman gives the idea of “lost innocence” in war a face. Given his two standout portrayals this year, Lerman looks one to watch.   

What Doesn’t Work?

Sadly, other than Wardaddy and Norman, the remainder of the Fury’s crew are walking stereotypes, who are only mildly engaging even when you can actually understand what they’re saying (due to wartime mayhem and gunfire, large chunks of the dialogue are unintelligible). Other than one intense monologue he’s barely visible onscreen while delivering, Michael Pena (so good in Ayer’s End of Watch) is wasted, a sad fate for such a talented actor. LaBeouf is even worse off. And while Bernthal gets to tear into the overripe role of a mean wartime dude (a type typically seen more vividly in Vietnam War films), the character is written as so loathsome, it’s sometimes hard to watch. Plus, a subsequent scene of attempted amends feels fake. It also doesn’t feel like a coincidence or a surprise that, when the going gets tough, his meanie is the first to die.

One of the main talking points in discussions of Fury is almost certainly going to be The Scene With The Two German Ladies, a narrative-stopping head-scratcher that occurs about 45 minutes in. After helping liberate a town of hidden Nazi forces, Wardaddy notices a pair of comely women peeking through the windows of their apartment. Dragging the still wet-behind-the-ears Norman along, Wardaddy goes inside, realizes one of the women is a young, curvy, fresh-faced blonde, he prompts Norman to take her into the bedroom while he has the older provide him a bucket of water in which he can shave and wash his face. While some suspense lingers as the women nervously eye the soldiers’ guns and hear distant explosions resound outside, some time is given to showing Norman managing to charm the blonde—named Emma—by drawing circles on her hands. Then they start kissing. It’s unclear how far they go before the rest of the crew comes by, at which the men mercilessly taunt Norman for “showing some” and then they all sit down and eat a sort-of brunch. This is where the ickiness of Bernthal’s character is shown in his unending insults of Norman and his calloused mistreatment of the comely blonde.

It’s not really that hard to understand why this scene is here. A) It gets a few women into the movie, which could potentially make the movie a bigger sell to people not in its target audience. B) Between Norman’s shape-drawing and Pena’s monologue, Bernthal’s nastiness and Pitt’s Wardaddy showing some grudging, gruff hints of chivalry, the scene was obviously seen as an opportunity to flesh out the major characters. C) It’s almost certainly meant to drive home the horror of war, how it rocks the world of helpless, harmless civilians. While it registers effectively enough on the latter two fronts, this scene borders on egregiously-funny as it runs nearly 30 minutes, becoming one of the most random and near-pointless show-stopper movie scenes since Michael Fassbender and Diane Kruger’s talky bar scene in Inglorious Basterds. But it feels undeniably forced—obviously, putting a few cutesy women near the fighting makes war seem that much worse, and with all these dirty grunts sitting in a pristine kitchen with some well-dressed hostesses, it feels and looks like some ill-tempered Jane Austen knockoff. Even if this scene manages to plumb some emotional depth, it still feels all wrong in its length and its placement—Fury, which clocks in at 134 minutes, would have been much better off as a sheer action film.

I have a few other quibbles as well—mostly on minor details: the fates of several of the tank’s crew members strain credulity, with false-feeling notes including a man surviving four bullets to the chest from a sniper long enough to ruminate briefly on the nature of men in war, and another being spared by a surprisingly-accommodating SS officer.

Content

Full of mud, blood, guts, and F-words, Fury is pretty uncompromising. It stacks up a huge body count for a movie focusing on the exploits of five men, and it shows both the full-scale battles and the details of gory aftermath. And, of course, the back-and-forth dialogue is not of the Sunday School variety. Welcome to war films, folks.

Bottom Line

At its best, Fury is one of the most captivating action films I’ve seen in the theater in some time. It’s fierce, brutal, and epic, and it contains a pair of fine performances, by Brad Pitt and rising-star Logan Lerman. But between some cookie-cutter characters, some corny details and one completely needless scene of domestic-hospitality-amidst-the-chaos, Fury has its sputters. But it still surpassed my expectations—you’ll be hard-pressed to stand on numb legs when this whopper is over.

