Deepwater Horizon dragged down by storytelling woes

Mark Wahlberg stars in Deepwater Horizon. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

The theoretical appeal for the remarkably subpar Deepwater Horizon is its based on true events nature, in this case the explosion of the titular oil rig off the coast of Louisiana in 2010. Films like this are akin to a backstage pass to watch a tragedy unfold in real time and see where things went awry. People want to understand what went wrong for an event like the Deepwater Horizon explosion to occur and film is a logical medium to tackle that curiosity; it's simpler to visualize these events rather than parse through lawsuits and transcripts from investigative committees. Yet the process is less honest this way, the necessity of compressing hours of reality into less than two hours of film and the requirement of providing a captivating narrative trumping a direct and truthful discourse of the situation. Director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg had a similar issue arise with their previous collaboration/enactment of true events Lone Survivor, which shed most of its nuance for a loud, dense, manipulative serving of America.

Deepwater Horizon is somehow worse, simply abandoning the concept of subtlety for tremendous doses of sloppy foreshadowing and outlandish, easy to identify bad guys to blame for the explosion. The villains, in this case a collection of BP representatives highlighted by John Malkovich, are portrayed as money-grubbing, out of touch snobs focused more on their important time tables than the safety of the good, hardworking folks on the rig. They're effectively cartoon characters to shove the blame on, simple scapegoats for the audience to root against as their demands become more and more outlandish. Casting Malkovich as the biggest bad is both a tremendous and a terrible idea – brilliant for exaggerating the Snidely Whiplash nature of the character, but awful for adding layers or depth to the corporate shill. That the film is factually inaccurate with its representation is doubly worrisome; while BP deserves the lion's share of the blame for the explosion, TransOcean (the company that owned Deepwater Horizon and is portrayed favorably in the film) and Halliburton were at fault as well. There's no expectation for Deepwater Horizon to be a piece of journalism or documentary, although it remains dangerous for any film to effectively slander people just for storytelling convenience.

Truth is a secondary concern for Deepwater Horizon; the film's tagline uses the line “real life heroes” to describe the people on the titular vessel. But it's interesting though how anonymous most of the heroes are in this film, how much the movie focuses on the deeds of Wahlberg's Mike Williams and, to a lesser degree, Deepwater Horizon manager Jimmy Harrell (played by Kurt Russell). This is not an ensemble film despite the multitude of names on the poster, meaning the multitude of people who saved others amid the chaos are left on the sidelines, memorialized during a brief run in the end credits. One character who is given a few seconds to sacrifice himself to save the others is summarily killed off with rather over-the-top Foley work above it (and it isn't not the first time Berg has valued sound effects over verisimilitude). That Berg and company spend so much of their time throwing stones at Malkovich’s group provides even less time for the film’s heroes to show their valor.

There is, however, a fair amount of beauty covering the flaws. The strongest selling point is the wonder of the images once the Deepwater Horizon catches on fire and the crew has to navigate through the flames and chaos ensues. One shot involving Wahlberg and Gina Rodriguez (as Andrea Fleytas) alone as the world burns around is awe-inducing and deservedly memorable. Deepwater Horizon comes close on occasion to being a serviceable survival/disaster flick in the mold of The Poseidon Adventure, complete with the visuals and a couple moments of tension to keep audiences engaged. Deepwater Horizon is a film better served from the outside in, its aesthetics worthy enough to make it occasionally watchable.

Rubbing off the foundation though reveals all of those problems and then some. It's a film with an overabundance of patriotism (including a rather blatant reference to the Star-Spangled Banner) that's used to make the British-based oil company slightly more evil than it would be otherwise. Deepwater Horizon condescends to its audience, trusting visceral reactions will supersede intellectual curiosity while casting stones with little regard for how hard they’ll land.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 107 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: People who like Mark Wahlberg and films involving true tragedies.

Take the whole family?: There's enough blood and destruction to bother kids, so try to stick right around the PG-13 rating.

Theater or Netflix?: Even though the effects are solid, it isn't worth paying out for the theater trip.

Any hopes for Patriots Day?: If it is anything like the last two Peter Berg/Mark Wahlberg collaborations, no. The film, about the Boston Marathon bombing from 2013, is even more recent than the last two real-life flicks they've done, making the wounds much fresher and the need for a light touch that much more important. Their films are blunt like anvils, which is exactly the wrong way to handle that project.

