Cinema: The Go-Getters

Thanksgiving weekend is upon us, and while temperatures continue to drop outside, in the crowded confines of your local multiplex it’s going to feel like summer never ended.  The difference – and it’s a crucial one – is that the studios have gotten their act together after coming up short several months ago.  Judging from some of the major releases opening in theaters just in time for Turkey Day, this trend shows no signs of receding

The happiest surprise of the bunch is Tangled, Disney’s breezy, proudly cartoonish retelling of Rapunzel.  Not only does the Mouse House’s fiftieth animated feature not suck, like I feared it would after watching the lackluster, by-the-numbers preview.  For my money it’s the best thing they’ve done without the word Pixar attached to it since they turned  George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue into the most dazzling segment in Fantasia 2000.  Its digitally rendered 3-D visuals pay homage to the studio’s rich, hand-drawn past without feeling like a pale Xerox of a product from the good ol’ days. (You could smell the mothballs in almost every frame of last year’s The Princess and the Frog).  And it’s unabashedly a musical, though the film’s marketing campaign has opted to omit this detail.

The movie’s finer qualities are not apparent at first.  There’s some business with smart-mouthed bandit Flynn Rider (voiced with Nathan Fillionesque gusto by Zachary Levi, star of the TV show Chuck)  that made me wonder how many times these animators plan to recycle Aladdin‘s character archetype.  But directors Nathan Greno (co-writer of Meet the Robinsons) and Byron Howard (co-director of Bolt) are after bigger fish here.  They intend to capture some of the magic we associate with the studio’s very best fairy tales and give it a fresh, slightly irreverent 21st Century spin.  Through their cheerfully skewed lens, Tangled plays like Sleeping Beauty with pratfalls (and boy, do I mean this a compliment).

After stealing a priceless tiara from the castle in the film’s unspecified kingdom, our conceited Public Enemy #1, who’s also the film’s narrator, finds a hiding place from the king’s guards in an isolated tower.  He finds out too late that it’s not abandoned (cue the frying pan to the head).  When he regains consciousness, Flynn meets yet another in a long line of independent-minded Disney princesses.  As voiced by Mandy Moore, Rapunzel makes for an endearing case of stunted development and low self-esteem…hidden under a 75-foot-long golden mane.

Like every dewy-eyed heroine before her, she yearns for Something More, in this case to find the source of those faraway lights that light up the sky every year on her birthday.  Ever since she could remember she’s been holed up in that doorless spire under the care of a dark-haired woman she calls Mother.  But Gothel (Tony-winning actress Donna Murphy) has her own reasons for keeping Rapunzel locked up (think Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in Stardust), and they have to do with her hair’s curative powers.  Murphy turns Gothel into one of Disney’s more interesting villains because she conceals her evil ways with fake kindness.  The passive aggressive nature of their relationship fuses the patronizing dynamic between Judge Frollo and Quasimodo in Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame with a dash of the delicious sibling rivalry that Joan Crawford and Bette Davis brought to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (minus the dead rat).

With Gothel away, Rapunzel bargains with Flynn to take her (and Pascal, her pet chameleon) to see those mystery lights in exchange for the tiara, and this is when Tangled becomes a fleet-footed adventure in the vein of Romancing the Stone.  My favorite showdown is a swordfight that pits Flynn against Maximus, a duty-bound royal stallion with a goofy demeanor that recalls Mr. Horse from Nickelodeon’s Ren & Stimpy Show.  Did I mention that Flynn is wielding Rapunzel’s frying pan in this sequence?

For all its good-natured gags, though, Tangled surpasses expectations for its unexpected depth of feeling.  The romance that develops between the lead characters feels considerably less formulaic than in other recent Disney efforts (cue my punching bag, The Princess and the Frog), and it culminates in an act so selfless that I instantly forgave the film for ripping off the climax from one of the studio’s beloved early-nineties gems.  With their nimble genre-hopping, Greno and Howard get to have their cake and eat it too. They have made a wonderful movie.

Former Disney princess Anne Hathaway delivers one of the year’s best performances in the Viagra-salesman comedy Love and Other Drugs.  Playing self-defined “drug slut” Maggie Murdock, she’s a bundle of contradictions, a high-maintenance commitmentphobe who volunteers her time to take busloads of senior citizens to Canada so they can get their meds cheap.  She meets her match in the form of all-American go-getter Jamie Randall, an ambitious Pfizer representative peddling antidepressants to overworked doctors.  (A genial Jake Gyllenhaal reteams with his Brokeback Mountain co-star.)

You get the sense Hathaway, whose character shows early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, can’t wait to explore Murdock’s many layers, if only director Edward Zwick would let her.  (My head still throbs from that self-important diatribe that was Blood Diamond.)  Some anti-HMO jabs aside, it’s a welcome change of pace for the director of Glory and The Last Samurai to step off the soapbox in his latest effort, which he based on Jamie Reidy’s nonfiction book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman.  Comedy, however, doesn’t turn out to be his strong suit; he is trying way too hard.  The film’s first half hour, which follows Randall’s rise from retail clerk to drug sales rep, plays like a shrill sitcom with an A-list cast.  It’s just sad, for instance, to see the late Jill Clayburgh wasted here as Randall’s mom.  I kept thinking of what a more comically astute filmmaker like Mike Judge could have done with this material.

Once Hathaway’s character enters the picture, Love and Other Drugs becomes infinitely more engaging.  There’s a frank sexuality to Murdock’s affair with Randall, which Zwick films in explicit detail, that is very rare for American mainstream cinema.  Such a degree of intimacy results in some strong, nuanced work from Gyllenhaal and Hathaway.  Their characters’ scorpion dance defies categorization, and the young actors hold your attention throughout, even when it becomes clear Zwick intends to shoehorn this complex relationship into a neatly packaged romance.

Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle fares much better in giving cinematic life to real-life events in his man-against-nature tale 127 Hours.  Anchored by a phenomenal performance from James Franco,  the film chronicles the harrowing ordeal extreme sports enthusiast Aron Ralston endured during a 2003 hiking trip when he took a tumble into a Utah canyon ridge…and a boulder landed on his right forearm.  What initially appeared to be a fairly minor mishap turned into a fight for his life when Ralston realized the stubborn rock had pinned him against the canyon wall.  (The title of his 2004 book on which the film based is Between a Rock and a Hard Place.)

Boyle’s hyperactive directing style is perfectly suited to tell this story.  He shoots what becomes the sole location for the bulk of the film’s running time from every imaginable angle.  He also makes inspired use of the split screen, initially as a stylistic device, and then to explore Ralston’s inner mind as he contends with the possibility that this desolated ridge might turn out to be his tomb.  It goes without saying that 127 Hours is not for the squeamish or fainthearted.  When Ralston decides he must do the unthinkable in order to survive, Boyle doesn’t look away.  He goes a little too far when he recreates Ralston’s hallucinations concerning his family, thus giving the film a sentimental streak it could have done without.

You can’t talk about the upcoming Oscar race, though, without mentioning Franco, who this year has proven himself to be one of the most gifted actors of his generation.  As the only character onscreen for almost all of 127 Hours‘s running time, it falls on his shoulders to carry this film, and he rises to the challenge with grace and a welcome dose of gallows humor.  He gives adventurous moviegoers one more reason to be thankful for on this better-than-usual fall movie season.

Category: CINEMA