Movie Nation

It’s easy to judge her.
Diane Després is 40something, wears her skirts too short, her jeans too tight (and too bedazzled) and her blouses open a little too low.
She’s a brassy gum-snapper, cheap and so self-absorbed it’s no surprise that her teenage son is a hyper-active, mercurial train wreck. When a Quebec boarding school says “We’ve done what we can” for Steve, that is “your turn,” “Di” is belligerent and defiant. She doesn’t take their final warning about her sometimes-violent son seriously.
“Loving people does not save them.”
But this “Mommy” is made of stern stuff. Maybe she underestimates Steve’s tirades, laughing them off. Diane, limited as her options and intellectual resources seem to be, is a fighter.
Xavier Dolan’s “Mommy”, in French with English subtitles, is a showcase for Anne Dorval in the title role. Over the course of this overlong melodrama she wins our understanding and occasionally our sympathy as she struggles to get and keep a job, find a man and keep her maddening, monster of a son (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) under control. A tantrum-tossing kid in a man’s body, Steve is a punk who needs medication that he refuses to take, needs attention that no single parent (Di is widowed) can provide.
He has a volcanic temper, and Diane’s efforts to cope with or at least withstand his wild-eyed tirades make us fear for her and for him. She has a temper, too.
Then, there’s hope, the possibility of a rescue or at least a respite from the tension. Diane befriends their quiet, school teacher neighbor Kyla. She can stay with the kid, help with the home schooling, maybe give him a chance to have a normal life, which Diane allows herself to fantasize about. Maybe he has musical gifts, maybe those will take him into the mainstream.
But writer-director Dolan will not let us off that easy. Kyla, played with a guarded jumpiness by Suzanne Clement, has her own issues. Something bad happened in her life, something that makes her needy enough to suffer the company of this dumpster fire of a family next door. She endures Steve’s crude and inappropriate sexual come-ons and his mood swings, but for how long?
Dolan’s film tests our patience as we and the two women deal with Steve’s eruptions. He wears on us as he wears on them. We suspect that lack of medication isn’t his only problem. He has mastered the behavior of a jerk, an obnoxious, self-absorbed creep. Whatever these women get out of each other as friends, a two person support group, he tests with his constant ugliness.
But it we’re lucky, even as the film reaches its much-delayed climax, we remember how we first judge this “Mommy,” her life and her world. And maybe we leave the theater a little embarrassed by that.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, sexual references and some violence

Cast: Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, Suzanne Clément

Credits: Written and directed by Xavier Dolan. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 2:19

We have forgotten how subtle Al Pacino could be, pre “Hoo Hah!” Something about his Oscar winning turn in “Scent of a Woman” unleashed the beast, a performer as big, broad and puffed up as that mountain of hair he’s teased about his head.
So it’s a bit of a jolt to see him as Simon Axler, a famous, fading stage and screen actor who is losing his grip and his ability to stay on script in “The Humbling.” He rarely allows Simon the Pacino bellow, rarely cranks up the heat and the volume as Simon shambles offstage, he fears permanently, his career seemingly at an end.
And that’s a shame, because if there’s one thing the sometimes funny, often sad “Humbling” could use is fireworks. Barry Levinson’s film, based on a Buck “Heaven Can Wait” adaptation of a Philip Roth novel, shambles along the way Simon does, with witty, coherent stretches and droning theatrical self-absorption that’s as dull as a stage performance that doesn’t play to the back row.
We meet Simon prattling on to himself, backstage, applying his own makeup as Jaques, the dry, wise fool of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
“Just do your words,” he says. “Shakespeare will do the rest.”
Simon alternately flatters himself and then insults his line readings. We forget he’s Simon and remember Pacino’s lifelong love of Shakespeare, his many stage performances and occasional films based on the Bard. And we remember Pacino, like Simon, is an acting “lion in winter.”
He forgets his lines, falls off stage and considers suicide. Next thing you know, he’s in a sanitarium. He and we wonder if anything that’s happened is real, or if it’s all in his head. The nutty lady (Nina Arianda) who insists she caught her rich husband sexually abusing their young daughter? She may be real, and she may want Simon to kill her husband. Because, you know, she saw him do it in a movie.
Dylan Baker is Simon’s shrink, preferring to do analysis via Skype. Charles Grodin is the old actor’s elderly agent, wishing he could get Simon to attempt another role.
And then, it’s home to convalesce. That’s where Pegeen, the lesbian acting professor daughter (Greta Gerwig) of two old colleagues finds him.
“You know, when I was like eight and you were like 40? I had a massive crush on you.”
So begins an affair with this much younger woman, and more humiliations, great and small, that pile up around Simon like kindling needed for burning him at the stake.
“Everything I got,” the old man sighs, “I deserve.”
It’s a navel gazing movie with far too much of Pacino, even at his wittiest, chatting to Baker via computer screen, or bantering with Gerwig, queen of the mumblecore comedy. Often, there’s not enough witty things for Simon to say.
And the snatches of his stage performances are dreadfully dull, draining the life out of Shakespeare by destroying context and Method Acting the lines to death.
It was never going to be “Birdman,” another film of an actor, facing his real self, in comic crisis. But “The Humbling” should have been more brisk, should have been cut, and should have had more of the Pacino who finishes this thing off with a flourish. The soul searching and sense of a life misspent are interesting. But there’s an awful lot of hooey before we get to the “Hoo hah,”

