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Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese puts Leonardo DiCaprio through the wringer again in Shutter Island, a gothic adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel. Leo's character, a Federal Marshal named Teddy Daniels, is first seen vomiting and jittery aboard a ferry; he and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) are being taken across the water to investigate an escape from a prison for the criminally insane, located on a forbidding rock called Shutter Island. From the first, Scorsese treats the place as though it were Skull Island in King Kong, worthy of ominous music cues and portentous camera angles. This might not be an easy assignment for the sweaty, anxious Daniels, who is haunted by his memories of German concentration camps and the loss of his wife (Michelle Williams, appearing in ghostly hallucinations). The audience will likely feel just as unnerved as Daniels, given the destabilizing nature of Robert Richardson's swooping cinematography and Thelma Schoonmaker's crazy-making editing scheme (it feels as though fractions of seconds have been removed from the timing of simple conversations, giving the movie a strung-out edginess--it's like watching Ray Liotta's cocaine meltdown sequence from GoodFellas for 138 minutes). Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow are staff psychiatrists, suspiciously eager to talk about lobotomies, and Ted Levine and Patricia Clarkson appear for small but potent turns. Scorsese appears to be "doing a genre picture" here, borrowing happily from influences such as Val Lewton and Samuel Fuller, and the film has a resultingly put-on atmosphere: a great deal of old-dark-house Sturm und Drang whipped up in service of a gimmicky little premise. The fade-out achieves some measure of real eeriness, and the whole shebang is certainly a kicky night out at the movies--if you can shake the sense that a talented filmmaker is working a couple of rungs beneath his level. 

Invictus

After South Africa elected Nelson Mandela president, the racially divided country could've easily erupted into civil war. In Clint Eastwood's determinedly populist, yet heartfelt look back at that time, the director examines one of the more ingenious steps Mandela (Morgan Freeman in a performance of sly charm) took to prevent that from happening. Knowing that his country was set to host the Rugby World Cup in 1995, Mandela believed the national team could provide an example of reconciliation in action. Led by François Pienaar (an unbelievably buff Matt Damon), the mostly white Springboks inspired devotion among Afrikaners and disgust among native Africans. Instead of changing their name or colors, Mandela encouraged them to win for the sake of their homeland. During the year leading up to the event, the team learns to work together as never before, just as Mandela's newly integrated security detail, a combination of cops and activists, finds a way to bridge their ideological differences. By the time of the big day, the poorly ranked Springboks are well equipped to hold their own against New Zealand's All Blacks (so named for their uniforms, not their racial composition). Drawing from John Carlin's Playing the Enemy, Anthony Peckham's script takes its title, Latin for "unconquerable," from a British poem Mandela held close to his heart during the 27 years he spent in prison. If Damon's accent is more convincing, Freeman serves as the film's heart--and as a timely reminder that reconciliation is never easy, but that it will always trump revenge. -

From Paris with Love

An uncomplicated, moderately entertaining action film, From Paris With Love offers an enthusiastic performance by John Travolta as a just-this-side-of-crazy agent and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors) as the low-level operative newly partnered with him. Outwardly an aide to the U.S. Ambassador in France, James Reese (Rhys Meyers) is also a low-level CIA operative, tasked with generally mundane duties. Then his inside contact offers him a high-level assignment that could lead to a promotion to full agent. All Reese has to do is drive CIA agent Charlie Wax (Travolta) around Paris on an undisclosed mission. But Wax is a shoot first, don't bother with questions kinda guy, and the straitlaced Reese quickly finds himself riding shotgun to a killing-spree through Paris' underground drug sub-culture. The drugs lead the obviously opposite duo to a hidden terrorist cell, and they race to stop the suicide bombers' plot. Wax's wise-cracking, one-on-many fight scenes are adequately entertaining--especially when he flings bad guys down a curving staircase, as Reese tries to avoid getting hit by the bodies--but the action generally leaves you wanting more. An undesirable characteristic in an action movie. Based on a story by Luc Besson, (The Fifth Element and The Transporter movies), one can't help wonder if the complexity of the story and characters could have been improved if he'd written the screenplay himself. However, the simplistic story offers a few surprises and laugh-worthy one-liners. The climactic final chase scene--Agent Wax hanging out the window of a speeding Audi, armed with heavy artillery and a driver with nerves of steel, as he attempts to stop one phase of the planned attack--is as impossible as one could hope for in this kind of movie. And hearing Travolta call his burger a “royale with cheese” is almost worth the rest of the movie.

The Road

In many ways a close adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's grim novel, The Road dutifully plods through the basics of McCarthy's nightmarish post-apocalyptic landscape: a father (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) try to survive as they trek along through the sodden, sunless remnants of some awful disaster. Scrounging for food and huddling together to stay warm, they spend most of their time trying to avoid the cannibalistic marauders who roam the highways. The film strikingly demonstrates that McCarthy's book was almost entirely dependent on his extraordinary language for its literary life; the story, such as it is, is so skeletal and spare it doesn't translate well into movie terms. The Proposition director John Hillcoat brings his grungy physicality to the material, so in the matters of the damp clothes and starved bodies and cheerless forests, the movie rings true. But the longer it trudges on, the more it seems a thoroughly conventional conclusion is at the end of this dystopian tale. The Road has one notable selling point: the performance of Viggo Mortensen. In his character's fierce determination to live--but also the gentle sighs he lets forth when confronted with, say, his first sip of whisky in years--Mortensen is completely in the moment, and all too human in the post-human world.