Movie Nation

This is the way it used to work, the image we used to be famous for.

An accused man is locked up on suspicion of his involvement with the 9/11 hijackers. Lawyers hear about him, locked up at the prison on Guantanamo Bay, not charged, and take up his case.

Because as a country that the world expects to operate under the rule of law, you don’t keep somebody locked up for years, interrogated above and beyond the pale without someone getting outraged, without somebody crying out for justice.

“The Mauritanian” is about an infamous case from the post-9/11 Bush years. Mohamedou Slahi was approached at a family party by his country’s police, told “the Americans” wanted to question him…and disappeared. For years.

Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) has directed a factual, well-acted and somewhat laborious look at his story, a detailed movie that runs out of time rather abruptly at the two hour mark and shoves a summary finale in that skips over years of Obama administration involvement.

So it’s fascinating but flawed, more truncated than thorough.

Tahar Rahim (“A Prophet,” “The Kindness of Strangers”) plays Slahi, a guy we see just enough of to wonder about his innocence. He lives in a country where the police are feared, but does what he can to protect himself when they come calling.

He’s allowed to change clothes, which allows him to erase his phone’s contact list and call history. And he gets to drive his own car to the station.

It’s November of 2001 and we’re not given a lot of information. “Would they let me drive my car if I wasn’t coming back?” he reassures his mother (in Arabic).

But clearing one’s phone seems suspicious.

Jodie Foster plays Nancy Hollander, an Albuquerque attorney who’s “been fighting the government since Vietnam.” She’s a bit of a ball-buster — older, her name’s on the firm, and she’s not shy about taking on an ACLU case. It’s been over three years and this guy’s family wonders what happened to him. He might be among the 7-800 detainees at “Gitmo.”

Calling around only gets her a “He’s not not here” answer. That’s great detail, showing just how hidden from the world these prisoners were and how hard it was to even learn who was there.

With a young associate (Shailene Woodley), Hollander gets on a plane to Cuba, struggles to win the trust of this man who doesn’t trust anything associated with America, and becomes his lawyer. She will fight for a writ of habeas corpus — a demand to know what the government has on him and if it has the right to keep holding him without charge.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has decided to pursue legal precedents that allow them to put Slahi on trial for his Colonel assigned the job of prosecuting Slahi, whom they accuse of helping recruit the 9/11 hijackers.

“Rough justice, that’s what this administration wants,” he’s told. Get it for them.

As each side digs into the case, facing “classified” and “redacted” material at every turn, Slahi writes a long account, over several long letters to his lawyer, telling his story. Flashbacks from those letters recreate his life — a bright kid given a scholarship in Germany, outrage over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, traveling there.

Macdonald, working from a three-credited-writers screenplay (with one writer taking the name of “Treasure of Sierra Madre” scribe B. Traven), may struggle to wrestle this into a compact narrative. The film has a geographical and sociolinguist disconnect. It never really feels like we’re watching an American story playing out in the US. That’s jarring, but by design.

The performances, the scenes recreated, the dialogue and the detail immerse us in this case even if we get lost here and there.

“Even in Mauretania we have watched ‘Law & Order’ and ‘Ally McBeal,'” Slahi says at one point. But the legalese here, the blizzard of legal and military acronyms, scenes of wholly-redacted paperwork in a top secret government archive, is enough to test even lawyers watching this.

Scenes of what Slahi went through — endless interrogations, torture — aren’t as rough as many films depict them. But the process and procedure as seen here is fascinating. Two questioners and an interpreter all play “good cop,” at first. And then one by one they turn hard.

Foster gives Hollander a brusque, clipped demeanor, impatient with anyone who blows her off or minions who can’t keep their feelings out of the case. Call her a “terrorist lawyer” and this woman has the perfect comeback.

Woodley, collecting credits with every Oscar winning actress under the sun, holds her own. Rahim has some nice moments, but his character doesn’t have enough scenes to properly engender sympathy. And Cumberbatch does a good job with Couch’s soft Southern accent even if there’s not enough screen time to develop the man’s faith-backed decision making.

The players make the whole enterprise watchable and worth taking a look at, just to remember that the erosion of America’s “rule of law” reputation didn’t start with the outgoing administration in Washington. It’s been withering under three presidents.

But the screenplay needed more work and the film in the can a lot more editing to make “The Mauritanian” worthy of the talent on the set.

MPA Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley

Credits: Kevin Macdonald, script by Michael Bronner (M.B. Traven), Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani. An STX release.

Running time: 2:08

This March 23 release was a big hit in China, where they can see movies in theaters again.