Watch this instead?: Fruitvale Station uses the same storytelling technique Deepwater Horizon has but does so with much more grace and general quality. You could also hit up The Poseidon Adventure for a solid brain-wasting disaster flick.

Dressmaker obtuse peculiar

Kate Winslet in The Dressmaker. Image courtesy Broad Green Pictures.

The first word that came to mind to describe The Dressmaker after watching it is bizarre. But it's not a good bizarre like the works of Davids Cronenberg and Lynch, who make movies that force audiences to interpret what they're watching with minimal input from the respective director. No, this is bad bizarre, strange for the sake of being strange with little no idea of what it wants to accomplish at the end of its final reel. The only thing The Dressmaker will think about it how poorly constructed the clunky flick you just watched is.

The Dressmaker is several films in one, it's opening sequence shoving things toward a soap opera and melodramatic direction. It could've made for a fascinating engagement to watch Kate Winslet (as the eponymous sartorial creator) and Hugo Weaving vamp things up for 90 minutes with terrific fashion ensembles in the middle of nowhere Australia. (It’s worked before for Weaving.) Then the film moves forward and the story goes into so many directions at once the question arises as to what, exactly, the film is trying to do. Is it a revenge tale featuring a black sheep returning home for a little vengeance so many years later? Is it a noir with Winslet as the femme fatale? Is it a study of the dangers of memory, how forgetting is sometimes for the best? Is it a mismatched romance between Winslet and Liam Hemsworth as the wokest Aussie in 1952? Is the film trying to show how difficult it can be for mothers (in this case Judy Davis) and daughters to reunite? Is this a film like Chocolat or Needful Things in which an outsider causes ruffles in the small community? Is it a profile of the evils hidden within a small community? Is it a comedy, a drama, a dramedy or a coma? Somehow, the answer is yes, which is a problem for a film trying to tell something resembling a linear plot and eschewing dreaminess or the fantastical. So many elements exist the filmmakers simply have no time to delve into any of them with some sense of completion or satisfaction. It creates an atonal experience by combining so much of everything the viewer is left with nothing to latch onto.

The film has this sort of attitude of tossing as much stuff into it as possible that, perhaps, something might land somewhere near successful. Admittedly, the ensembles designed by Winslet's character are quite lovely, and Weaving plays things so campy it becomes somewhat charming to watch him revel at Winslet's sartorial creations. No one else follows his lead, aside from a few slips by Winslet into behaving in a somewhat scandalous fashion, so The Dressmaker comes across as more straight faced than it ought to be. It's strange how this film both rejects and embraces its oddness, pushing away from being too strange yet replacing character development with quirks. It tries too hard to be odd when it does go in that direction, becoming a subpar Twin Peaks and failing to provide that show’s sense of community intrigue.

At least Twin Peaks has some grounding and logic for its esoteric leanings. The Dressmaker doesn’t have that same grounding, lacking true motivation for its plot machinations besides an illogical revenge plot. The film has so many malarkey plot twists designed to forcibly advance Winslet's character into something resembling independence the whole endeavor could easily break a viewer’s mind trying to put the events into some form of logical flow. The initial prompt for the event is a lost memory from Winslet’s past, and the film resolves it in a fittingly messy fashion, only to continue beyond any point of interest through a bombastic ending that loses any sense of logic within a few moments of thought.

Thought, really, is anathema to The Dressmaker. Thought provides an undercurrent of logic to an obtusely illogical situation designed by filmmakers to be appear difficult and challenging. Films like this fail because they try to appear smart and lose that sheen once people can start parsing through what they witnessed. The Dressmaker requires more direction than it currently has, some underlying point to make Winslet’s return home emotionally affecting or at least designed to be more than a series of flukes. Otherwise all that’s left is watching Hugo Weaving go mad over Dior, which isn’t a bad thing but not something that can carry a two-hour movie.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer

Rating: R

Run time: 118 minute

Genre: Drama

 

Ask Away

Target audience: People down for obscure Aussie flicks.

Take the whole family?: Stick with the rating recommendation on this one; it gets a bit bloody and very uncomfortable.

Theater or Netflix?: Stay home if you must watch it.

Academy Award chances?: Hopefully about zero for the regular categories, even with Hugo Weaving's daffy, fascinating performance. It might get a little something for the costuming though, as the era-appropriate apparel looks quite fetching, albeit not on the same level as, say, Carol from last year.

