Joy

Jennifer Lawrence is the Robert De Niro to David O. Russell's Martin Scorsese. A muse, a great collaborator, and a splendid actress, she is the main reason to see this unevenly textured comedy about business hardships. Written by Annie Mumolo and Russell, it chronicles the rise and fall and rise of a woman named Joy, loosely based on the real Joy Mangano, who invented a self-wringing mop.
Russell makes movies in which the funny coexists uneasily with the difficult, and what I liked best about Joy is that it dwells on the tribulations of a business venture. It's her family tribulations that feel forced. Joy lives in a small home with her two kids and her depressed mother (the hilariously lost Virginia Madsen), who spends years in bed watching soap operas. In the basement lives her estranged husband (Edgar Ramírez), whose dream in life is to be a crooner. Her difficult dad (Robert De Niro, at his boorish best) is left on her doorstep by his third wife, who doesn't want him any more. Why she endures them is anybody's guess. Even though the actors are all on their game, this feels like a bad underground sitcom.
An unnecessary voiceover narration provided by Diane Ladd, who plays Joy's grandmother, explains that Joy was always an inventor and a doer as a child, and so when she finds herself struggling as an adult, she wonders whatever happened to her that she did not fulfill her potential. Unfortunately, we don't get to see it, but we do get some hints: the dismissiveness of an insensitive father and the demands of motherhood and divorce. Basically, what women have to go through when they want to do more in life than load clothes into a washer. Joy attempts to be a satirical feminist fairy tale but it is too disheveled to be a satire and too undisciplined to be a fairy tale. This makes it interesting, even if it's not quite successful.
One day, as she's invited on the yacht of her dad's rich new girlfriend (Isabella Rosellini, having great fun as a villainness), a spill occurs that Joy has to clean up, and she has an epiphany that leads to the invention of her non-humiliating mop.
This is where the movie gets its thorns. Rarely do we see American movies that show the agonies of running a business. In fact, rarely do we see movies where women run a business. Here we see what Joy struggles against: jealousy, incomprehension, negativity, distrust, inexperience, contempt, shady people. A plague of reasons conspire against her as she tries to make her venture work. Her family is a hindrance, she is out of her league, but she is not a quitter. The dramatic ups and downs, many of them contrived and telegraphed too soon, require a focused and transparent actress, and Lawrence comes to the rescue. She is magnetic and totally genuine. The scene where she finally gets to peddle her product on QVC is Oscar material. Joy freezes in front of the TV cameras, but then she hits her stride and finds the conviction of someone who truly believes in her product with the energy and desperate need of a saleswoman. As in all her performances, Lawrence is capable of signaling vulnerability, backbone and maturity, and of making her arc -- her passage through time and experience -- feel completely real. Never a false note in her.
Bradley Cooper appears briefly as the boss from the channel that orders product from her, and they have such good chemistry that their scenes are the best in the movie. I liked the frustrations mounting on Joy simply because it is refreshing to see them. When she loses all hope, she tells her little daughter that it is not true that opportunity is there for the taking. That there are people and circumstances that make sure that opportunity is snatched away from you and crushed. It's a bitter pill to fail so transparently in front of your child. A clunky fairy tale with little sugarcoating, Joy is a movie about the frustration of not being able to do something creative that you know is good, where the system that keeps telling you that you can be and do whatever you aim for is the same system that is completely indifferent or even poisonous to your struggles when you try. Failure is what feels most real in this movie. Even if if the fairy tale conceit is not fully worked out, Russell once again summons a uniquely contrarian tone and energy to his prickly comedies. Joy is a feel good movie that is not a feel good movie at all, which is fine.