They never really met like this, debated these issues and foreshadowed their futures this overtly. But if the new heavyweight champ Cassius Clay, on his way to becoming Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X and singer Sam Cooke and football legend-in-the-making Jim Brown had met, that “One Night in Miami” probably would have set off more sparks than this.

Blessed with a good cast, a passable script based on a play that won’t make anybody forget the poetry of August Wilson’s similarly theatrical/”historical” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and solid if not dazzling direction, we’re left with a somewhat stagebound movie that works and yet only comes close to thrilling just once or twice.

Leslie Odom Jr. (“Hamilton”) delivers chills as doomed pop singer Cooke, and does it in flashbacks that take the movie out of its Miami hotel room setting, showcasing Cooke’s voice and electric stage presence.

Oscar-winner Regina King steps behind the camera and when she “opens the play up,” with a long and terrific prologue introducing Cooke, Clay (Eli Goree), Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Malcolm (Kingsley Ben Adir), she ably sets up the context, builds anticipation and raises expectations.

The movie that follows is just too damned conventional for its own good.

Goree (TV’s “Riverdale”) gives us a Clay who is swagger and braggadocio incarnate, joking around with his cornermen in a fight he will win, but not without having some fun (and almost blowing it) as he does.

Hodge (“Brian Banks” and TV’s “Underground”) brings out Brown’s presence, his simmering, self-assured cool. But even he has to grit his teeth through a “homecoming” meeting with an old backer (Beau Bridges) on his native St. Simon’s Island, Ga., a drawling Antebellum mansion dweller who thinks nothing of reminding Brown he’s also a dyed-in-the-wool racist.

British actor Ben-Adir (“Peaky Blinders,” High Fidelity”) gets across Malcolm’s self-control and discipline as a man on the cusp of breaking with the Nation of Islam over the infidelities and indiscretions of “The Messenger” and leader, “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” But when Brown reassures Cooke after an argument that “You know Malcolm. He’s all ‘fire and brimstone’ about everything,” we have to rely on our memories and the charismatic leader and speaker’s reputation. This Malcolm is so buttoned down you kind of wonder what the fuss was about.

They gather in Miami to watch the Feb. 1964 fight with Sonny Liston that won Clay the title. Goree doesn’t disappoint, floating and dancing away from punches in the ring, more joking with his “team” in the corner.

“I TOLD you he’s ugly,” Clay blusters, wide-eyed. “You should see him UP CLOSE!”

Recreating the controversial win and Clay’s riotous bragging from the ring — “I’m the GREATEST! I’m PRETTY!” — the guys gather at Malcolm’s hotel room — Cooke arriving with a guitar and a Ferrari 250GT, Brown with expectations and Clay with Malcolm. At least two of the guys thought they were showing up for a “party.” But no.

Malcolm has an agenda, a concern and maybe a little desperation about his situation. He needs something from all of them.

But high-living Cooke is gently chastised and not-so-gently challenged — “You’re not doing enough for the CAUSE” — by Malcolm. Clay wonders if he’s about to make the wrong decision, coming out as a Muslim with a title belt in his hands. And Brown reveals that he’s just made a movie, is about to make more and isn’t all that interested in Islam.

“Have you TASTED my Grandma’s pork chops?”

Malcolm’s “you bourgeois Negroes” lectures don’t change many minds, but he’s a little off his game. He’s worried about how one “leaves” the Nation of Islam. His desperation doesn’t show, but his powers of persuasion don’t either.

Odom lights up the screen as Cooke, with Hodge and Goree never less than convincing or compelling in a script that doesn’t have much in the way of fireworks.

Ben-Adir’s less inspiring Malcolm seems upstaged by most everybody here. The serene righteous menace Lance Reddick brings to a bodyguard and aide almost washes Ben-Adir off the screen.

Playwright/screenwriter Powers (he co-wrote Pixar’s “Soul”) serves up light skimmings of African American history, color-lines (“You light-skinned cats end up being so militant!”), competitive songwriting and the financial-moral implications that Clay had to take into account before making his gutsy stand.

But for a movie with this kind of awards hype, I was underwhelmed. Watching this after seeing the sometimes spine-tingling “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” make “Miami’s” shortcomings pop out.

It’s not bad. King could develop a more stylish hand as director and Powers could achieve the next level in screenwriting fame — in TV would be my guess.

But as a movie, this “One Night in Miami” is more promising than polished, more righteous than riveting viewing.

MPA Rating: R, boxing violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, Leslie Odom Jr., Joaquina Kalukango, Michael Imperioli, Beau Bridges and Lance Reddick.

