Two new movies based on real-life accounts demonstrate that fact can be stranger (and more poignant) than fiction. Elsewhere, The Informant! extends Steven Soderbergh's recent winning streak, and Julia provides Tilda Swinton with another opportunity to display her genius.
Incredible true stories form the basis for the first three movies on this list. As for the other three films, two of them simply feel lifelike – and the other is so exceptional precisely because it pushes the boundaries of believability.
The Damned United (Sony Pictures Classics)
The sad truth about sports movies is that most of them fall into that neither/nor category – they’re neither amazing nor terrible. They set up their underdog story, introduce us to some inspirational types (usually in the form of a coach), and then send us down a predictable-but-satisfying path to a rousing ending. Which is why The Damned United is all the more remarkable.
Based on a true story, the film covers a tumultuous time in English football – “soccer,” we’d call it – during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when the top team, Leeds United, lost their successful and beloved coach and hired an ambitious outsider, Brian Clough, who had made his name turning underdog teams into winners. (Oh, and he also publicly loathed Leeds United and took every opportunity possible to criticize its players.)
From that plot setup, I hope your sports-movie-cliché engine is churning – you’re probably imagining that the movie will be about how Clough has to prove himself to his distrustful players and a ferocious fan base that expects nothing less than a championship. And while that iswhat the movie’s about, The Damned United is such a triumph because the real story turned out to be far more complicated than one would expect. Even more importantly, director Tom Hooper and screenwriter Peter Morgan don’t try to shoehorn the actual events into a nifty little narrative – this is a sports movie that’s really a dark portrait of ambition, pride and male competitiveness, one in which the actual on-field action is secondary to what the characters are thinking and feeling.
A lot of credit also has to go to the cast, especially Michael Sheen as Clough. It’s not giving anything away to say that Clough’s tenure at Leeds was rocky, but as he did as Tony Blair in The Queen, Sheen is a master at portraying strutting confidence that never lets you forget that he’s not quite sure how he’s going to be able to keep this up. I think that special skill is the secret to The Damned United – even though I knew the outcome already, Clough’s battle to keep his team together is altogether more emotional and riveting than your usual Bruckheimer sports flick. You may have read that it’s hard to follow The Damned United if you don’t follow soccer. I think that’s hogwash – all you need is an interest in the personalities and egos that drive professional sports. That and a sneaking suspicion that even our greatest head coaches can’t do it alone.
An Education (Sony Pictures Classics)
What director Lone Scherfig and screenwriter Nick Hornby have done very right here (working from Lynn Barber’s memoir) is highlight the nervous, giddy excitement that comes from a young person being given the keys to the adult world for the first time. It doesn’t matter that Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a girl and that her coming of age occurred in pre-Beatles London of the early 1960s – this breathless dreaming of the bigger world outside your front door is universal, and An Education puts the audience inside her excited perspective when she meets David (the always terrific Peter Sarsgaard), a 30-something man who has no place being with a 16-year-old girl.
Angling away from the story’s creepy factor, Scherfig never pretends that there isn’t something “off” about these two people’s burgeoning relationship – he takes her to jazz clubs and to Paris, while seemingly asking nothing in return – but even if we in the audience know that she’s headed for heartbreak, we see her situation clearly. She’s a bright young girl who’s desperate to escape her dull school life – so desperate that she allows herself to be not-so-bright about the reality of her romantic situation.
I found An Education to be charming and tart as only the British can, but there’s not a lot of originality to this true story. The scenes with Jenny’s conservative parents might as well be labeled “See, This Is What the World Was Like Before the Beatles,” and the arc of the love affair leads to a twist you anticipate for a while – and even if you can’t quite predict the outcome exactly, it’s disappointingly underwhelming nonetheless. But Sarsgaard is great as a very nice man who’s really very rotten the more you think about it. And of Mulligan’s two Sundance films from this year – the other was the dreadful The Greatest – this one is clearly superior. She plays a believable 16-year-old – she was 22 at the time of shooting – and, like everyone else, I think she’s destined for better things soon.
The Informant! (Warner Bros.)
Why, I ask myself, do Quentin Tarantino’s indulgences bother me so while Steven Soderbergh’s mostly get a pass from me? That’s a question that kept bouncing around my brain while watching The Informant!, a movie that is not without its indulgences – stare at it just right while taking in Marvin Hamlisch’s hey-hey-hey score and you’ll swear the whole film is the director’s way of laughing at the stupidity of the true story he’s documenting. But in the right hands, the appearance of jokey nonchalance can actually disguise a deeper purpose, which I was able to find in this true story of a small-town Illinois executive who became a whistle-blower … sorta.
Part The Insider, part Ocean’s Eleven, part The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Informant! is mostly just an odd duck that would have been a hell of a lot more commercially successful if Soderbergh had decided to make State of Play II and called it a day. But Soderbergh doesn’t do anything the easy way – he likes his audience to know that he’s always thinking. This means making a film that’s an ungainly mixture of farce and character drama. It shouldn’t work, but I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it.
