Cinema: The Four Films of Christmas

For such a beloved holiday, Christmas can sure be a lot of work.  Whether it’s decorating that seven-foot-plus pine tree, dedicating and sending all those greeting cards (virtual and tangible), or scissoring away roll after roll of gift-wrapping paper, by the time December 25th gets here you might be feeling ready to take a vacation from your holiday.  Hollywood will entice you with visions of Jack Black fending off Lilliputians, the promise of some good-natured “I will be watching you” Robert De Niro/Ben Stiller barbs, or, perish the thought, the prospect of a middling Hanna-Barbera cartoon transformed into a synthetic 3-D kiddie ride.  You, beleaguered reader, deserve better options, so let me steer you in the direction of four movies that alternately embody and subvert the spirit of the season.

Your December calendar is incomplete if you haven’t penciled in The King’s Speech among your moviegoing plans.  I’m a stickler for taking notes during movies (I shudder when I contemplate where I would be without them), but I hardly touched my pen as I was seeing this impeccably produced chronicle of the unlikely friendship that develops between George VI (aka Queen Elizabeth’s dad) and speech therapist Lionel Logue in the years leading up to World War II.  I became so enveloped in the story that I didn’t want to take my eyes off the screen for a second.

The film starts in 1925, when the monarch-to-be is still the Duke of York.  As George V’s second son,  Albert doesn’t have to worry about following in his father’s footsteps.  He does, however, have to address hundreds of people at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.  The microphone looms menacingly, and the look of sheer terror on his face leads to frustration as he tries to form the words but they…just…won’t…escape…from…his…mouth.  As played – flawlessly – by Colin Firth, the royal stutterer’s pained expression reduces this historical figure down to human size.  Our hearts go out to him, and the film transcends its period-piece trappings to become something far more universal.

The best doctors in the land each take a turn, and fail, at curing Albert of his stammer.  Enter the Duchess of York (Helena Bonham Carter), who is advised to seek out an Australian miracle worker for her husband’s condition.  A reluctant Albert agrees to meet Logue (Geoffrey Rush), but his unorthodox methods like, say, calling the future leader by his childhood nickname (“Bertie”), hardly start things off on the right foot.  Such cheek!  He doesn’t need an immigrant to help him speak properly.  After George V (an unrecognizable Michael Gambon) dies in 1936, though, Albert’s older brother Edward (Memento’s Guy Pearce) takes the throne, but he abdicates less than a year later when faced with the choice of marrying twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson or staying in power.  Uh-oh.

It all leads to the titular event, in which the king must address the nation – by radio – about Britain’s impending war with Germany.  By this point, The King’s Speech starts feeling more and more like a thriller, and we wonder whether or not Bertie will be able to pull this off.  To say the film is an actor’s showcase is an understatement.  Bonham Carter’s dead-on portrayal of the Queen Mum reveals a steely resolve beneath her prim exterior, and Rush is simply phenomenal as the man who becomes Albert’s life coach.  The real standouts here, though, are the men behind the camera.  Hooper (HBO’s John Adams), has a knack for making history come alive with an immediacy and poignancy that is all too rare in the genre.  His boxy framing and composition, as well as some tight editing, kept me riveted throughout.  And screenwriter David Seidler (Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker), who has been trying to get this film made for decades, writes dialogue that’s blessedly unshowy.  The royals, in his point of view, are every family, no longer the untouchable icons covered to death on the History Channel.  His pet project comes to vibrant life in a way that should quell most naysayers’ elitist misgivings.  No ifs, ands or b-b-buts about it: This is a great movie.

Hooper’s not the only filmmaker revitalizing a well-worn genre.  Joel and Ethan Coen’s deeply satisfying True Grit, not so much a remake as it is a more faithful adaptation of Charles Portis’s Western novel than John Wayne’s 1969 version, shows that even when they’re picking up a paycheck, the directors of No Country for Old Men sure know how to spin a yarn.

The film begins with a haunting shot of a body lying outside a Fort Smith, Arkansas saloon on a snowy night.  That was Frank Ross, shot by his farmhand Tom Chaney when he tried to stop a bar fight, and it’s up to his daughter Mattie (14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld in a star-making performance) to come to town to settle his affairs. “If you would like to kiss him, it would be all right,” the mortician tells her upon first viewing her father’s remains; when the character utters the line a second time, you can almost hear the Coens giggling behind the camera.

In one of the film’s best scenes, Mattie haggles her way into getting more money for Frank’s horses.   She plans to avenge his murder, you see, and to that end, she attempts to hire U.S. marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges, making it look so easy).  The crusty, hard-drinking lawmaker brushes off the girl’s proposal, but eventually agrees to her request.  When the one-eyed gunslinger hears that pompous Texas ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon, all hoity-toity bluster) is also hunting down Chaney for an unrelated crime, the two men join forces and decide to leave Mattie behind.  Nothing doing, says the tenacious whippersnapper, and in another wonderful sequence, she and her pony dive into the river to join the trackers on the opposite side.

