Jackie

A jewel box of private and public pain, this film by Pablo Larraín is a layered study of the tension between private grief and public performance. It is an intimate portrait of grief, a film about personal devastation from the point of view of a woman who was in close proximity to absolute power, lived at the seat of power, but had only the very limited power she could wield as the wife of the slain president of the United States.
The movie starts with Jackie (Natalie Portman, formidable) talking to a journalist (Billy Crudup) and then jumps back and forth, from when Mrs. Kennedy gave a tour of the White House for the first time on TV, to the assassination of her husband, and its immediate aftermath in her life. The excellent script by Noah Oppenheim never leaves the focus on Jackie. It never moves out to depict the shock and grief that gripped the nation and the world; a wonderful choice, because it is far more powerful as an intimate portrait of a woman in a time of crisis than as a conventional account of historical events.
At the center of the maelstrom, Jackie Kennedy remains an enigma. She is stylish, perhaps frivolous and interested in throwing grand soireés; she is cultured and well-read and obsessed with history in a fetishistic way; she is petite, demurring and gracious but also steely and single-minded in her pursuit of dignity -- a style icon, but a shy one. She is fiercely loyal to the memory of a husband who she knew was disloyal to her. She is poised and controlled in public, and unhinged by grief in private. Natalie Portman pulls out all the stops, including nailing Jackie's breathy voice and her insane accent, which is no small feat. She is fantastic in this movie, capturing moment by moment the tension of living such profound devastation as a public performance. Jackie is a woman trying to rein in and give meaning to a world that is spinning out of control.
Larraín shoots Portman mostly in close-ups, leaving the grand personalities of history, including her husband, on the margins. It's a masterfully realized character study. The scene on Air Force One where Lyndon Johnson (John Carroll Lynch) takes the oath of office while Jackie is visibly reeling from the shock is all you need to know about how it feels to have the earth pulled right from under your feet.
Larraín is one of the most skillful directors working today. The movie feels like we have entered a snow globe hermetically sealed from inside to witness events almost from the very skin of the woman at the center of the story. Although Jackie is an American story, conceptually it is not a typical American film. It steadfastly avoids clichéd heroics or epic sentiment. Larraín was an inspired choice to direct because his movies are always concerned with understanding and revealing power (mostly in all its ugliness). He is allergic to sentimentality but capable of profound empathy.
The only elements that feel shoehorned are the inclusion of two fictional characters, the journalist (Crudup), and a priest (the great John Hurt) to whom Jackie tells her story. I get the symbolism. After the events, Jackie talks to the press, understanding and fiercely insisting that power lies in controlling the narrative, and with the priest, she lets rip with the awful, unvarnished truth that pours out of her in her grief, which in both cases is tinted with anger. As good as they are, these conversations tend to slow the movie down. Still, Larraín knows exactly what to reveal when, and the script mirrors the experience of shock and loss remembered, in bits and pieces, so the assassination itself blossoms at precisely the right moment, not when the audience expects it, and it feels like a punch in the gut.
The extraordinary music score by Mica Levi echoes the revulsion, the shock, the unmoored feeling of the cataclysmic event. The meticulous art direction, attention to fashion, and every single prop mirror Jackie's own obsession with image, and with history and its artifacts. The perfect harmony of subject matter and flawless execution make Jackie a strangely hypnotic, fetishistic film. Jackie is obsessed with preserving history, showing the truth, and punishing chaos with dignity. Thus, Jackie comes at a very timely juncture, in which we are left to ponder what's in a presidency. As Jackie Kennedy makes clear in this movie, the presidency is as much about policy as it is about powerful symbolism and clear leadership. The first family mirrors the country it leads.

