on chesil beach

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton's Atonement was the most recent big screen adaptation of Ian McEwan's work. Sweeping and charged, the movie was a visually and aurally rich picture with an thwarted love story at its center. With On Chesil Beach, McEwan adapts his own slim novella to great effect. The movie, directed with grace by debut filmmaker Dominic Cooke, is much stranger and winningly more complicated than Atonement--intimate and quirky, wrapped in deceiving beauty. Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan, both outstanding in tricky, intricate roles, play newly wedded couple, Edward and Florence, in 1962 England on their honeymoon. The expectations of marriage has created a new heavy weight upon their shoulders: they are loving but awkward with one another in their cramped hotel room.

Smoothly, the movie is built upon flashbacks, all of which hold troves of McEwan's specificity, as we see the genesis of their relationship and what has led them here to this moment. McEwan treats this love story with care--his narrative and his detail and dialogue are refreshing and sort of weird. Sean Bobbitt helps meld these twisting tales together with his gorgeous cinematography. A climatic scene situated on the pebbled Dorset seashore landscape of the titular setting against a stark gray-blue sky, is elegantly framed and almost nihilistic in its spareness--Florence's cerulean dress and Edward's black suit, contrast beautifully as they clash upon the shore.

Even when the film swerves into gooey sentimental territory, I was still with the picture, so entranced by the visuals and the superb performances. Howle expresses anguish and nimble comedy with seeming ease and control. His face under his dirty blond fringe never quite looks the same and we watch him transform through the various stages of Edward's life with acuity. On the heels of her indelible turn in Lady Bird, Ronan plays a young woman who is repressed, and of upper-class upbringing, quietly rebellious and compassionate. There's a strive for perfection in her, including her terse direction of her string quartet, but also a freewheeling sense of adventure (wading through woods to visit Edward). Far more interesting than the couple in Atonement or many other films I can think of, I enjoyed how these two were never really pigeonholed. The supporting cast is strong too, especially by pros Emily Watson and Anne-Marie Duff, as two very different mothers unable to emotionally connect with Flo and Edward for very different reasons. The slew of classical music and Edward's proclivity for Chuck Berry-infused rock are balanced throughout nicely even if some of those classical chestnuts were a little too precious. I was also impressed with the cinematic handling of the main underlying problem in the relationship--it's a delicate thing and rarely expressed in films, with Ronan's monologues giving fervent voice to it. ***1/2


-Jeffery Berg

lady bird

Greta Gerwig's feature Lady Bird is a triumph for her as a filmmaker and writer. It's a coming-of-age tale of the final high school year of a young woman, the self-named titular character (Saoirse Ronan), from "the wrong side of the tracks" in Sacramento and her relationships with friends, family, and a few boys. Lady Bird often finds herself in tiffs with her mother (a poignant Laurie Metcalf) that are short-lived but also run with an emotional undercurrent that feels perhaps forever unresolved.

A skilled and charming actor, screenwriter and film aficionado, Gerwig also shows tremendous talent behind the camera. Reportedly broke at the time when she was on the red carpets for her major movie debut in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg, it's beyond heartening to see her rise and receive deserved acclaim as a director. Gerwig hails from Sacramento and her emotional attachment to her hometown permeates the film. In a way, it feels like a movie that was decades in the making, a story bursting to be told. The piece is visually arresting, shot with affection by Sam Levy, and edited in a distinctive rhythm by Nick Houy (who recently won the Emmy for his work on "The Night Of"). In fact, many of the movie's laughs derive from Houy's sly and sharp work. The movie is a tight ship, coasting through the seasons and ardent events of a single year with both an inherent complexity and a seeming ease. It's also a movie that's acutely conscious of its time period, the rarely examined early aughts, particularly within the breakout of the American invasion of Iraq. The unnerving news reports and financial worries (money and class division is a big aspect of this picture), along with the stuttering Timbaland beat of the very appropriately used Justin Timberlake lament "Cry Me A River," thrums along in the background of a twilight time before cell phones were ubiquitous and blocky home computers still ran on dial-up.

