Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Brave

Brave
Disney/Pixar Animation Studios, 2012
Directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman
Starring: Kelly MacDonald, Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly (Voices)
Three and a half stars 

It's no secret that Pixar is the most consistently solid studio in Hollywood: ever since they burst onto the scene with 1995's Toy Story, the storytellers and animators at Pixar Animation Studios have challenged the boundaries of animation, served as a constant pillar for heartfelt and innovative storytelling, and created some of the most beloved films and franchises of our time. At their best, almost no one can touch them: the Toy Story trilogy is the most critically acclaimed film franchise of all time; Finding Nemo redefined what voice acting could be for an animated movie (thanks largely to Ellen DeGeneres who, despite Academy rules, should have won an Oscar for her work there); Monster's Inc. set a benchmark for boundless imagination that has rarely been duplicated; and Up and Wall-E, though I find both less consistently wonderful than the aforementioned titles, each began by flirting with silent film elements and delivered sizable emotional punches in the process. Hell, even when Pixar has fallen short of their customary originality and transcendentalism, the results (namely the Cars films and A Bug's Life) have stood up to (and often surpassed) the ones that Dreamworks or Disney (on their own) were making at the same time.

 It's also no secret that Pixar is a well-oiled machine, delivering one full-length feature every summer, no more, no less. When that one film captures the minds of audiences and critics alike, the result has often been the most well-reviewed film of the year, and recently, has even netted the studio a pair of Best Picture nominations. But when the result is a disappointment, like with last year's misguided Cars sequel, the wait between projects seems to stretch on for much longer than usual. Last summer, when Cars 2 became the first Pixar feature to earn a "rotten" rating from review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes (and the first to receive zero Oscar nominations), moviegoers and critics everywhere began speculating about what that first crack in the facade meant for the world's most consistent studio. Was the Pixar golden age at an end? Certainly no streak can last forever, but the moment Pixar's fell, the sense that they were untouchable, like they could do no wrong, was shattered, and critics began to realize that kicking them around was actually a viable option. This brings me, at last, to Brave, Pixar's latest full-length feature, the first to feature a heroine in the lead role, and unlucky number 13 in their oeuvre.

When the reviews for Brave started rolling in, even I was ready to speculate that Pixar was on the downswing. That's not because Brave has received the level of mixed to poor reviews that Cars 2 did, but because I have, over the course of my life, become so accustomed to seeing everything the studio touches turn to solid gold that seeing their projects get anything less than unanimously perfect reviews is still a bit of a shock. I took those reviews and I bought into the negative hype. But they say that the best way to enter a movie is with lowered expectations, and so I found myself as I sat down in the theater Sunday afternoon for my first viewing of Brave. Too often, by the time the credits roll on the year's most critically acclaimed films, I find myself wondering what I missed, where the great film I read about was, and why all the flaws that I noticed had been looked over; too often, my enjoyment of a film is sabotaged by the hype and by my own expectations. But after experiencing just over an hour and a half of what is, rather doubtlessly, the most gorgeous animated film ever put to celluloid, I had the opposite reaction: there hasn't been enough hype for Brave.

Perhaps it's because Brave doesn't quite reach the level of originality that has been pivotal to Pixar's past work, the level of how-the-hell-did-they-think-of-that brilliance that runs back and forth through films like Monsters or Toy Story. And indeed, while Brave does carry a ton of Pixar's trademark comedy and heart, its ideas are a bit more straightforward than those that have served as backbone for the studio's true masterworks. Perhaps the "good-but-not-great" critical response to Brave has been a result of people who just can't wrap their heads around the fact that, yes, we have kinda sorta seen this story play out before. But then again, each Pixar movie has, at its barest essentials, covered universal themes, and that's no different here. Just like Toy Story, this is a film about growing up, about the things we love that we take for granted right up until the moment that we almost lose them; like Nemo, it depicts a relationship between a parent and a child that is tested and reborn through struggle and adventure; and just like Toy Story 3 and Up and Wall-E and every other movie this studio has made, it has a handful of moments that hit tremendously hard.