Credits: Directed by Regina King, script by Kemp Powers, based on his play. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:53

The children of Korean immigrants try to escape the trap their parents have set for them in this drama. This hits theaters Feb. 5.

As an exercise in making a reasonably entertaining movie in the middle of a pandemic, “Locked Down” is something of a triumph.

Limited sets, a stellar “socially-distanced” cast, some shooting their own footage in ill-framed cell phone video, screen-freezes and Oscar winning fashionista Anne Hathaway playing a boss with business sharp blouse and jacket combos worn over pajama bottoms in Zoom meetings? It’s a terrific artifact of life in these times, in “this situation,” this locked-in, isolated “land of the walking dead.”

The caper comedy it eventually becomes? Strictly an afterthought, and one that should have been discarded, seeing as how badly botched it is on a very basic genre level.

Director Doug Liman is the guy who wants to film his “Edge of Tomorrow” star Tom Cruise in space as his next stunt. I have no doubts he’ll manage it, even if the movie comes out like the rest of his filmography (“Fair Game,””The Wall”), more interesting in concept than execution.

You could do a lot worse than hiring the fellow who scripted that Tom Hardy, on his cell in an SUV talking drama “Locke,” Steven Knight. He comes up with a LOT of things for people to muse over, confess, debate and complain about, and co-star Hathaway handles all that verbiage at a staccato screwball comedy pace — a blur of words, many of them funny, biting and close to perfect in summing up city life in COVID.

“How are you?” “Terrible. You?” “Just awful.“

Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor are a London couple waiting until “this madness is over” to complete their break up. They’re cohabiting as a survival mechanism. She works for a multi-national promotions/event managing company of some sort, and on the day we meet her, Linda Zooms her entire staff in to lay them off.

Her now-ex partner Paxton (Ejiofor) is antic and verbose, regaling their city block with poetry recitals before the nightly banging of the pans (Remember those?).

“I write poetry! I could BE someone!”

Except he isn’t. He’s a delivery truck driver, and he a bad-boy-on-a-motorbike past that was catnip to Linda. Once. How’s her day going?

“I just had some bad news…nothing…compared to…EVERYthing.”

They keep their distance, barely communicate and when they do, they erupt in duologues — either talking over each other or not paying enough attention to what the other is saying. His family (Jaymyn Simon, Dulé Hill) are upset at hearing about the breakup via Zoom. We figure out why when Linda walks in on him on his motorcycle in the garage.

“Why is the hose in the exhaust?”

His boss (Ben Kingsley, in and out of his cell phone camera frame) needs to fudge Paxton’s ID to get him higher security clearance for deliveries of items from posh department store Harrad’s — in the middle of a pandemic. Her German boss is ready to move her back to the States, and her US counterpart (Ben Stiller, very funny), chilling with his teens and wife in Vermont, may be threatened by that.

“Do you have a temperature, Linda?” That’s the COVID version of “Is it that time of the month?” Not nice. Then again, she’s not even keeping her omni-present wine glass out of camera range.

Eventually, these two intolerable work situations force our splitting up couple to find common ground and purpose — a heist.

That twist in the picture arrives well after the point where one has stopped summarizing the movie’s plot, an after-thought. It’s introduced clumsily and executed without much suspense, wit or urgency.

It doesn’t break “Locked Down,” which needs judicious trimming in the first two acts as it is. But it robs us of most of the elements that make a caper comedy/heist picture fun — the planning, the logistics. We don’t know enough to know when to be worried they might get caught.

All that other talk and they couldn’t squeeze the basics in?

Ejiofor is OK, somewhat underwritten as a biker “poet.” Hathaway is in top form but could stand to lose every line that isn’t funny or doesn’t advance the plot.

Some of the cameos — Kingsley, Stiller — are funnier than others (Mindy Kaling has nothing funny to play). The use of Harrad’s and Zoom was inspired, details like druggies eyeing the poppies they have growing in their garden plot — hilarious.

But in the end, we’re left with a gimmick movie that doesn’t come off, an accurate-enough artifact of the global lockdown of last spring that will be remembered for that, and little else.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout and some drug material

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ben Kingsley, Jaymyn Simon, Ben Stiller

Credits: Directed by Doug Liman, script by Steven Knight. An HBO Max release.

Running time: 1:55

No filmmaker made me cry more often than Michael Apted.

He could handle most any genre, directed multiple Oscar nominated performances, with Sissy Spacek winning best actress for his Loretta Lynn bio pic, Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

Apted, who passed away last week at the age of 79, did biographies and a Bond film, but was never happier than when he could “put something real, something true” up on the screen. Native American issues were important to him, and he made docs and a feature film touching on that.