At this point, Matt Damon seems entirely incapable of delivering a dull performance – as with his turns in the Bourne series and The Talented Mr. Ripley, he makes his whistle-blower character both likeable and a touch unsettling. There is something not quite right about this man, we tell ourselves, although we’re not quite sure what. That mystery powers the film, and Damon and Soderbergh keep us guessing about the man and his intentions long after we’re convinced that there can’t be any more surprises. But the true-life story never lets up – trust me, you don’t want to know anything going in. Between this film and The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh has had himself a great year, and by the end of The Informant! I had an answer to my question about the Tarantino-Soderbergh divide. Tarantino’s indulgences seem to limit his films’ impact, shrinking them into his little worldview. Soderbergh’s do the opposite – they keep you engaged and thinking. And even if he could let up a little on showing off his smarts, I’ll allow Soderbergh his braininess if he promises to keep making movies as nervy and loopy as this.
Beeswax (Cinema Guild)
Writer-director Andrew Bujalski has only one subject – that delicate sliver of time before young post-grads have to decide what the hell they’re going to do with their lives. This is a period that most adults have very little patience for – “we had to grow up,” they think, “so don’t get all moony about it. Just shut up and get on with it.”
As that time period fades from my own memory, I can understand the complaint, and now that Bujalski is in his 30s he’ll surely find other things to juice his creativity. But for now, he’s an honest chronicler, and if Beeswax doesn’t feel as significant as his last film, Mutual Appreciation, it’s that movie’s equal in terms of lovingly gnomic characters and very real anxieties.
Beeswax focuses on twin sisters – played by real-life twin sisters (newcomers Tilly and Maggie Hatcher) – living in Austin and trying to figure out their careers and love lives. Where Whit Stillman a generation ago turned his overeducated young people into witty mouthpieces for an upper-crust society that tried to seal itself off from its emotions, Bujalski embraces the “uhs” and “ums” of guys and gals who read alt-weeklies and are just smart enough to be painfully, nakedly self-conscious of the fact that their lives may very well never be as good as they are now, which are hardly that great to begin with.
Both actresses are quite good, by which I mean charming and natural and very relaxed. And as one of the sisters’ occasional boyfriend, Alex Karpovsky plays a gangly nerd who may end up becoming a lawyer or maybe not. Everybody in this movie might become one thing or another. We don’t know, and they don’t know – frankly, I don’t think Bujalski knows either. He probably doesn’t even care – he knows that people have to grow up, and he’s not someone who insists on clinging to immaturity. But he sees the poignancy of that sliver of time, and he does his best to honor it.
Still Walking (IFC Films)
Never one to turn down an intimate family drama where little outwardly happens but so much occurs within the characters, I figured Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking would be a slam-dunk for me. But unlike his magnificent Nobody Knows, which feels like a tightly orchestrated suspense thriller in comparison to his latest film, I found myself struggling with Still Walking a bit.
Kore-Eda brings together a clan – two parents, two adult children and their kids – for a tense family gathering that’s haunted by the one member who’s not there, the oldest son who died over a decade ago. Precisely observed and unfailingly modest and graceful, the 24 hours or so chronicled by Kore-Eda are pregnant with all the resentment, sadness and love that aren’t being expressed by the characters. With a film like this, the understated tone is meant to evoke whole worlds of deeper meanings, and without question this tiny heartbreaker builds in emotional power as it confidently glides to its ending. But some of the symbolic rhyming of Kore-Eda’s characters feels forced – the oldest son has married a recent widow, carrying the film’s exploration of mourning into a realm where it starts to feel a little heavy-handed – which is more problematic when you’re making a movie this delicate. But those complaints can’t completely derail such a sad, beautiful little film – it only shows what a miracle something like Yi Yi truly is.
Julia (Magnolia Home Entertainment)
Is there a better actress at the moment then Tilda Swinton? In the eight years since her astounding turn as the world’s most amazing mother in The Deep End, she hasn’t given a bad performance and has in fact delivered several great ones, leading to her richly deserved Oscar for her turn in Michael Clayton.
Her latest, Julia, got overlooked when it was released earlier this year, and it’s understandable why – writer-director Erick Zonka’s epic character study-cum-heist film is one of those cinematic experiences built around the notion that mundane story logic isn’t more important than a heightened poetic truth. But if you’re feeling adventurous, seek it out on DVD – Swinton’s masterful performance as the flailing, desperate L.A. alcoholic Julia will more than reward your time. But more significantly, Julia is a riveting study of humanity’s worst instincts colliding head-on with basic decency. It’s like a Dardenne brothers film with a lot more drinking and nudity – and with a crime-caper-gone-bad plot written by the Coen brothers.
Julia gets involved with a fellow alcoholic who wants to get back the son she lost to her rich father-in-law. Thus begins a kidnapping plan, and I’m not saying one more word about it because I don’t want to ruin anything and, honestly, some of it’s going to read weird in print. Hey, it’s weird on screen as well, but Zonka’s film quickly establishes itself as a metaphysical thriller, one that never loses its tension but one that is more concerned with Julia’s transformation than with good guys and bad guys. Gloria is probably the most obvious touchstone for what Julia is after, but I couldn’t help but think of David Mamet’s twist-heavy films, which are always better once you accept the fact that they’re not meant to be entirely realistic constructions.
As for Swinton, she plays a boozy, double-talking slut, and that usually creates an opportunity for actors to overact. There’s very little of that here – Julia’s ragged, no-account worthlessness feels organic rather than dreamed up through a bunch of self-conscious tics. Sometimes we accept a film’s limitations because of a compelling actor or character. Julia succeeds gloriously because it has one of each.
Consumables is a regular overview of popular culture.
