Slumdog Millionaire has become a word-of-mouth hit, but that can't hide its flaws. Elsewhere, James Bond shoots blanks, and a dysfunctional family come together in A Christmas Tale.
Slumdog Millionaire typifies what I’ve felt about many of the highest-regarded films of 2008 – it’s very very good, but it’s not great. That sounds like splitting hairs, I realize, but I’ll try to lay out the distinction below.
Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) Director Danny Boyle has become one of our greatest visual stylists, and I hope that description sounds both impressive and slightly overblown. It's meant to – after making perhaps the scariest film of the decade and then the best sci-fi film of the decade, he's managed to reinvigorate his brand by fitting his stylish excesses into genres where such things are appropriate. But the visual pizzazz he bestows on Slumdog Millionaire, though completely hypnotic, proves to be more problematic. Where the sheer spectacle of 28 Days Later and Sunshine was so stunning – mixed with a dark pessimism about the futility of humanity's future – here the spectacle seems to be doing battle with the story. Boyle still hasn't figured out how to do characters – at his best, he makes them pungent types – and Slumdog Millionaire suffers because its love interests, when you get right down to it, just aren't that interesting. And while Boyle turns his Indian locations into the most vibrant environment imaginable, his “So colorful! So-exotic!” routine gets a little too rambunctious from time to time. I didn't feel a lot emotionally in Slumdog and was reminded of Boyle's Trainspotting, another really propulsive movie that breaks down once you start thinking about its story problems. Impressive and slightly excessive – this isn't Boyle's best movie, just his Boyle-iest.
Quantum of Solace (Columbia/MGM) In Quantum of Solace, James Bond longs for Vesper Lynd, and all the rest of us long for Eva Green, whose beauty, brains, sophistication and wit are all missing in this new go-round. But I also miss Martin Campbell, who may not be an auteur but had the right gritty panache to make Casino Royalean excellent Bond movie. Marc Forster is a lot of things, but gritty panache is not something he's shown a lot of since Monster's Ball. Coherent action seems to be too much to ask of him, either. And I’m sad to report that the old, lame Bond-isms are back: boring corporate villains, impenetrable fortresses that are surprisingly easy to penetrate, Bond girls who are dumb dumb dumb. There's some environmental message thrown in there, too. I didn't much care. Was this why they made Casino Royale so great? So they could instantly start making so-so Bond movies all over again?
Ballast (Alluvial Film Co.) "Hey, who needs a plot when you've got mood?" asks film critic Peter Rainer, and while I'm not as down on Ballast as he is – not by a long shot – I do think he's hit upon the one striking limitation of writer-director Lance Hammer's otherwise very fine debut. A tone poem on grief and poverty, it's not unlike other great regional portraits we've had this year – Frozen River, Chop Shop. But unlike the best of this year's bunch, Shotgun Stories, the rest focus so intently on showing a community and its marginalized citizens in such a spare way that while they're evocative films, their plots are so bone-dry that there's very little room for narrative surprise. Ballast's many supporters would argue that where it's headed doesn't matter much – it's the getting there that's important. I don't disagree, but I confess that after a series of wonderful small moments, pretty soon I realized that the film was only going to be small moments, one after another. It pokes along at its own pace, but comparisons to the Dardenne brothers don't quite work because their films are taut little machines of forward momentum – they resonate so deeply because they're actually smartly plotted. Ballast is a powerful formal exercise, but it's not staying with me. Ballast is very good – I think there's room for even greater from Hammer, though.
I’ve Loved You So Long (Sony Pictures Classics) Kristin Scott Thomas gives such a fantastic performance that she (and the audience) deserve better than the terrible ending writer-director Philippe Claudel supplies to his otherwise very fine drama. Scott Thomas plays a woman let out of prison after 15 years – she murdered her young son. Much of the film's power comes from Scott Thomas and Claudel's refusal to let us know the circumstances of the crime – like her sister (a superb Elsa Zylberstein), we can only judge from what we see in front of us as we constantly wonder what could have driven such an intelligent, sensible woman to commit such a crime. Scott Thomas doesn't ask you to feel sorry for her character – if anything, she's prickly when people try to treat her like a victim – and so the movie's commitment to always move forward becomes an open question: Can people who do terrible things ever put it behind them? And will those around them? The ending upsets that balance, and, god, did it make me mad. There's nothing quite like screaming "No! No! No!" in your head as you beg a filmmaker not to make the mistake you can see him walking right into making. Frankly, the wrongheaded ending ruined my otherwise very good evening, and now I'm trying to forget that the last 10 minutes or so of this movie ever happened.
A Christmas Tale (IFC Films) Some directors just aren't your particular rhythm. You can recognize what they're doing and appreciate its merits – even enjoy them to a point – but they just can’t connect with you on a deeper level. After admiring Kings and Queen and A Christmas Tale, I guess writer-director Arnaud Desplechin is one of those directors for me. A story of a dysfunctional family reuniting for the holidays, A Christmas Tale has several clichéd elements: the matriarch dying of cancer, the irascible black-sheep son, the siblings still jostling for position well into adulthood, the Big Secret that's bound to come out and cause all sorts of emotional tumult. Yet Desplechin's style allows for a lot of life and energy amidst the clichés – he gets performances that are so exuberant that it can help you forget that the cast is playing through archetypes you've seen before. And that enthusiasm is contagious – the go-go-go spirit of his many characters keeps you entertained, and like Woody Allen circa-Hannah and Her Sisters, he understands the warmth of family, even when it's a unit laced with problems. But like with Kings and Queen, Desplechin's made another movie that's a little too cutesy for my taste. And to cite a comparison I'm sure will make his fans unhappy, A Christmas Tale reminded me of another family drama so insular that I never found its family's problems to enter the same universe as my own – The Royal Tenenbaums. Desplechin makes delightful little concoctions blown up to 150 minutes. That's too much sweetness for me in one setting.
Consumables is a biweekly overview of popular culture.