Gerwig's keen eye must have played a part too in the wondrous assembly of the cast, with many who have deep roots in theater. Laurie Metcalf is an acclaimed stage actress and a character actor in films. As the by-turns giddy and glum Aunt Jackie, she played a big part in the comic mastery of  TV's "Roseanne." It's exciting to see her with this sizable role which displays her subtlety (that head shrug when Lady Bird asks "what if this is the best version of me?") and dynamite physicality (the way she drives her car, which becomes ultimately symbolic, is miraculous stuff). As Lady Bird's best friend Julie, Beanie Feldstein, who appears in Broadway's Hello Dolly!, is hilarious, emotionally engaging, and totally winning. As the father, Tracy Letts, a well-regarded playwright and actor who I usually find too ferociously "actorly," tones himself down and emerges as a tender and understated presence. It's his best film performance. Also great in smaller roles are Lucas Hedges, Odeya Rush, Lois Smith and the magnetic Stephen Henderson playing the school's depressed theater director ironically steering a production of "Merrily We Roll Along." There's something a tad unsatisfying about the storyline of Lady Bird's brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues) and his girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott), but that's not at fault of Gerwig's writing or the strong performers as it is perhaps a point of view issue: Lady Bird cooly distances herself from them. That could be said too of Lady Bird's fumbling relationship with the purposefully detached, blankly emo Kyle (Timothee Chalamet). Ronan has been around for years and is usually exceptional, with an expressive countenance. Here, I didn't even think of her as acting, she just sails through the film as this character.

It's hard to distill all the melancholy and joy I felt watching Lady Bird in a clinical film review. When a film is really cooking, it's working on multiple levels, sometimes in ways that are at odds with each other--"scary and warm," as one of the characters describes Lady Bird's mother. I don't think I've seen the quick breaks between lashing out and affection between mother and daughter done so well since James L. Brooks' Terms of Endearment. There's a smart, bittersweet sensibility these two films share, including the psychic pain brought forth by a loving yet continuously disappointed mother and the emotional ache of separation. Like Terms too, the movie is very funny, laugh out loud funny--something I don't find often, as comedies are quite broadly bland these days--and also deeply sad and moving. I cried through most of the movie, that uncommon laughter through tears experience, it hit a nerve that so few films do and the quietly devastating turn by Metcalf floored me. ****


-Jeffery Berg

lady bird

I'm all here for Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig's directorial debut starring Saoirse Ronan and the amazing Laurie Metcalf (!).

catching up with some films of 2011

Trust - Consider me surprised that David Schwimmer has directed such a deft drama.  The plot is a bit Lifetime-melodrama: 14-young girl Annie (well-acted by Liana Liberato) becomes victim of a sexual predator from the net.  Family breaks down and father (Clive Owen) becomes more and more manically obsessed with revenge while mother (the always naturally good Catherine Keener) tries her best to connect with her distraught daughter.  The best aspects of the film--including Liberato's portrayal, the ambivalent nature of Annie's hookup, the bland, matter-of-fact presentation of her predator--are deeply unnerving.  Too often though, the script is a bit clunky; Owen's psychological breakdown and his job as a developer of provocative tween ads are a bit contrived.  Schwimmer seems to pay homage to one of cinema's best family dramas--Robert Redford's Ordinary People.  Both are set in wealthy Chicago suburbs, have sympathetic counselors at the helm (here, Viola Davis in another thinly-sketched part that doesn't demand enough of her skills as an actor), show the effects of tragedy on a family in low-key style, and end with fathers crying and coming to terms in cold backyards.  Trust is not nearly as complex of a jolt as Redford's film but it's still an unsettling, often compelling cautionary tale.

We Were Here - David Weissman & Bill Weber's (The Cockettes) quietly elegiac documentary traces the devastation of AIDS in the San Franciscan gay community in the 1980s and 90s.  The film's sensitive interviews of five people who survived a terrible era are powerful.  By focusing on such a small group of individuals and the details and accounts of their lives (a poster with pictures warning of a new "gay cancer," wrenching drug trials, a flower man's witnessing of death and trauma of those around him) makes the film an arresting and important testament.

Hanna - Joe Wright's (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) Hanna is a bit of thin-skinned schlock but it's also an entertaining tale of Finnish-bred assassin (Saoirse Ronan) on the run from wicked witch agent (Cate Blanchett).  Reminiscent of Firestarter (another film with another wickedly powerful blonde girl on the lam), the movie owes much of its atmosphere and fun to its offbeat European settings, the pulsating Giorgio Moroder-inspired Chemical Brothers score and a campy Blanchett.