Experimenter

Stanley Milgram was a social scientist, the son of Holocaust survivors, who was obsessed with answering the question that still plagues us to this day. How could the German people do what they did during the Nazi years? How can regular people be ready to commit atrocities just because someone with authority asks them to?
To find out, Milgram created a controversial test in which he asked some subjects, whom he called "teachers" to administer a questionnaire, and if their subjects ("learners") answered incorrectly, they were to give them electric shocks. To his surprise, about 65% of the teachers complied, even when they heard the learner behind the wall pleading to stop, screaming in pain or not responding anymore. He tricked the subjects into thinking that there was an actual person being electrocuted. Some were uncomfortable and they protested, but very few stopped doing it.
He is one of the most influential social psychologists in recent history. His experiments brought awareness to concepts like groupthink, mass obedience, and other issues that are of particular concern to modern man. We do not live anymore under omnipotent religions or princes. Modern man is supposed to have the individual agency to refuse. But Dr. Milgram's experiments revealed that complying is more common to human nature than rebelling. Our instinct to conform, to not rock the boat, to be accepted, is strong, and it can be abused by those in power, even if we don't live under totalitarian regimes.
Unfortunately, as fascinating as Milgram is, Almereyda's film does not live up to its subject. Almereyda uses an experimental approach himself, and the film is a visual essay rather than a conventional narrative film. Instead of dramatizing Milgram's story, Almereyda narrates it, which makes for a very stilted movie. Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) constantly breaks the fourth wall to directly address the audience. Sarsgaard is a resourceful actor who tries his best to come alive as Dr. Milgram. I can see why he was cast, as he can be icily dispassionate, but I think he's not right for the role. On the other hand, he is saddled by the artificiality of the approach and does what he can with what little he is given to do.
Almereyda's unconventional execution reminded me of Il Divo, by Paolo Sorrentino, an essay-like character study of Giulio Andreotti, the former Prime Minister of Italy. Yet Sorrentino had resources at his disposal: a great cinematographer, spectacular locations and a grand sense of visual style. Under a clearly limited budget, Almereyda's chosen visual quirks look dreadful. They also seem arbitrary. Sometimes, he puts the actors in real locations that share the screen with black and white photographic backdrops. This could look good with a lot of digital enhancement, great cinematography and color correction. Done on the cheap, (bad lighting, terrible wigs) the film looks amateurish and these flourishes make little dramatic sense.
Most of the solid cast is wasted because they don't have much to do. Winona Ryder is self-conscious and twitchy as Milgram's wife. The actors who take part in the experiments are all terrific in very small parts: Anthony Edwards, John Leguizamo, Taryn Manning, Jim Gaffigan and others. But that is because they have actions to perform. Still, they are too well known for their parts, and this also feels lopsided.
In this case, the experimenting should have been left to the characters on the screen. Nothing wrong with trying, but a dramatic narrative and a better sense of how to spend the production dollars could have brought Milgram's story to life much more effectively.

Black Mass

Johnny Depp gives one of his best performances as James "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster who was an informant for the FBI.  Depp is chilling as a brutal criminal with a warm spot for those he loves. However, of all the people who could have played Bulger, why choose someone who looks nothing like him? We have to look past the solid make-up job, the receding hairline, the blondish hair, the distracting blue contact lenses that obscure Depp's expressiveness. Even though his performance is good, it seems encumbered by artifice. Depp fancies himself a modern-day Alec Guinness and loves physical transformations, but in this realistic movie this feels like an uphill battle. Ed Harris would have been spot-on in terms of looks. But so could have Matt Damon, who'd have no trouble with the Southie accent, or Edward Norton, or Ryan Gosling, or even Kevin Bacon, who is in the movie as an FBI agent, and who always rocks. Basically, any good actor who is also a blue-eyed blond could do. All the effort made to turn Depp into Bulger is distracting and it whacks the film out of balance.
The story is incredibly juicy. John Connolly (the excellent Joel Edgerton), is an FBI agent who was a childhood friend of Bulger's and he convinces Bulger to inform against the Boston Italian mafia. The brutal Bulger then uses the government's protection to run rampant and become the mafia kingpin of Boston. The movie is about testing loyalty, and about the good getting in bed with the very bad. The incestuous level of corruption between criminality and the government is the most interesting part, but the script by Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk seems a bit unfocused. I would have loved to know a little more about how it was possible for the most notorious gangster in Boston to have a brother (Cumberbatch) who was state senator for Massachusetts.
The direction by Scott Cooper is spotty. Some scenes are powerful but others smack of cliché. Who is really the main character? Bulger or Connolly, who starts out wanting to make a name for himself as the guy who brought the mafia down, and ends up sullying himself and the FBI for recklessly consorting with criminals?
I enjoyed the long, unwieldy movie because the cast is a dream (it also includes Corey Stoll, Peter Sarsgaard, Julianne Nicholson, Dakota Johnson, and Rory Cochrane). While Depp is busy channelling the likes of Christopher Walken, Joel Edgerton brings a dark humor to Connolly, an excitable, ambitious, if crass, agent who gets comfortable playing outside the rules to accommodate Bulger, and then flails in hot water by watching him spin out of his control. Edgerton is an intellectually sexy actor; he brings surprising but coherent quirks to every part he plays. Here, he gives a very layered, rounded performance, swaying between his gratitude and admiration for Bulger, to a comic swagger that creeps in once he gets his way, to his deepening brazen, desperate denial about the terrible mess he has created.
This movie needs a director with a fiercer sense of irony and a stronger sense of outrage. Still, if you like gangster films, this one's a keeper. Even the good guys are thugs.