“Thunderheart,” “Enigma,” “Amazing Grace,” “Nell,” “Gorillas in the Mist,” “Chasing Mavericks,” “The World is Not Enough” and many other titles put him in rare company as a director — not among the immortals of the top tier, but right below them.

But his true claim to immortality is a classic of British sociology, his “7 Up/28 Up etc.” series, documentaries that caught up with a cross section of British kids every seven years, starting when they were seven, exploring how their childhood lives, upbringing and opportunities, shaped their adulthood.

Those films, made original for British TV, were remarkable lessons in social mobility and immobility, and never failed to bring tears. The last one, “63 Up,” catching us up with people who endured the struggle of life with varying degrees of success, is a life affirming experience.

I interviewed him several times over the years, here’s a link to our first chat. Fascinating man who worked with his heart on his sleeve, often as not.

Based on the graphic novel, Motherhood and Metallica and Rob Brydon figure in this mid Feb. Release.

“Stand up and FIGHT for your SOUL!”

For those who like their horror kind of nuts and on-the-cheap side.

The vast smorgasbord that is the British Museum offers too many riches and distractions to count for the history buff. But if you’re into archeology at all, the temptation is great to give the Elgin Marbles and the like a pass and make your way straight to room 141, to the treasures of Sutton Hoo.

“The Dig” is a warm, stately and beautifully-acted drama about how this Anglo Saxon era burial treasure was unearthed, a tale given weight, poignance and urgency by the events hanging over that dig. World War II was looming, giving this “amateur” unearthing in Suffolk a somber tone and need for speed.

They’re called “salvage digs” these days, a somewhat rushed job because something is coming — usually new construction — threatening whatever you hope to find with the risk of being “lost forever.” I took part in one as a teenager, a Native American village in my hometown that would be destroyed by an expansion of a sewage treatment plant.

Imagine that situation with the added menace of a World War on everybody’s mind.

That’s just one of the ticking clocks Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) internalizes when she offers a job to “excavator” Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes). She and her late husband bought their land with a notion of finding out what’s in these mounds on the property. And after some haggling over wages, Brown agrees.

It’s 1939, and the lady of the house won’t be digging herself. She’s too frail. But she can commission this dig, on the cheap, and figure out what previous digger King Henry VIII never did. What’s under all that dirt? mounds?

Her inquisitive, comic-book fan little boy (Archie Barnes) will be under foot, literally. He offloads his entire brain’s supply of questions on Brown while wearing (literally) a tin foil hat and star-bedecked bedspread he treats as a cape.

Mrs. Pretty might be looking to leave her mark, lamenting an academic life she never had, or might be fulfilling a dead husband’s wishes. Brown is an autodidact — self-trained — and a veteran of such digs. Academia and the local museum toffs regard him as a laborer, someone whose value they don’t appreciate until he leaves them for her.

Both are looking for validation, and she has “a feeling” about this biggest mound, about “the dead and what they leave behind.”

Warplanes roar overhead on training missions, soldiers muster everywhere and the wireless crackles with news of the escalating crisis on the continent. But Brown, following the boss’s hunch, continues to dig in the dirt and mud under overcast skies. His own hunches, flying in the face of the “experts” who figure their Roman villa dig across the county is more important, have the promise of “This changes everything.”

But if it does, you can be sure those with degrees will rush in, led by British Museum archeologist Phillips (blustering Ken Stott) and take over and take the credit while they’re at it.

“You men there, finish up and then don’t move ANOTHER PEBBLE!”

That allows more characters to be introduced, the professorial Piggott (Ben Chaplin) and someone who might well have been his student, his new wife Peggy (Lily James).

Her arrival, summoned by Phillips as well, provides the film’s best sexist joke. As fragile as this long-rotted-away ship is, he needs someone “light” to get down there in it for the fine-work required.

Director Simon Stone (“The Turning”) and screenwriter Moira Buffini (the Mia Wasikowska “Jane Eyre” and “Tamara Drew”) cloak this story in deaths past and deaths sure to come, in class snobbery and curiosity. And then they toss in a hint of romance.

The late second act new characters and incidents associated with them give the film more of a fateful World War II romance touch. They also slow it down.

“Stately” implies the pacing is slow, and “The Dig” generates a feeling that it’s taken on a few too many issues and messages for its own good. “Class” and “credentials” snobbery are the heart of the story, and with all this added-on stuff, there’s barely time for our heroine to stand up for our hero against the snobs of academe.