American Sniper

My first gasp of disbelief came early into this movie, when sniper Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is about to shoot an Iraqi boy who is carrying an explosive device. He has him in his sight and is about to pull the trigger when, CUT, all of a sudden Chris is a little boy, hunting with his dad in the Texas woods. A leisurely flashback then introduces us to young Chris. Born into a God fearing family, with a father who looks like the Brawny paper towels guy, Chris defends his little brother from a bully at school -- an American hero in the making.
This cut is one of the most dishonest, dispiriting choices I have ever seen in a film, and it happens at the very beginning. Director Clint Eastwood eventually goes back and shows how Kyle finishes the deed, but the damage is done. This morally complicated killing, an opportunity to show the savagery of war and what it makes people do, has been scrubbed by a bath of homespun Americana. Once our heart strings have been tugged, it's hard for the audience to think that the guy who was forced to make this choice is anything but a hero, because we just saw how courageously he defends his little brother, how, at a tender age, he steals a Bible from church, how he grows up to be a rodeo cowboy, how he feels the call of duty at the news of attacks against US embassies abroad.
We are not to entertain any doubts that he is righteous.
I do not doubt that Chris Kyle was an outstanding soldier who served his country well. I respect his sacrifice and admire his marksmanship. I am not going to discuss U.S. foreign policy or get into partisan politics. My problem is with simplistic narratives like this movie, which pervade the culture thanks to the unhealthy fixation with heroism that afflicts this country. This fixation is directly related to the insane fetish for guns, which is also in evidence in the film.
It's bad enough that we are the only country on Earth that has an industry devoted almost exclusively to the manufacture and exporting of mind-numbing superhero and guns and explosions movie franchises. But when these childish narratives are used to coat historical events, such as the Iraq war, our very tragic, messy, complicated, hellish, costly (and out of sight, out of mind) foreign wars are sanitized and banalized with the mythology of comic books. This is scary because people eat it up. And people eat it up because it is in the nature of movies to rouse us to emotion. Movies are extremely powerful. They affect and influence us consciously and, even more strongly, subconsciously. It's never "only a movie".
Had Eastwood stayed in the moment, had we seen this man shoot a boy carrying an explosive within the first minutes, we would have had more of a truthful grasp on the hard realities of war, and the unspeakable things it makes people do, on both sides. However, the American narrative of heroism is rarely concerned with the unspeakable (unless it's perpetrated by the enemy), or the gray areas, or moral dilemmas. It is concerned with aggrandizement. I say American because many heroic stories are deeply complex: take your pick of Shakespeare. In other countries immensely heroic journeys can happen to two characters in an apartment. The oversimplification of the world into good guys and bad guys is a uniquely American phenomenon.
American Sniper is based on the true story of a man appropriately nicknamed The Legend, the deadliest sniper in US military history. Kyle was brought up in this very culture of heroism and gun worship and so this narrative is natural and organic to him, as it is to millions of viewers who have these kind of stories in their cultural DNA. The filmmakers then further shape Kyle's story into a mythical entertainment, and, in the name of dramatization, sink into many gross simplifications.
For starters, the four tours of duty that Kyle served in Iraq are used as a backdrop to an appalling mano a mano between Kyle and his Iraqi counterpart, a sniper who had been an Olympic gold medalist. By the time, long into the movie, when it became apparent that Eastwood was going to make this "duel in the sun" the climax of the film, my disbelief had turned to disgust. Not only is the Iraq war boiled down to a pissing contest between two equally proficient dudes, but the vulgar, cartoony choice of showing the bullet as it travels out of Kyle's rifle cheapens and disrespects every sacrifice every American soldier has made, and every life that has been lost or maimed, Iraqi and American. It turns the war into a video game.
Zero Dark Thirty is similar: one determined tough cookie nails Osama Bin Laden. Must be Wonder Woman.
I don't see how it helps American soldiers that the rest of society, which is deliberately shielded from the carnage of our wars, should perceive their sacrifice as something out of a video game. If it is a game, how can anyone take it seriously? The Vietnam war ended in part because it was shown week after week in the evening news. The public was appalled. In our time, we have seen little if any footage of the wars, we don't honor the dead as they arrive or adequately help the damaged as they struggle, let alone consider the people whose countries we invade.
Cinematically, there is nothing in American Sniper that has not been done more powerfully and effectively in other war movies, most recently, The Hurt Locker. There is nothing insightful except the tepid introduction of the topic of post traumatic stress disorder. Eastwood is heavy handed on the battle scenes but timorous on the subject of PTSD, which has been notoriously underestimated by the Pentagon. In this movie it looks like every soldier is getting all the help they can get.
Eastwood flirts with the idea of challenging Kyle's gung-ho patriotism but shies away from articulating a powerful contrasting viewpoint, a glaring omission, considering that Iraq was fought under false pretenses. Instead of his Iraqi counterpart, why not confront Kyle with an Army buddy who has real qualms about the quagmire? The one soldier who intimates doubt is shot two minutes later and Kyle thinks he was killed because he stopped believing in the mission. His relentless hero complex is borderline pathological, but the movie does not have the balls to go there. That would have been a far more interesting film, but not so pristinely heroic.
An evil Iraqi called The Butcher, a real life character, is a sadistic torturer and enforcer, but he has no American counterpart. Eastwood includes an indolent American soldier, but there are no homicidal sadists or the kind of unhinged seekers of violence that lurk in every army, including this one. The movie cherry picks the liberties it takes with reality.
Only one remarkable scene summarizes what an invasion by a foreign army feels like. An Iraqi whose house is searched and taken over by Kyle and his soldiers invites them to eat because it is a Muslim holiday. We see the soldiers feasting at the table as if they were right at home, noisily bantering in English, oblivious to how invasive, insensitive, arrogant and rude they are. Of course, the Iraqi turns out to be an insurgent. Of course Kyle smells him out all by himself.

