Side Effects

Drugs and depression. Steven Soderbergh takes both subjects head- on in Side Effects, a film that examines how the lives of a group of individuals inevitability become tied together by mental illness and chance.

Emily Taylor’s (Rooney Mara) life is on the brink of total collapse. After waiting four years for her husband to get out of prison, her depression finally overtakes her. She ends up in the Emergency Room after a failed suicide attempt. Here she encounters Doctor Jonathan Banks (Jude Law).

Jude Law doesn’t seem a likely psychiatrist, but it doesn’t matter, he pulls it off and all the other characters fall into line around him; although Jude Law is the heart of the film, Soderbergh is undeniably at the helm here. He is the brain. Soderbergh’s characters habituate their New York City with 100% believability, believability so intense in fact, it is haunting.

The viewer envies the characters and their glamorous lives, even more as they destroy themselves. The viewer needs to remind themself that these characters do not exist, and this is a fiction, be it an excellently written one by Scott Z. Burns. As a screenwriter I watch this film as a lesson in how to build intersecting plot lines.

Banks comes across as a doctor legitimately interesting in helping people, so when Emily claims to be living in a depressive fog Banks takes on the task of trying his best to help her. Emily’s condition begins to improve, but in the midst of the improvement tragedy strikes, and it threatens to bring down both patient and doctor.

As a psychiatrist Dr. Banks did what psychiatrists do, he prescribed drugs. Then more drugs. Then even more drugs. Even though it seems absurd at times just how many medications are being dolled here, for anyone who has ever experienced psychiatric treatment, they will realize that these procedures are standard. So is this a jab at psychiatry’s habit of throwing handfuls of pills at people in mental distress? However mind-boggling it may be that the treatment for nearly every mental condition is medication, this film doesn’t come across as serious critique of psychiatric drugs, or the pharmaceutical industry.

There is a fog covering the whole film, figuratively in the melancholic tone, and literally in the shades of grey of the cinematography. This fog further complicates an already complex plot, but once you can piece together what has occurred, as I did hours afterwards, you will not be able to shake this film’s dark presence.

In the end it is not drug use that is being criticized here, but rather the avaricious soul-sucking void, the characters' needs to engulf their surroundings, and the sociopathic culture that made them this way.

Amazing 9.5/10

Love

In Love, a film by William Eubanks (2011), lone astronaut Captain Lee Miller is manning the International Space Station when suddenly he loses communication with Earth. At first the disconnection seems to be a technical glitch, but Lee examines and reexamines his gear; he realizes that the problem is more serious. Something has happened and Earth is no longer transmitting at all. When a recorded message finally does reach Lee he is infuriated. He thinks he has been abandoned, but his rage subsides as he realizes the true consequence of his situation.

Alone on the space station for 6 years supplies begin to dwindle, life support systems reach critically low levels, isolation takes its toll. Hypnotically, Eubanks takes separate segments of time and forces them together to form something telling, a transformation that is forced by chance. The mere unlikely probability that human kind even exists is contrasted against the alternative, the much more likely outcome that it doesn’t.

Eubanks’ scale of comparison, this timeline of humanity is limited and goes back only as far as the civil war, a mere drop in the bucket of human history, and a moment of unregistered minusculity if evaluated on a universal scale. Still, even though the comparison could have been vaster, the point is made, and the film leaves the viewer with an aesthetically original and brilliant closing, even if the film's title Love is as unoriginal it gets.

7/10

Ender's Game

For any film fanatic that also happens to be an Orson Scott Card fan, Ender’s Game was the type of film that warranted the hanging of a calendar on the wall and blacking out the days until the film's November 1^st release date. I was this excited for months about the film, and yes, I saw it opening night. But after having seen it, I say with dismay that although the admission may not have been a total waste of money, it may have been better spent on a few drinks at a bar, or on a Shake Shack dinner (for the non- drinkers). I was just so unexpectedly un-enthralled that I’m still in shock.

The film opens with Ender Wiggin as his parent’s third child in a world where thirds are not highly regarded, yet a prestigious military school’s administrators monitor Ender’s life via hidden cameras, and through this observation witness the potential genius within Ender. But whatever they notice, it is not shown to the audience.

Nonetheless Ender leaves his family behind to study at this elite training school where plans are secretly being made; Ender will train to become the next great commander of the Earth fleet. While at battle school Ender meets the legendary Mazer Rackham, a famous Maori warrior whom singlehandedly defeated the aliens previously, when they attacked Earth. Rackham’s job now is to mentor Ender, to prepare him for the greatest battle of his life.

Director Hood’s rendition of Ender’s Game does just adequate justice to the original plot of the book. I pined for a grittier, R-rated Prometheus or District 9-ish kind of rendition, and instead I got something related more to Will Smith’s Independence Day. 

There were no gaps left in the timeline of the film, gaps necessary to explain how Ender could possibly have become a fleet commander at all. As Director Hood portrays it, the audience sees Ender go from cadet to commander overnight, almost literally. No human past, present, or future, (not even Ender) could pull that off.

Blasé scenes are followed by descriptions of grandeur that made me wonder if I had just watched the same scene as the military commanders. In front of a group of new recruits Ender is praised by Officer Graff (Harrison Ford) for his intelligence, a set-up for later peer torment? But the intelligence Ender shows here is hardly praiseworthy. It’s just a smart-alecky remark about zero gravity. Later, when Ender is confronted by a gang of boys, whom he ends up defeating, the fight is not convincing, yet again, administrators swoon. This type of device, apathetic scene followed by glorious praise occurs over and over throughout the film. Descriptions of awe are purveyed when no actual awe has taken place.