Fury (2014)

Written and Directed by David Ayer

Rated R

Length: 134 minutes

THE JUDGE

The Judge

Grade: B

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall, Jeremy Strong, Vincent D’Onofrio, Vera Farmiga, Dax Shepard, Billy Bob Thornton and Leighton Meester

Premise: A cynical Chicago defense attorney returns to his rural Indiana hometown and becomes an important figure when his elderly father is put on trial for murder.

Rated R for language, intense emotional content, sexual content, and some unsettling images

“Oscarbait” is a term movie people like to throw around this time of year. Its meaning is simple. Since the Academy Award/ “Oscar” nominations are announced early each year, the last few months of any given year usually play host to movies vying for nominations from Hollywood’s most prestigious award show. They’re released in the last few months before voting for the awards’ nominees begins in order to remain fresh in the minds of voters. Whether or not the movies were actually made with the intent of getting such recognition remains something of a mystery, but their content and the timing of their release are not. These movies—whether they boast potentially noteworthy plot, acting, writing, directing, aesthetic values, or some combination therein—are, by being released during the time in which voters are looking for quality, quite simply fishing for Oscar nominations. Hence, they’re Oscarbait.

The Judge is pure Oscarbait. Again, I can’t prove it was made just to try to win major recognition, but it certainly seems like the releasing studios are almost hoping for some notice. It was fairly-obvious from the movie’s trailer, which put the world on notice that it had four actors filling major roles whose names come attached the words “Academy Award Nominee” or “Academy Award Winner”. And then there’s the movie itself, which boasts enough material for at least half-a-dozen Oscar-nominated films. It doesn’t help that a lot of this material has been covered (many times, and sometimes recently) by better movies. The Judge isn’t a bad movie; it deserves some praise, and has the ability to touch many people. But it’s a little too long, too overstuffed, and trying to feel important to be a truly authentic, powerful motion picture.

I can’t help it. To further illustrate this point, I will put numbers throughout my plot synopsis below to indicate elements in The Judge that are indicative of the kinds of elements that get movies award notice, or the kinds of movies that have actually gotten award notice.

Plot

It’s said that slick, motor-mouthed Chicago defense attorney Hank Palmer (Robert Downey Jr.) doesn’t have a conscience (1). His record of ducking trial with his cases indicates as much. He’s got money and a name people in the business know, but he also has a crumbling marriage (2), which is likely to endanger the amount of time he gets to spend with his adorable daughter Lauren (Emma Tremblay)(3). When his mother unexpectedly passes (4) he leaves the big city to return to the provincial Indiana town in which he grew up (5). Back home, he’s reunited with his big brother (Vincent D’Onofrio), a former rising-star athlete who was permanently crippled by a car accident, which lost him a promising future (6). He’s also reunited with his little brother (Jeremy Strong), who’s something of an obsessive technology whiz (7) despite suffering from a mental handicap (8). The brothers have often wondered why Hank ran off for the big city and rarely visits (9), but their curiosity is kid stuff compared to the decades-old grudge nursed by Hank’s father Joseph (Robert Duvall), from whom Hank has long been estranged (10). Having served as the town judge for 42 years, Joseph is a well-respected, even beloved, figure in the small town (11).

But Joseph—who’s hiding Stage 4 cancer from the world (12)—is threatened with losing all good favor with the townsfolk (13), when he comes home one night from a drive on a stormy night with a man’s blood on his car (14). The man, a convicted felon with a violent past, died after being struck by the car while riding his bike. Joseph—called “Judge” by his sons and most of the townspeople—can’t remember exactly what happened (15), whether that’s due to possible dementia, mental lapses caused by his secret chemotherapy treatment, or his potentially having fallen off the wagon from his decades-old sobriety (16). When the town D.A. (Dax Shepard), a kind but nervous young man with a law degree from a no-name school realizes he can’t quite cut it (17) when the old man’s case goes to court, there’s only one man for the job. Though Joseph is loathe to use him, enter Hank as his new DA (18).