MPAA Rating: R for sexual material, language and brief violence

Cast: Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig, Dianne Weist, Charles Grodin, Dan Hedaya

Credits: Directed by Barry Levinson, scripted by Buck Henry and Michal Zebede, based on the Philip Roth novel. A Millennium release.

Running time: 1:58

  “Big Muddy” is a big ol’ muddle of a thriller, a lot of dangerous characters converging, from various parts of the Canadian prairie, on a femme fatale and her teenage son.
It’s a modern day Western, a B-movie that founders on a weak leading lady and a stumbling lack of urgency in the direction.
Donovan (David La Haye) escapes from prison and kills a cop in the process. A big, wild-eyed French Canadian, he must be looking for his woman, Martha.
Young Andy (Justin Kelly) is courting a teenage June (Holly Deveaux) at a local horse track. That’s where he runs into the shady Buford (James Le Gros). He, too, wonders where Martha (Andy’s mom) is.
And Martha, when we meet her, is barely a single step ahead of the law her own self. She and her latest beau, Tommy (Rossif Sutherland) run a bar pickup scam that turns into armed robbery. Tommy is something of a psycho.
Canadian indie film fixture Nadia Litz plays Martha with an understated brazenness. There isn’t a hint of Hollywood in her casting, and she doesn’t deliver the confidence of even your average mug shot momma in the part. She’s kind of just here, occasionally letting her dress drape off her shoulders, struggling to deliver “sexually available,” trying to look dangerous when cornered. She isn’t.
Jefferson Moneo’s screenplay is the sort that relies on grizzled veteran character actor Stephen McHattie to offer a cop, looking for the ex-con on his ranch, a drink, which the cop turns down. Only to change his mind with “Maybe I will have that drink,” after considering the gravity of the situation. So many lines give away that no thought went into them at all. How many times do teenagers in film have to say “My dad’s gonna KILL me,” when they’re late?
McHattie, known mostly for TV work dating back to “Haven” and “Seinfeld,” has most of the best lines — “You can run from a lot of things, but your sins ain’t one of them.”
And Litz and Le Gros have the best chemistry, playing brittle banter that lets us believe they have history.
“I thought you gave up horses?”
“No. Just people like you.”
The kids are the blandest members of the supporting cast, though the heavies rarely deliver menace and the slack pace makes everybody seem listless and a little lost.
It’s not a total waste of time, but waiting around for McHattie to return and clean up “Big Muddy” gets old after a bit.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Nadia Litz, Justin Kelly, Stephen McHattie, James Le Gros, Holly Deveaux, David La Haye
Credits: Written and directed by Jefferson Moneo. A Monterey Media release.

