Looper (2012): A Matter of Time

Perhaps I was looking forward to this one a bit too much. Looper is, of course, the much anticipated time-travel film from Wunderkind writer-director Rian Johnson [Brick (2005)] starring the rising star Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and established star Bruce Willis, along with the lovely, ever-amazing Emily Blunt. Its time travel hook is more or less a meld of 12 Monkeys (1995) and The Terminator (1984), updated and with a lovely twist at the end. I like this sort of film, I’m a big fan of all three of its stars, and I found Looper engrossing and entertaining. When the lights came up, though, I was a little disappointed. Like I said, my expectations may have been set too high.

The setup [not a spoiler, as we learn most of this in the first five minutes, as a preamble to what comes next]: It’s 2044, time travel has not yet been invented, but it will be by 2074 - when it is immediately banned, and thereafter used primarily by organized crime syndicates as a means to dispose of rivals, ingrates, and whoever else they want to knock off. The victim is bound, hooded, and sent back to 2044, whereupon he’s immediately killed by specialized assassins, called loopers. For the 2074 mob it’s quite efficient, no muss – no fuss. The loopers are paid very well for this service, as well they should be, because eventually they will be called upon to pull the trigger on their older selves, a ritual referred to as “closing the loop,” at which point they are retired and allowed to live out their remaining thirty years of life. Failing to close the loop when the opportunity presents itself is a serious, fatal infraction.

Gordon-Leavitt is a looper named Joe– a young amoral guy, living for the present: sex, drugs, partying … and money. Inevitably, he faces his closing-the-loop moment – and blows it. Joe the elder is Willis, of course, older and wiser, and maybe a little tougher. Knowing what he knows (and I won’t spoil this part), Joe Sr has an agenda to carry out in the past (i.e. in 2044), which has to do with solving a mystery and altering events in order to change the future – his future. Joe Jr is, understandingly, more concerned with his present – he’s in serious (mortal) trouble unless he gets his man, which is to say his older self. This may sound confusing but is well and convincingly laid out in the film.

So … interesting situation. Child is father to the man, and vice versa, with one’s life on the line. Johnson’s script riffs on the paradoxes inherent in the situation humorously at times and dramatically at others. The several scenes with Gordon-Leavitt and Willis facing off with one another are just terrific in this way, especially one at a roadside diner. Both actors are in top form here. (Gordon-Leavitt is fitted with a prosthetic nose bridge and other makeup magic to make him look more plausibly like a younger Willis, and while one may question whether all that was warranted, it definitely works.)

Jeff Daniels has a nice turn as the boss of the loopers, a guy shipped back in time to do this job, who seems to wish he could go back (but can’t), who’s frankly more than a little frustrated dealing with the young, often clueless, and sometimes unreliable crew of dimwad loopers at his disposal, and who rules his menagerie blending paternal advice and the threat of extreme violence.  He gets off one of the funniest lines in the movie and casually steals every scene he’s in.

Blunt plays a young woman living on a sugar cane farm, trying the best she can to raise her somewhat unusual son, and steer clear of trouble. She is lonely and vulnerable, but plays tough. Of course trouble is going to find her anyway. Blunt is always excellent. I never thought of her as a mother before, but she was fully credible in the role of someone whose first priority is to help and protect her child any way she can. The child, played by a little guy named Pierce Gagnon, is pretty amazing, and another scene-stealer. How and why the story winds up at their farm is complicated, and to explain would spoil some of the fun, so you’ll just have to see it to get it.

There’s action, multiple hunters and hunteds, some razzle-dazzle, the obligatory Willis shoot-em-up , human moments, terrible inhuman moments (thankfully brief), and time travel conundrums. There’s even a surprise ending that’s as satisfying as it is unexpected – even though I told you about it. All in all, it’s a solid, worthwhile, entertaining flick.

So why was I disappointed? It may be because I had seen its predecessor, 12 Monkeys, just a couple weeks earlier. And while Looper is quite good, Monkeys was better. Or maybe it was just first. If you’re not inclined to drop the big bucks on a movie theater experience right now, check out my review of 12 Monkeys, and rent that this weekend. Looper will be on DVD in a few months, too.

Looper is in theaters now, in wide release.

12 Monkeys (1995): Odd Title, Terrific Movie

I’m really looking forward to the new movie, Looper, written and directed by Rian Johnson – whose first film, Brick (2005) was quite a tour de force: a film noir style high school crime thriller. Looper is about time travel, involving a future world where crime syndicates send guys thirty years into the past to be wiped out by paid hit-men called, yep, “loopers.” In it, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt plays a looper who discovers that his target, sent back from the future is his older self, played by Bruce Willis. Nice little loop right there. And, Gordon-Leavitt, then an unknown, was the star of Brick, so another reversion.

Looper was inspired by La Jettée (1962), the classic short film by Chris Marker. So I recently watched that on YouTube.  La Jettée is about a man whom scientists in a future post-apocalyptic world send into the past, where he finds the love of his dreams (literally) and witnesses his own death. It’s an odd yet haunting picture, consisting of a series of evocative black and white photos, a haunting soundtrack and occasional narration - somewhere between a poem and a short story. Although primitive by design (and a shoestring budget), La Jettée’s themes of life and death, dreams and reality, self and society transcend sci-fi and still resonate a half-century later. (Cinema, too, is a bit of a time machine!)

La Jettée also inspired and was the template for the film under review: 12 Monkeys, which, like Looper, also stars Bruce Willis.  The “present” in La Jettée was a dystopic future in the aftermath of a nuclear third world war, but the writers David and Janet Peoples updated that premise, setting 12 Monkeys in a dystopic future after a lab-engineered virus has wiped out ninety-eight percent of the human population.   In both films, the decimated future population lives underground. The time travelling guy in Jettée was a slave hoping to earn his freedom; Willis’ character, James Cole, is a criminal who has been selected to “volunteer”, but offered the same incentive. The action in both pictures largely takes place in the pre-holocaust period, although there is way more action in 12 Monkeys. Indeed, while the earlier film is interesting, Monkeys is thrilling.