Thus, while battling plying questions about his failing marriage, hosting his daughter for a brief hometown stay (19), and contending with his father’s failing health and hair-raising insults, Hank tries to prepare his defense for a case that, to some, seems open and shut (20). “Some” includes steely-eyed prosecutor Dwight Dickham (Billy Bob Thornton), who swears he’s going to ruin Joseph’s reputation and have him locked away for murder (21). Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, Hank is reunited with his high school sweetheart, now a diner matron (Vera Farmiga)(22), and experiences alarming discoveries about the parentage of that former flame’s cutie-pie grown daughter (Leighton Meester)(23).

What Doesn’t Work?

Well, other than being just a bit cliché….

Ah, I hate being hard on a sincere, well-intentioned movie like The Judge, but with so many melodramatic, seen-it-before plot elements, it often feels like either a polished movie from the Hallmark Channel or a Nicholas Sparks adaptation (come to think of it, those two types aren’t really all that different). While the estranged father/son dynamic, the small town homecoming and the murder trial are all clearly broadcast in the trailer, the smaller elements—the mentally-handicapped sibling, the late-act cancer diagnosis, and the potential rekindled romance—are all a "surprise", and are all unavoidably indicative of Sparks’ soapy, “important” style. Also, what with attempting to touch on all these elements, The Judge feels way too long and drawn out, up to and including the most not-the-real-ending scenes I can remember in one movie since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

My shortest diagnosis: The Judge is a polished Hallmark Channel movie.

What Works?

There’s no denying this movie’s pedigree where its actors are concerned. In fact, perhaps the only elements that lift this movie out of the same league as Sparks adaptations/Hallmark fare are the leading performances by Robert Downey Jr., and Robert Duvall. As the lead who’s in nearly every scene, Downey Jr. doesn’t tread much new ground (his early scenes are easily-reminiscent of his Tony Stark from the Iron Man films), but later scenes show him add an edge of steel to his wise-cracking motor-mouth. One of the most watchable actors in the business, Downey Jr., has some surprises up his sleeve this time. He has to be at the top of his game, too, to go head-to-head with Robert Duvall. As everyone knows, Duvall brings gravity to all his late-career curmudgeons, naturally infusing them with humanity, emotion, and, when required, twinkly warmth, but what stands out is that, at 83, he can still blow a gasket like nobody’s business. Whether in boiling-over spouts of bitterness and old hurts released in his kitchen or a few of the most riled courtroom confrontations since A Few Good Men, Duvall brings a staggering force to his character’s eruptions, convincingly portraying an old man who backs down from no one, least of all the middle son who disappointed him.

The two primaries are so fine that, at times, The Judge manages the swagger of a truly Great movie. It happens when Downey Jr. and Duvall are at each other throats (at one point, they almost literally are).

Despite a large cast, none of the other principles have anything approaching that same dimension, which is a shame when you have the likes of Vera Farmiga and Billy Bob Thornton (both previously nominated for Academy Awards for their acting) on hand. Both are solid, albeit in cookie cutter roles, her as the old flame with the heart of gold any man would love to come home to at the end of the day—let alone after 25 years—and him as the supremely-confident prosecutor who smells blood. You wish they each had more screen time.

Content

Cut the movie’s 15-20 F-words, and The Judge would be a fine PG-13 film. There are a few innuendos and a pair of heated make-out scenes, but the scenes most likely to affect audiences depict an aging character who’s starting to lose control of his bodily functions, whether that’s his memory, his temper, or, in arguably the film’s most wrenching scene, his bowels. Overall, there’s not much material here that will offend, and, given the wealth of domestic storylines, many audience members will be touched and able to relate.

Bottom Line

My shortest diagnosis: The Judge is a polished Hallmark movie. While a whole raft of clichés and half-baked subplots puts one in mind of Nicholas Sparks' well-meaning but corny dribble, the movie is overall solid, mostly by virtue of terrific leading performances from Robert Downey Jr., and Robert Duvall. I wouldn’t expect to see this movie on many end-of-the-year awards lists (it’s a little too cliché for that) but it’s a decent R-rated alternative to some of the darker flicks in theaters right now.

The Judge (2014)

Directed by David Dobkin
Written by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque
Rated R
Length: 141 minutes