What appears at first glance to be a year-end prestige film turns out to be a surprisingly lighthearted adventure peppered with PG-13-level displays of Coens-style violence.  The filmmakers have a ball giving their characters highly quotable dialogue, and in Mattie they have found a heroine worthy of Fargo‘s Marge Gunderson.  True Grit is not quite on the same level as that film, but after this and their very personal predecessor A Serious Man, it shows the Minnesota natives blossoming into more compassionate storytellers.  More power to them.

If you were one of the viewers who found Tron Legacy (unseen by me) underwhelming, take a chance on Monsters, an atmospheric alien movie that plays like an arthouse cross between Cloverfield and District 9.  In writer-director Gareth Edwards’s alternate reality, the northern part of Mexico has been quarantined after large tentacled creatures from Europa, Jupiter’s moon, crash-land there.  American photojournalist Andrew Kaulder (TV actor Scoot McNairy), covering how the U.S. government’s involvement in containing the extraterrestrials has affected the country’s residents (or, as he calls, it, “photographing tragedy”), is pressured to escort Samantha (Whitney Able), his publisher’s daughter, back to the U.S.  After missing a ferry that would have led them to safety, they opt to cross the “infected zone” in order to reach American soil.

Working with a very limited budget, Edwards, who also wrote and photographed the film, limits the viewers’ initial exposure to the aliens.  Instead, he relies on ominous shots of overturned trains, destroyed buildings, and ubiquitous helicopters to help create an unsettling mood.  Even though it’s obvious he’s not very familiar with Spanish – most of the signs and Mexican TV news coverage are in an awkward Spanglish mix – he’s obviously intent in capturing the flavor of rural Central American life (besides Mexico, Edwards shot in Belize, Costa Rica and Guatemala).  The way he integrates alien iconography in his south-of-the-border landscape is endlessly inventive.  Monsters loses steam in the final third, and in an unfortunate scene makes an obvious parallel between the interplanetary aliens and the illegal ones who cross our border every day.  For the most part, however, Edwards resists the temptation to turn Monsters into an issue movie, and in the film’s darkly lyrical final scene, he gives viewers a payoff that makes the characters’ perilous journey more than worth our while.

The King’s Speech might be the best film being released in theaters this weekend, but the most fun I’ve had at the movies in months comes courtesy of Bad Santa screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa.  In their hysterical feature debut I Love You Phillip Morris they take Jim Carrey where he has never ventured before.  The versatile comedian plays real-life con artist/jailbird Steven Russell, who starts out as a Virginia Beach-based policeman and devoted family man and in the course of the film’s outrageous chain of events undergoes quite the character arc.

Early on in life, Russell’s parents tell him he was adopted at birth, which, in developing a sense of identity, feels like having the rug pulled out from under him (there’s plenty of falling in the film).  When he realizes he can use his resources at the police department to track down his biological mother, he turns up on her front porch; it’s safe to say the visit does not go well.  He packs his bags and moves his wife Debbie (Knocked Up‘s Leslie Mann) and their kids to Texas, where, after a car accident, he decides to live his life as an openly gay man.  (Oh yes, you see Carrey having wild, uninhibited gay sex.  Woo-hoo!)

South Beach, here he comes!  Russell soon discovers being a fashionable SoBe queen is damn expensive, so unbeknownst to Jimmy, his boyfriend at the time (Rodrigo Santoro, having a ball sashaying down Lincoln Road with Carrey), he starts ripping people off.  The law’s not buying Russell’s nervous breakdown routine, so off to the state pen he goes.  This is where he meets the title character (Ewan McGregor), a gentle soul doing time for keeping a rental car way past its due date.  The bracingly unpredictable love story that follows plays like Brokeback Mountain as reimagined by There’s Something About Mary‘s Bobby and Peter Farrelly.

What’s miraculous about Ficarra and Requa’s approach to the subject matter is that it never trivializes Russell and Morris’s relationship for a cheap laugh (though there are plenty of those here).  I Love You Phillip Morris‘s  un-PC irreverence never stands in the way of its tender romance, a bond that will have you rooting for its mismatched couple in the face of insurmountable obstacles.  I was in whacked-out bliss from first frame to last.

I Love You Phillip Morris holds AMC Sunset Place and Regal South Beach Cinemas captive beginning Christmas Day.  The King’s Speech also opens at area theaters the same day.  True Grit is already playing in wide release.  Monsters begins a one-week run at the Coral Gables Art Cinema this Friday.  For showtimes go to www.gablescinema.com.  May your Christmas be filled with good cheer and the buzz that comes from seeing great cinema.

Tags: featured

Category: CINEMA