But Mulligan — drawn, wan and yet steely here — and Fiennes’ lightly-laid-on sturdy working class polymath turn make “The Dig” touching and richly rewarding, as entertaining as any movie about archeology could be without a bullwhip.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for brief sensuality and partial nudity 

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James, and Ben Chaplin

Credits: Directed by Simon Stone, script by  Moira Buffini, based on a book by John Preston. A Netflix release (Jan. 29)

Running time: 1:53

“WandaVision” arrives on your SmartTV as a singular bit of whimsy mined from the intellectual property that is the comic book publisher turned studio, Marvel.

It’s a spoof of sitcoms from various periods, with Marvel characters shoved into say, something inspired by “Bewitched” or “The Brady Bunch” or what have you.

There are inside Marvel Universe jokes and parody TV commercials — in period style — advertising assorted products — toasters, toys — with a hint of Hydra about them.

Because underneath the sunny silliness that American TV has served up in sitcom form, there was always something sinister or at least a lot more real left unexamined and unspoken of — by Samantha and Darren or Rob and Laura or Carol and Tom Brady.

Disney provided three episodes for review, so the suggestions of something Stepford or Patrick McGoohanesque is just hinted at. The first three episodes don’t give us Kat Dennings or Randall Park. So I can’t speak much about where the “darkness” will go, other than repeating my usual gripes about the glacial pace of streaming series storytelling.

“WandaVision” is built around the happy and sitcom-ditzy relationship (“No wedding ring?”) of Wanda Maximoff aka “Scarlet Witch” and AI in the flesh Vision, a mating that…shouldn’t work. Well, in the era of no sex, separate twin beds and Mid Century Modern furniture, it just might.

Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany unleash their collective considerable charms on Wanda and Vision in a very black and white, very “Bewitched” opening episode, changing eras and TV sitcom styles as they (in later episodes) add a baby, experience life in suburban Westview and hide their identities from their nosey/funny sitcom neighbors.

Comic actress Kathryn Hahn was born too late to be Mary Tyler Moore’s “best friend next door” in “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” but she knocks her helpful/welcoming Agnes right out of the park. She’s sorry, for instance, that she didn’t “pop by” earlier.

“My mother-in-law was in town. So I wasn’t.“

Fred Melamed of “A Serious Man” and “In a World…” plays the obligatory tyrannical boss where Vision (masking his robotic looks) works, setting up many a “What do we actually PRODUCE here?” satiric jibes, and deflected probing questions about Vision’s background.

“You don’t have any skeletons in your closet, do you?”

“I don’t HAVE A skeleton, sir!”

This frothy tone and style is cute, and wears thin quickly enough. So does the whole “supernatural” housekeeping, cooking and child-gestation line of gags. Watch the long closing credits to see how much effort it took to get those dishes to float in the air and what-not.

The charity talent show where Vision and Wanda put on a magic act, with a drunken Vision showing off their supernatural powers as sober assistant Wanda has to think fast to “explain” the tricks to their Westview neighbors makes great use of comic talents neither actor got to demonstrate before their indentured servitude with Marvel, much less after.

Bettany’s Vision, playing the ukulele to “entertain” houseguests while commenting on the “nonsensical nature of the lyrics” of current Hit Parade products such as “Yakkety Yak” is just adorable.

But even with the Stepford organization of the charity wives, even with all the Hydra pro-consumerism parody ads (What you buy could control your life, or kill you…like an iPhone?), the pickings are pretty slim in the early episodes. And the series is only six installments long.

As each and every one of the six starts with a :55 second Marvel logo credit, and ends with “Mandalorian” length closing credits in the five-to-six minute range, there isn’t a whole lot of “content” in these sitcomish installments.

Throw in credits for whatever “WandaVision” series (time frame) they’re in this time out, and you’re looking at 20 minutes, with (weak, I have to say) parody commercials mixed in.

If you’re deep into this universe and have been keeping up on all the creator and staff commentary “explaining” what they’re aiming for, you’ll get more out of “WandaVision” than any casual viewer.

The end product is comedically wan, the double-takes broad and all the Olsen/Bettany/Hahn charm squeezed into tiny dabs of screen time and doesn’t add up to enough to make the whole worth the investment in time, even if you switch shows as the endless closing credits start.

And unlike with Marvel movies, that’s allowed.

MPA Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Kathryn Hahn, Kat Dennings, Randall Park

Credits: Created by Jac Schaeffer, directed by Matt Shakman. A Marvel Studios release on Disney+.

Running time: 6 episodes @25-30 minutes each