Asa Butterfield's unmoving performance is largely responsible for the film’s failure. He is not a convincing Ender, and so all his examples of greatness seem staged. Every time Ender does something “miraculous” and is praised for it, it’s reminiscent of the medieval age; a king’s steward dolloping out praise at every instance to keep his majesty satisfied. Harrison Ford is also pretty terrible. Come to think of it, pretty much all the acting, except Ben Kinglsey’s is bad.

Errata: Ender spends significant amounts of time whining about the administration blocking his email account. What does this have to do with the plot? Nothing. Since when do starships send and receive email? They don’t. There’s ansible technology in this world people! (machines capable of instantaneous or superluminal communication) Starships are way past “email.”

Overall, I’d say Ender’s Game was only kind of bad, but it so totally not awesome.

6.5/10

A Hijacking

To continue with the theme of hijacked ships this week, this is a review I wrote for another blog on August 5, 2013.

Quick, precise, and severe, the film spends little time on the mechanics of how the pirates actually board. This is not an action film. We learn that a high-speed boat has approached and boarded effortlessly, that’s it. More important to the film is what happens while the pirates are onboard.

The first thing the pirates do, even before starting negotiations for money, is demand food. The ship’s cook, played brilliantly by Danish actor Pilou Asbaek, becomes the pirate’s gopher, and an ad-hoc negotiator between the pirates and the ship’s owners.

Conditions onboard are miserable. Shocking even. The cook and 2 other crewmen are kept in a small closet for weeks, four other crewmembers below deck. They’re not allowed out to relive themselves in a toilet; they must use a corner of the room. My training on ships did not include images like these. There was no training about how to interact with maniacs with automatic weapons.

The job of casting the actors that play the pirates is ingenious. All the actor’s performances are in the Somali language (I think). Their interactions with the ship’s crew are so authentic that I’m guessing none of these men were trained actors. Probably just local Somali men recruited by the casting director, but I can’t verify this. If they were actors, they’re the best I’ve ever seen.  

Contentious negotiations between the ship’s owners and the pirates leave questions. The hijacking ends without incident, almost, but the negotiations take months. Could the ship’s owner have done more? Given in to the pirate’s demands sooner? Gotten the crew home faster? Undoubtedly questions that need to be asked of the real hijackings that take place routinely in the Gulf, where we get little more than a single paragraph in the news about some, and no more.

Errata: There is no military presence here. It seems unlikely that a cargo ship would be held hostage for months without attracting some kind of military presence. The fact that the all the negotiations themselves are handled by the shipping company, and are not handed over to the military entirely seems implausable, especially when compared to the Greengrass version where the military handles everything.

9.5/10

Captain Phillips

The best thing about Paul Greengrass’ new action thriller Captain Phillips is that it is actually about Captain Phillips. No, this is not a joke.

Phillips is an adept ship captain for the huge shipping conglomerate Maersk. He assumes his role aboard a freighter docked in Oman bound for Kenya, and this route is straight through the Gulf of Aden, past Somali, the most pirate infested piece of ocean in the world. I assume most viewers entering the theatre already know that this film is about pirates attacking a ship. The film does fulfill this expectation in the first act, but from there everything that happens is as unpredictable as is possible to be unpredictable.

First of all, kudos to the trailer’s producers and marketers for selling this film as a conflict totally based upon on the hijacking of a ship. While this is the first major conflict of the film, it is not the only one. As the ship’s hijacking unfolds, and errors occur, whole tangential series of events and complications are created. Greengrass takes these tangents to a place we never could have expected, and all of a sudden we have an unexpected thrilling crisis of a film.

Overall it’s a simple story, but it’s so creative in its originality and unfolding that I was on the edge of my seat the whole film. Since it’s based on a true story I guess Greengrass shouldn’t get all the credit. A lot of the credit must go to one the two scriptwriters, Richard Phillips. He adapted this script from the book that was based on true events.

Second of all, there is a storyline involving the Somali’s and the world they come from. It was a great idea to include this. We are shown that Somali pirates are not just pure evil, but are in many ways forced into the acts of piracy they undertake. In a extremely revealing scene Phillips and Muse, the head pirate, reveal how higher levels of bureaucracy influences both their lives, they both have bosses they say.

In a moment of cinematic excellence, Greengrass actually makes the viewer feel sympathy for Muse despite the fact that he is a maniacal, automatic weapon toting killer who hijacks ships. Sir Greengrass, very well done. 

There has been a concern over this film’s release though, and this raises the question that all art needs to consider: do the events of the film/artwork that declare themselves as true have an obligations to actually be true? Or can anyone declare anything and make into a work in itself?

This though comes from media attacks on the real Captain Phillips. According to The Guardian, apparently Captain Phillips himself was not the hero he is portrayed as in the film.  He was a notoriously difficult captain to work for, and by sailing too close to Somalia some say he was the cause of the whole incident. Debate aside, very good film.

9/10

Having transvered this section on ocean myself I feel a particular attraction to hijacking movies, and so I had to compare the Captain Phillips to Tobias Lindholm’s 2012 feature A Hijacking. Lindholm’s film was fantastic but in Lindholm’s take the onboard antics of the pirates are the focus. The Somalis were portrayed as plot devices. They reminded me of the riverboat’ crew à la Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; they were there to serve their purposes as savages, and that’s it. So Unlike Greengrass’ portrayal, in A Hijacking we hate the pirates.

No subtitles (expect Danish to English), no frills, no action sequences, no military, just pure, raw, compelling filmmaking, with the ship’s cook as the main character played brilliantly by Pilou Asbæk. I was worried that Greengrass saw the Lindholm film, which was an indie film on a tight budget, and decided remake it as blockbuster. I can say with complete confidence that these are two completely different films with only two real things in common, Somali pirates and ship hijackings.

A hijacking: Highly recommended!