Watch this instead?: Young Adult has a concept but adds in a lot more bite and loses the melodrama, and Twin Peaks hits the odd community notes far, far better. Also, just because Kate Winslet's involvement, seek out the tremendously brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The woods go bump in the night

Valorie Curry in Blair Witch. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

There's a beautiful simplicity that drives The Blair Witch Project and its second sequel, Blair Witch. Abandon a few young people in the woods, state clearly from the get go those people will not survive, ramp up the paranoia and eeriness from the isolation, and spend 90 minutes messing with their heads and the audience’s in the process. Both films are effective at showing the resulting horror and the discomfiting notion that survival is both a fluke and an impermanent state of being and have several solid frights within their around 90 minutes of screentime. But the new version is missing a few key features that make The Blair Witch Project memorable 17 years later. It’s still a fun and often intense horror/thriller, but that trepidation might last for just one viewing.

One thing to say for Blair Witch is it is a conceptually interesting film even without the direct link to The Blair Witch Project. Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett have stewed up a goulash of a film, lifting elements not just from the original film but Evil Dead, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Vanishing and even a couple of concepts introduced in the first sequel in the series, Book of Shadows, to create their spin on the Blair Witch concept. It's a creation that's often interesting, and the collaborators are playful enough with their dialogue and a few bait and switch shots to add a small layer of parody underneath the horror. This is effectively their much bloodier and less grounded version of The Blair Witch Project, one in which the supernatural elements are more prominent and the quality of film has taken a step up in the approximately 20 years between the “found footage” making up the two movies.

Blair Witch still embraces its role as a follow up, inserting clips and a vital tie to the first film to provide logical and emotional motivations for sending six doomed souls into the middle of nowhere Maryland. This film aims to provide some clarity to the events depicted in the first run through, providing a comparatively concrete explanation to what happened in The Blair Witch Project. It also, at the same turn, tries to add to the legend created by its predecessor and retain a little mystery to its own oddness. Weird things happen to explain the strange things in the first film without receiving an explanation for themselves. It's an interesting strategy that requires some mix of confidence and ingenuity to attempt, although what they offer as answers are a little too easy, and the questions they pose a little too opaque.

What Blair Witch lacks is the sense of dread that comes from being lost in the woods for days at end. There's little of the hopelessness left over from the original, nor is there a true sense of desperation from the characters as they lose touch with their sense of selves and sanity. Strangely enough, while Wingard and Barrett give the woods malevolent personification, their forest is far less intimidating than the trees and shrubs shown in the first film. It's somehow more frightening to be in an environment that doesn't care about your existence rather than one that is out to get you.

The woods though are just an appetizer to the house featured at the end of the first film, a strange building akin to the protagonists' home in House of Leaves with unfathomable dimensions and doom around every corner. This is, though, the weakest part of the film, with so much time spent inside it draws away from the quality time spent outside the home. Usually this concept is reversed, but in Blair Witch, the confined space is less frightening than the open woods outside of them. The audience knows the situation will not turn out well for the characters stuck inside the death house, but the woods offer an existential dread that just can't be found in a tidy house. Also, while the house in the first film was a possible refuge from evil, it's presented as a trap in Blair Witch.

Those issues, along with some pacing problems tied to them, are why I don't think Blair Witch will hold up on a second viewing. It does serve its purpose for the first viewing, offering enough chills and queerness to keep audiences a few steps away from comfortable. It's a visceral delight with a few jolts of nastiness and a couple of rather brilliant bits of gruesomeness to keep you on your toes, and it might make you think twice about taking that shortcut through the forest on the way home tonight.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 89 minutes

Genre: Horror/Thriller

Ask Away

Target audience: People with fond memories of the original film and horror fans prepping for October.

Take the whole family?: Even if it lacks the sheer terror drawn out from the original, this one has more than enough blood and gore to make it unfavorable to kids.

Theater or Netflix?: A late night theater trip would be pretty fun, although I'd rather tag team it with The Blair Witch Project and some beverages.

Is The Blair Witch Project a good horror film?: As a piece of horror cinema it is quite terrific. It's a great example of the slow burn, developing the strangeness and the isolation in the woods and creating scares from the environment itself to keep the audience feeling dread as the situation worsens. It also features what is more often than not the best horror movie monster; the viewer's imagination.