The forty-year-old Bruce Willis, as Cole, is gritty, vulnerable, tough, dark, canny, self-doubting, and – as always – intriguing to watch.  Given his celebrity it is amazing just how fully he inhabits his character, to the point where you pretty much forget it’s Bruce. This is one of his best pictures, among many good ones.

Directed by Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, The Fisher King, Brazil, etc) and shot by his cinematographer/collaborator RogerPratt (Brazil, Mona Lisa, The End of The Affair, Harry Potter), Monkeys resembles Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1992) in texture and appearance, if not in plot or message. There’s a low-tech feel, even to the future tech stuff.  Much of the story takes place in our world circa 1996, albeit a run down, and pretty grim version thereof. Institutions are oppressive. Bad news is everywhere. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is stark. It feels like the world is out of kilter, going mad.

Where 1996 differs from Cole’s future world is that in this pre-pandemic world, people live above ground, experiencing sun, grass, fresh air, freedom of movement (for those not incarcerated), and a belief in possibilities.  Cole loves this, of course, and wishes he could stay here; it’s so much better than what’s to come. But paradoxically, our open society also allows people to get caught up in dangerous causes, such as the radical animal rights group, the Army of the 12 Monkeys, headed up by nut-job Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt, in a compelling, manic, award winning performance). The future world has reason to believe that this “army” released the toxins that set off the killer epidemic. Cole’s mission is to find them.

Cole, however, is a hunted man. He’s been beaten and shot. He’s believed to be deranged and dangerous. Recently arrived from the future, disoriented by his time travel, he winds up in an insane asylum at one point.  He’s also a haunted man – troubled by memories (or perhaps dreams?) of other times and of people he cannot place. Cole, alone, in a strange time and place, constantly misunderstood, starts to question his own sanity. What is real, what’s imagined, what’s memory? What is meaningful, what is not? Do the past and the future intersect; do they even exist; and can either one be changed? Is his mission impossible?

Cole’s psychiatrist, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), finds him oddly familiar. He feels the same way, and then recalls that she resembles someone in his recurrent dreams.  Eventually, … well, that would be too much of a spoiler.

The film also features Christopher Plummer and David Morse, among others in an excellent cast.

All in all, a very worthwhile movie, not too heavy on the sci-fi, emphasizing instead the human drama and the puzzles posed by an interesting plot. It definitely offers some food for thought and, I expect, a worthwhile aperitif in advance of, or perhaps a digestif following, Looper.

Available on DVD/BluRay from Netflix or streaming from Amazon Instant Video

10/14/2012

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen (2011): One That Got Away

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a romantic fantasy with some attractive A-list stars. But even the beauty and talents of Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt, and Kristin Scott Thomas can’t save this muddled film.  

Simon Beaufoy, the screenwriter, has done some pretty good stuff in the past, including The Full Monty (1997), Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day (2008) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), but this story is not only silly, but as misbegotten as the ludicrous idea that an extraordinarily rich, British educated Yemeni Sheikh (Amr Waked) could create an environment conducive to spawning salmon in the deserts of the Arabian peninsula, and that otherwise sensible, intelligent people would go along with it.  To be fair, pretty much every character in the movie declares that the salmon breeding/fishing idea is farfetched, but this is done in order to create a sort of childlike fantasy mood that anything can happen if, like Wendy in Peter Pan, you just believe. The trouble is, this is not a kids’ movie.

Setting this tale in the modern Middle East in general and Yemen in particular is problematical. The story derives from a comic novel of the same name, which was published in 2007, before the political unrest of the last couple of years (although there has been periodic unrest in Yemen for the last twenty years). On the other hand, the producers of the motion picture must have been aware of the recent Yemeni civil war, al Qaeda activity, etc.; and I actually found insulting the filmmakers’ assumption that I wouldn’t know or that I’d just suspend my disbelief no matter how dumb the premise.

Beaufoy’s script tries to anticipate this sort of criticism, much as he anticipated the absurdity of the whole fishing idea by having characters acknowledge that fact. So there’s a little bump in the plot about cartoonish Arabs trying to assassinate the prince, but such references to the fraught political situation are so clumsy and slight as to undermine rather than gird the reality depicted. By way of apology, he also has a character explain,  "We need a good story about the Middle East that doesn't have explosions." 

I guess it’s just supposed to be a “feel good” picture about a modern land of Arabian nights and dreams that might come true.  But for me, the net impression was pretty much the contrary - like eating too much candy: it’s nice at first to taste all the sugar, but then you tire of that and are left with sticky lips and fingers, an annoyed stomach, and a feeling of regret that you engaged in the activity at all. This feeling is abetted by a rather tepid, clunky, almost nineteenth century romance between McGregor, as a button down, somewhat nerdy character, and  Blunt, as a young professional woman, who does not appear to have any actual profession. Adding to the cotton candy, fairy tale quality of the story is the character of the Sheikh – a handsome, charming, “visionary” benevolent dictator who only wants what’s best for his people.  

On the plus side (!), the cinematography is lovely, and the actors do the best they can with the material at hand. Also, Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt are quite nice to look at.  [Despite this clunker, Emily remains well ensconced on the girlfriend list.] Director Lasse Halstrom [Cider House Rules (1999), Chocolat (2000)] keeps the predictable plot moving along.

Still, there are better fluff movies around, and superior ways to spend your time.

Available on DVD and Blueray from Netflix, or for streaming at Amazon Instant Video.