Running time: 1:43

Take away the high-wattage stars, the staggering budget and the celebratory nature of the thievery, and “The Wolf of Wall Street” would look something like “Americons,” an indie parable about greed, high-living and wrongdoing that led to the real estate/home mortgage meltdown.
It’s a short, curt and occasionally heavy-handed slap at the major villains of that era — the hustling, rule-breaking lenders and those who bought and shuffled around those iffy loans. And underneath it all is the warning that few then or now heeded, the lesson that nobody seemed to learn.
“When did these guys get so smart and how did their work suddenly become so valuable?” The answers, fading into the mists of time, were “They aren’t” and “They cheated.”
Beau Martin Williams stars as Jason Kelly, one-time wide receiver now reduced to being the doorman at a night club. That’s where Devin (Matt Funke) recognizes him and promises to change his life. One flight on the company jet later, Jason’s met the chief (Sam McMurray) of Wall Street Lending, who is “Wall Street” only in his contempt for competitors like WaMu and Countrywide (mentioned by name), rules, customers and any sucker he can talk into signing his Option ARM (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) or investor he can get to buy them off his hands.
In a flash, Jason is in Los Angeles, learning the lingo, memorizing the phrases that lure people into buying, selling or refinancing houses using loans that Jason and his boiler room crew cook up. They falsify records, they sleep with sexy real estate agents who are in on the hustle. They gamble on the job, and after hours.
Thanks to Devin, Jason even talks an ex-teammate at the end of his NFL career (Trai Byers) into leveraging himself to the max on a new home.
Jason’s answer to, “You trust him, J.?” is just his first lie.
Director Theo Avgerinos skips through this morality tale quickly, and Williams, who also wrote the script, peppers conversations with enough jargon about “home equity extractions,” “mortgage backed securities” and “the Option ARM” to make “Americons” credible, if not quite wholly comprehensible.
Women are just blonds to be slipped in and out of swimsuits, using sex to further their careers. The men are vipers of various stripes, with Williams suitably confused as the newcomer in over his head.
Veteran character actor McMurray has the best speeches and most interesting scenes, making his CEO a class warrior and a master of “the illusion” of “The American Dream.”
The details are different, but the bottom line is so overly familiar as to make “Americons” feel, too often, like a movie we’ve seen before and a strident lecture we’re never going to pay attention to until the bottom drops out again.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity, sex, profanity

Cast: Beau Martin Williams, Matt Funke, Sam McMurray, Trai Byers, Alyshia Ochse

Credits: Directed by Theo Avgerinos, screenplay by Beau Martin Williams. An Archstone release.

Running time: 1:21

Golden Globe winner Eddie Redmayne had to come up with a few more surprised and “incredibly honored” remarks when his Oscar nomination for “The Theory of Everything” was announced Thursday. He’s trying to keep his head about him, even as the acclaim piles up for his portrayal of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in the film.
“There’s an alchemy in film that you can never gauge or control,” Redmayne explains. “Lovely scripts that don’t turn into lovely films, or good films that people don’t see. And then there are the shoddy scripts that turn out to be wonderful films. So there’s this strange alchemy, this odd mixture of art and science, that sometimes happens to a film. I wonder if that’s happened, here.”
His 13 years of experience in the movies helps him not get too carried away. He recognizes “that it’s rare when all these things connect and a movie becomes what this one did. Felicity (Jones, nominated for best supporting actress) and I, when we took one on these parts, felt this amazing mixture of privilege and trepidation. We knew Jane and Stephen Hawking would see it and pass judgment on it. And since they’ve seen it and enjoyed it, and audiences have found it, that’s our real reward.
“All the buzz and hype, you can’t put one foot in front of the other, if you listen to that too much. But you do let yourself hear just enough of it to realize that this is a rare and wonderful thing to have happen to some bit of work you’ve done.”
Redmayne, 32, had made a mark in such hits as “Les Miserables” and such critically-acclaimed movies as “My Week With Marilyn.” “Theory,” which has him depicting Hawking from his college years, through his ALS diagnosis, his first marriage and his later life scientific triumphs, may be the most difficult piece of acting of last year.
First, he had to learn about Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the disease that killed baseballer Lou Gehrig and has crippled Hawking.
“What was so brutal about going to this clinic (National Hospital For Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London)
is that what the doctors were doing were just trying to manage the illness. There is no cure. That has emotional ramifications for any patient, including Stephen Hawking.”
Redmayne had to back-engineer the illness, “working out how he might have been to get to that particular point” in the script. Yes, Hawking ended up in a wheelchair, and there is little footage extant of him before the disease had taken hold. “I got at as many photographs of Stephen as I could. I showed them to the specialists at the ALS clinic to see if they could decipher what sort of hand gestures, how his body might shift, what sorts of movements would be upper neuron and lower neuron. Which parts of his body were stiff, and which were soft, and when this or that set of muscles stopped working.”
“The emotional side of the character I developed through talking with his children, reading both Jane’s book, and Stephen’s latest book, ‘My Brief History.’
Michael Keaton, who won an acting Golden Globe in the comedy category for “Birdman,” is considered the Oscar favorite. But it’s obvious that the physical journey Redmayne made — he also won a Globe — was an equally impressive screen transformation. Redmayne “transcends the eerie physical impersonation” and “reveals both Stephen’s grand resolve and his peculiar blind spots” Time Magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote. Getting across Hawking’s sense of humor, the “twinkle” that gives away “that extraordinary mind” was paramount, to Redmayne. For that, he used a meeting with the great scientist (“The power, the command he has over a room, just on entering it, is extraordinary”). And he relied on a couple of props, each day, to get his Hawking on.
“His look shifted and changed. Those Buddy Holly glasses that he wore, slightly askew, would throw me into Stephen World. And in the early scenes, there was one velvet jacket that the character wears that feels academic. Finding my hands in his pockets would shift my gait. There was something physical in putting my hands in there that made me feel something Stephen might have felt, and transformed me.”
One gift this awards season attention has given Redmayne is the chance to finally allow the awe to set in, to appreciate just who he was playing in “The Theory of Everything.”
“As someone who gave up on science as a kid, this was quite the job, forcing myself to learn about it, think about it and realize what Stephen did — that thanks to him, we can get our minds around it, we can tackle these amazing concepts. That’s what he means to the world, I think. That gift of passing on his understanding of the universe.”