On the whole, Brave is more of a throwback to classic Disney Princess movies than it is to the rest of Pixar's innovative track record, but that's not a bad thing. The movies it collects inspiration from, ranging from Snow White to Sleeping Beauty to Mulan, are all terrific, classics even, and Brave stands among them easily. Blending its baffling animation with a gorgeous score of Gaelic music and a terrific cast of characters (including a notably strong heroine in Merida, since its about time Pixar had a female lead), I can't recall enjoying many Pixar films more than Brave on first viewing (the Toy Story films and Finding Nemo excepted), nor have I been so thoroughly pleased, moved, or enraptured by any film I've seen so far this year. To me, it feels like a collision of the timelessness of the hand-drawn Disney classics and the fierce creativity and heart that has defined all of Pixar's films, movies that have carried me along from childhood, into adolescence, and finally onto adulthood: movies that are near and dear to my heart. Needless to say, that it fits among that legacy at all is praise enough for Brave; that it surpasses some of it is one of the highest commendations that can be given in modern film.



There has always been this sort of unspoken belief in the film industry that animated movies can't be "serious art," that these films are made for kids and they can't possibly measure up to the works that are showered with big awards recognition at the end of each year. But that's not true, and right from the beginning, Pixar Animation Studios have spent every one of their films proving that. Sure, these movies can be enjoyed by kids: the audience I saw this movie with was at least 60% children, and they all loved it. But I've always felt that Pixar is not aiming at the kids: they're aiming for the parents, they're aiming for the film buffs, and they're aiming for my generation, the generation that fell in love with the first Toy Story in the first days of its original release, the generation that has been there with them every step of the way, growing up alongside Pixar, their films, and their characters, and finding new pieces of wisdom every time we sit down to watch a new feature or revisit an old one. Because in every Pixar movie, there are themes or moments that can only be fully appreciated with age, with time, and with experience. It's a gift that we have an animation studio so thoroughly committed to making great films that are resonant across all age groups, and it's a testament to their high level of work that I have never seen two people rank their output in the same order. Some may say that the Cars 2 debacle and the less-than-perfect reviews for Brave are a sign that the studio is weakening, but on the contrary, I'd rank Brave as one of their most enjoyable films to date...if not one of their best, and that deserves celebrating.

*Note: As is customary with Pixar features, a short film plays before Brave. The wide-eyed wonder of this year's version, a beautifully rendered short called La Luna, is not to be missed, so make sure you show up in time to catch it - even if you have to sit through a bevy of terrible previews first.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Hide Away

Joules Films, 2012
Directed by Chris Eyre
Starring: Josh Lucas, James Cromwell, Ayelet Zurer
One and a half stars (out of four) 

I really wanted to love Hide Away, and that's not just because it was filmed in my hometown and is graced, on so many frames, by the gorgeous expanses of Grand Traverse Bay. No, I wanted to love Hide Away because I loved the concept and because Josh Lucas is one of the most likable and underrated actors working today. At very least, Lucas's talent isn't in doubt, as he does a terrible amount of heavy lifting in a film that, ultimately, renders his efforts as both a thankless task and a moot point. When we land on the shores of the Grand Traverse Peninsula at the outset of the film, we are introduced to Lucas (as a character who is never explicitly given a name). He's come to the docks to buy a boat, and, rather inexplicably, he's wearing a suit. We don't need the screenplay to tell us that he's running away from something, but it throws us a few bones anyway. "Are you divorced?" asks the guy who sells him a frighteningly decrepit sailboat. "No, I'm not," Lucas replies. Apparently these docks are a haven for divorced men, running away from their pasts and trying to regain some vestige of youth and happiness. Neither of those options seem very likely for Lucas's character, who seems thoroughly grounded in his own personal darkness from the first frame to the last, but he's still here for the same reason: to disappear.