Watch this as well?: Aside from the The Blair Witch Project, flag down The Babadoo as well as the 2011 thriller You're Next; the latter shares the same writer/director team and is one of the highlights of the past decade in thrillers. For your own sanity, please avoid Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.

Drama sucked out of Sully

Aaron Eckhart and Tom Hanks in Sully. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Sully shows how easy it can be to botch the story of a man saving 155 lives after crashing an airplane into the Hudson River. It manages to do so despite having an incredible real-life story to work from, a very capable director in Clint Eastwood, and professional nice guy Tom Hanks playing the eponymous pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Yet the film still boggles up a great story, exchanging the interesting tidbits of self doubt and crisis for a celebration of one man and creating a rather one-note and flat piece of cinema.

It's hard to pin down what Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki are trying to convey with Sully. The film has a habit of bouncing wantonly between points and changing narrative directions and tone for reasons known to the two men responsible for this film and no one else. It's quite odd, really, how the film opens with Sullenberger expressing self doubts about his actions and experiencing severe PTSD, only to drop them when the need apparently arises to honor the man. The final sequence is an outpouring of adoration for the man in the film's fictionalized universe and in reality via a short promo where Sullenberger literally stands behind an American flag boldly. In between the praises for Sullenberger is one of the worst final scenes in recent memory, a final moment that offers no catharsis or introspection or proper closure to a hypothetically emotional narrative. That leaves the man himself left out of the equation to bow to the collective cheers and applause from audiences. Perhaps the poor quality of the film itself is for the man's benefit; people cheering at the end credits are probably focused more on his incredible act of aviation brilliance than the abstract concept of a film that replicated it.

To be fair, the man has earned all of the accolades and praise he receives for that one feat of impossibility, as well as the right to have Hanks play him on screen. At this point in his long and terrific career, Hanks seems to have a fetish for portraying men of high moral values (or at least the perception of said values) who serve as shining beacons through the morass of the human soul. This isn't Hanks' finest performance – he is getting a little too close to self parody – but he offers the kind of performance one should expect from him, albeit not at the Hanksian level he reached last year in Bridge of Spies. That the people around him – a co-pilot played by Aaron Eckhart, the Great Laura Linney (tragically trapped on the other end of several phone calls), various union representatives – are designed more as cheerleaders than actual people doubles down on the need for an exceptional lead performance. Their main purpose is to offer comfort to Sullenberger from the external figures the film portrays as trying to “get” Sullenberger. Eastwood and Komarnicki almost make the characters of the NTSB panel investigating the crash (led by Mike O'Malley, Anna Gunn and Jamey Sheridan) mustache-twirling villains hell-bent on outing Sullenberger as a poor pilot. Making a government board a villain is a rather lazy plot point; having them almost immediately join the sides of angels at the end adds an extra level of screenwriting sloth.

Sully could be all about Sully if Eastwood and Komarnicki had centered it on the character and perhaps mentioned the crash without showing it on screen, and it appeared for a while they might indeed skip over the incident. The idea of not showing the crash into the Hudson is intriguing, allowing for a heavier focus on the central figure and letting the nightmares the man has about what happened serve as a reminder for the worst case scenario. Instead, Sully builds up to the crash (actually showing it twice from different, asinine perspectives), establishing the happy ending while reducing the fear evoked during the crash. Good filmmakers can wring drama out of events in which the audience knows the ending (The Walk does this brilliantly); taking so long to get there only decreases the tension. That Eastwood and Komarnicki do it once again exacerbates the initial problem and Sully’s most notable flaw; it’s tough to succeed as a drama when the dramatic moments lack intensity.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 96 minutes

Genre: Drama
 

Ask Away

Target audience: People who enjoy watching Tom Hanks embody human decency.

Take the whole family?: The crash sequences will get a little intense for kids, so keep within a year or so of the PG-13 rating.

Theater or Netflix?: Home rental is better, but don't pay for the IMAX experience if you do go out.

Oscar Odds?: It'd be a problem if this film earned a Best Picture nomination or anything related to the screenplay and directing. Depending on how the rest of the year shakes out, Tom Hanks might be the best best (and possibly a deserving candidate) for an individual nomination, and it could get a few technical nods to boot.

Watch this instead?: The gold standard for this type of film remains the unimpeachable United 93. Despite the collective knowledge of the fate of the eponymous flight, director Paul Greengrass teases the possibility of a happy ending, keeping the audience tethered to the action.