American Hustle

The hair in this movie is as epic as anything else in it. It is the main metaphor of a film that celebrates American fakeness in all its glory. It all starts with the worst rug ever assembled by man, on the terrible pate of Irving Rosenfeld, (Christian Bale, fat and wonderful). This unlikely hero is a sweet, small time con man who separates desperate losers from their money; the kind of guy who has a dry cleaning business and sells fake art masterpieces on the side.
What is the moral compass of a film that celebrates a bunch of endearingly amoral characters? David O. Russell's best film to date is simply stating what we all know but pretend ain't so: America, with its unending appetite for money and its idolization of individual ambition, is the biggest con on Earth. For all our lofty talk of freedom and democracy, we're really only interested in the part about the pursuit of happiness, which is nothing but the pursuit of money. This is the blood coursing through our veins, and we might as well admit it.
This is a highly ambitious film, a spectacularly crafted, extremely complex multiple character story; a directorial tour de force, aided by virtuosic editing and excellent camera work by Linus Sandgren. The storylines (the script is by Russell and Eric Singer) glide into one another in a frenzied yet utterly limber fashion. The movie grabs you by the wide lapels and never lets go. It's great, dark fun.
The story is loosely based on the Abscam scandal in the 70s, a now semi-forgotten episode in which politicians were entrapped by the FBI to get bribes to help the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, rebuild Atlantic City. Rosenfeld and his lover Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) got caught embezzling, and in exchange for their freedom were forced to cooperate with the FBI.
But American Hustle is not a procedural, nor is it an august American morality play with a righteous hero determined to be ethical. It is a wild comedy, a kindred spirit of Shakespearean romps like Midsummer's Night Dream, full of mischief, prestidigitation and love. At its center is a quartet of heroic losers befuddled by love and ambition.
Irving falls in love with Sydney, but he is married to Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence, a national treasure). Meanwhile, the ambitious, way in over his head local FBI agent, Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper, better than ever) falls in love with Sydney, who he thinks is called Edith.
Everything is combustible because it takes place in the seventies, when people were unencumbered by personal screens and emboldened by the drama of the times. This movie is a love letter to the era of hot tubs, clingy dresses, no bras, great music, and the passionate public embrace of fake hair; unlike today, a brazenly sexy era. These are the glitzy, Saturday Night Fever, Studio 54 seventies, and between the fantastic soundtrack and the sexy, yet borderline ridiculous way people look, you just want to go there again, perms, bell bottoms and all.
The actors are all an immense joy to watch. As unlikeable as they are capable of being (needy, overambitious, insincere, hysterical, ruthless), they are all sympathetic. They are all searching passionately for their specific idea of happiness. Irving wants to be a family man (and con people). Sydney wants to be someone else. Rosalyn wants Irving to pay attention to her, and Richie wants to make a name for himself. They all do terrible things to other people and to one another, and still they are all adorable. Both Adams and Lawrence give intensely focused, electrifying performances of not quite sympathetic characters. Jennifer Lawrence in particular is the kind of screen presence we thought did not exist anymore. She is a great movie star, not only because she is gorgeous, but because she is alive and magnetic onscreen. Even playing a part for which she is a long shot (Jewish housewife from Long Island?) she is riveting, hilarious, and true. When I watch her, I want her to be protected from all evil so she can continue growing as the great actress she is.
Bradley Cooper is hilarious as driven, ruthless and clueless Richie DiMaso, and Bale is excellent as Irving Rosenfeld. Not only because he is fat and flabby and looks terrible, but because he seems a born schmoozer, the mastermind, yet the more quietly ambitious one in the bunch. He's sort of a lopsided mensch. Perhaps Russell gets a kick of casting everyone against type (Louis C.K plays the saddest sack FBI agent in history), but he and co-writer Eric Singer give the actors so much richness to play off that the actors abscond with the movie.