As the film progresses, the "Young Mariner" (so Lucas is named in the credits, if you get that far) sets about repairing the boat, often to comically disastrous results. He is observed by a pair of other damaged souls (a solid James Cromwell and an ambiguously accented Ayelet Zurer) who will offer him personal and technical assistance over the course of the story, and he even gets a few interested glances from the cute girl who works at the local grocery store (maybe they should have just made a movie of Springsteen's "Queen of the Supermarket" instead...) Amidst all of this, Lucas sinks into mourning and succumbs to an alcohol-fueled depression, rebuilding the broken-down boat as he tries to rebuild his own heart, soul, and life. It's a nice idea, as crushing loss has led to many great works of art in the past. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one will relate to our young mariner: when we lose the things that are most important to us, it feels impossibly wrong to move on without them, and Lucas plays that kind of unendurable pain very well. But the screenplay betrays his efforts, and clunky editing only makes matters worse. A long, drawn out montage during the film's mid-section shows Lucas's descent into alcoholism, but it feels more like an anti-drinking commercial than it does a movie. Even the nice moments in there, like one where he reads out loud to imaginary children, or where he loses his temper with another phantom in his head, have their emotional force truncated by tonally awkward fade-to-black cuts. The segment ends up feeling both painful and eternal, and the only solace comes from the fact that the film improves somewhat after it's over.

There isn't a whole lot of dialogue in Hide Away, and Lucas gets to spend a good deal of the (mercifully brief) runtime onscreen by himself. But even with so many intimate moments, we don't really get a deep sense of who he is. The same holds true for the supporting characters, who each have a few shining moments, but seem thrown in to fulfill decidedly more calculated plot points. Listed as the "Ancient Mariner" in the credits, we're (probably) meant to believe that Cromwell and Lucas are essentially the same person, with the latter being on a 20-year delay, but that slice of symbolism only gets a few moments of clarity. Zurer's character ("Waitress," how exciting) is even more of a caricature, with the film's most cringe-worthy moment coming when she solicits a sexual encounter with Lucas's character late in the film, eliciting a brief flashback that shows us just what happened to his family (and a too-subtle hint as to why he feels guilty enough to run away from it).



To Lucas's credit, he pulls this all off very well, giving us a handful of emotionally resonant moments in a film that otherwise never feels the slightest bit organic. The "plot twist" with his family doesn't work though, and it mutes the impact of his struggle with himself. The screenplay oscillates randomly between not giving it's audience enough credit and expecting them to make huge leaps in logic without the slightest bit of exposition or clarification, and the result is a frustrating, muddled mess of a movie that never finds its feet and has no damn clue what it wants to be. It would have been better to leave Lucas as an enigmatic figure, suffering from a nameless pain, to leave the funeral suit he arrives in at the film's outset as the only physical link to his mourning and his past life; it would have been better to build on the strong onscreen relationship he shares with Cromwell in their few scenes together and to pretty much eliminate Zurer from the film altogether; it would have been better if this film had a discernible story arc. Sadly, the film and it's director Chris Eyre (with whom I am entirely unfamiliar) don't take the ideal or sensible paths here, opting instead for something more minimalistic and abstract. But you can't have meaningful minimalism without a fully formed idea to build it on, and despite some nice flashes of concept, the framework here is distinctly half-baked.

Hide Away sounds good on paper: man loses family, runs away and starts re-building a boat in a symbolic nod to his own disrepair, helping a number of other people find their way in the meantime, and thus finding the redemption he came here looking for. Sadly, Eyre's film is able to find the emotional nuance in very little of that. More dialogue, more characterization, less heavy-handed editing, and more time would have helped the material breathe a little (though I can't say I wanted another 20 or 30 minutes when the credits finally rolled), but as is, Hide Away is a sloppy pile of ideas that never coalesce into anything more powerful than the sum of their parts (and actually distinctly less). Minor characters (and alcoholism) disappear without a trace, relationships spring up from nowhere, without any vestige of believability, and then the film just ends. There's no climactic moment, no real resolution, and certainly no memorable message to take away when the credits roll. Instead, it feels like Eyre just got tired of making this movie, and while I can hardly blame him, he does a major disservice to his characters (and to Josh Lucas, in general) by never giving them the time to grow. Worse, he does a poor, shallow job of depicting a theme and struggle that should have been intrinsically devastating and viscerally moving; I just wish someone had told him.