Anne Hathaway didn’t sing in “Interstellar,” but she does croon a tune in her latest. When the movie’s titled “Song One” and is set in the lively indie music scene of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, it’s to be expected. But it’s not like she’s dying to cut a record or tackle more musicals.
“I love music and I’ve always really loved singing, but I never had the fire in my belly for performing music that I did for acting,” she says. Sure, she won an Oscar for singing and acting in “Les Miserables,” and “If something comes up, a musical that’s offered, that will be a lovely thing to consider. But I’m not looking for more chances to sing.”
Still, her heart-tugging cover of that ’70s pop ballad “I Need You,” in “Song One” suggests there could be a new hobby, if she’s game. Surely some band that covers the hits of pop-rockers America is looking for a vocalist.
“I’m WAITIN’ by the phone!” she cackles.
Hathaway took on “Song One,” first as a producer, thanks to her “Margot at the Wedding” director, Jonathan Demme. The filmmaker who put Hathaway on the “serious actress” track and re-launched her career suggested she look at Kate Barker-Froyland’s script. Barker-Froyland wanted to direct, too, “and I KNEW her! She was (director) David Frankel’s assistant on ‘The Devil Wears Prada.'” Hathaway and her husband, Adam Shulman would produce. And the more Hathaway thought about the lead role, that of Franny, a harsh, judgmental scientist who rushes home because her estranged dreamer/musician younger brother is in a coma, the more she wanted to play the part.
“I didn’t, as a producer, want to say ‘Cast me!’ I wanted to give her the option. She’d worked on the script for years, and she’d always imagined Franny as 24,” Hathaway, 32, says with a chuckle. “I am many things, but I am NOT 24. Audiences wouldn’t buy me as 24.”
“Song One” gave Hathaway the chance to dive into the indie music scene that the movie captures. Franny’s way of coping with her brother’s circumstances is to read his journal, visit the clubs he haunted and places the aspiring singer-songwriter played. Along the way, she meets her brother’s idol, a British folk rocker played by Johnny Flynn.
“I got to play this wonderful woman who…thaws,” Hathaway says. “It’s always surprising to find a character like this one — so young and already so closed off, to people, to experiences. Her brother’s in a coma, but she gets to go through her own awakening here.”
Franny, and Anne Hathaway, got to see this twangy, confessional and intimate music scene through “her brother’s 19 year-old eyes. That’s just MAGICAL. It was hammered home to me, pursuing acting, as I am sure it must be for musicians, that doing this has to feel as important to you as breathing, for it to be worth it.
“This music world, it is so hard and there are no guarantees that you’ll make it…So your wanting to go into it has to come from a place of true passion, and even having that passion is no guarantee that it’ll work out. If you know that, and your heart and your gut still compel you to do it, you do it.”
Making movies is Hathaway’s passion. And while “Song One” won’t open as wide as an “Interstellar,” and reviews of the indie film have been indifferent (“Twee for two,” Henry Barnes said in The Guardian, with Variety’s Peter DeBruge praising “the grief-stricken authenticity Hathaway shows” as Franny), she still has hope :”Song One” finds its audience.
“It’s a film for people who believe in the magic of music. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. There are people in the world who feel that way, that music is as important as the next breath you take. And as a film audience, they’re under-served. Until now!”