Light Between Oceans cries its way through tedium

Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender think about crying in The Light Between Oceans. Image courtesy Disney.

While leaving the theater on Tuesday evening on the way to a train home I realized I couldn't actually remember the name of the movie I just watched. I had to look at my notes to come up with the title, The Light Between Oceans, which is so perfectly generic it flutters its way through the mind within an instant. It's a title that screams bland, offering no intrigue but wrapped in a heavy handed metaphor that clearly must mean something important. It doesn’t really mean all that much, nor does the film the title introduces to audiences. The actual film is equally unremarkable, concerning the travails of a lighthouse keeper and his wife somewhere in Australia (albeit filmed in New Zealand) in the 1920s. The Light Between Oceans flirts with mediocrity, falling a slight step below that mark.

Occasions arise when the film bobs into charming in the first act, when stars Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander reveling in their wedded bliss in a satisfactory sequence that, sadly, teases a more interesting film. (At least, more interesting than the one director Derek Cianfrance, who also wrote the adaptation from the novel, delivers.) Their bliss, coming after a short romance between Fassbender's lonely and guilt-driven lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne, and Vikander's local girl Isabel, is sweet and endearing, showing off the inherent decency of Fassbender's Tom and the liveliness of Vikander's Isabel. It's akin to the Julia Childs half of Julie & Julia, a portrait of a loving couple that captivates from the magnetism between Meryl Streep and the perpetually underrated Stanley Tucci. Vikander and Fassbender don't quite have that level of rapport, but they do make for a enviable couple for the film's moderately endearing first act. And at least the early parts of the relationship explain how a couple living alone at a lighthouse can handle the isolation; they have each other, and that's just about all they need for a spell.

The Light Between Oceans starts to sink in act two, once Vikander becomes obsessed with motherhood – representing a fairly notable reversal in her previously noted personality – and the couple's decision to claim a lost infant as their own. It's at this point when the water works begin to flow and Vikander and Fassbender ugly cry as often as possible. (They're joined later by Rachel Weisz as the child's real mother; she more than holds her own in this contest.) The tears come across as more phony than real, presented in a more cinematic scope than as an organic reaction to the situations the characters find themselves in. It’s staged weeping built for award shows and to show the photogenic stars in a vulnerable state of mind, although it does sometimes feel as if the characters are infected by a terminal case of snot face.

What Cianfrance wants is a presentation of inner turmoil, with the morally rigid Tom debating the rightness of their decision. Yet Cianfrance doesn't appear to know how to accomplish that goal in an interesting fashion (ugly crying excluded); he doesn't focus enough on Tom's inner turmoil, and his efforts to toss in montages akin to the early days falters because of how poorly Cianfrance addresses the proverbial elephant in the room. Not like he didn’t have time to deal with this issue considering how much the film begins to drag in the final two thirds, lollygagging through a long second act and an interminable third act brightened solely by the reminder that Bryan Brown is still alive. Whatever point Cianfrance wanted to bring up in The Light Between Oceans exists somewhere within the morass of his final two acts and involves guilt, sins and temptation on some level presented without passion or excitement.

The Light Between Oceans is something of a tease. It's a movie about a lighthouse keeper in an era when lighthouses were vital that incorporates little of the dangers or interests the position has. It presents child abduction in an utterly boring way. It offers an interesting debate of the definition of parenthood, only to skirt away from the issue to push the plot forward. It comes close, sometimes, to resembling interesting, only to step away and test the audience's patience in the process. There isn't much more to say about The Light Between Oceans except to remark upon its frustrating fugacity and shrug.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 132 minutes

Genre: Drama 
 

Ask Away

Target audience: People searching for ersatz prestige flicks.

Take the whole family?: Far too boring for kids to handle.

Theater or Netflix?: Just stay home and wait for it to come to you.

Academy Awards odds?: About time to break this thing out for the ramp up to Oscar season. I don't think this will do any real damage in the main categories, but the film does have some very solid costuming reflecting the era that might just justify a nomination.

Watch this instead?: It's tough to find a good film that matches The Light Between Oceans, so I'll go instead with A Simple Plan, Sam Raimi's terrific slow burn of a thriller about four people who quickly end up over their heads. It also does a better job of showing how guilt can become such an insidious little thing when it comes to illegal activities.