Pop Goddess

Not only does Brave feature Pixar’s first female lead character, but it also centers on her relationship with another important woman in her life – her mother.  In most Disney stories and fairy tales in general, mothers are either absent or the source of the heroine’s problems.  As a character in the delightful meta-fairy tale Penelope says, “It’s always the mother’s fault.”  In most narratives, the heroine, secure in the romantic relationship that’s the main focus of the plot, is finally able to let go of the baggage she inherited from her mother, to dismiss her as someone who’s just doesn’t get it (again, in Penelope, see how the title character finally gives up on her mother for caring too much about looks).  In a refreshing change, Brave keeps the focus on strengthening the mother-daughter relationship.

The first section of the film lacks the closely-observed nuance of earlier Pixar entries, which create absorbing worlds out of environments we often don’t see or pay attention to – a child’s playroom, an ant colony.  Films like Toy Story and A Bug’s Life are packed with imaginative details that make us wonder, “How did they think of that?” and also, “Of course, that makes perfect sense!”  The opening section of Brave is painted with broader strokes, relying on the kind of slapstick humor that usually fills out the edges of other Pixar movies.

*SPOILER ALERT* Once Merida’s misguided spell turns her mother Elinor into a bear, the film takes off.  The physical comedy becomes character-based, not just slapstick for its own sake – a lot of gags about the bear trying to behave like an elegant lady.  I also liked the details of how Elinor slowly becomes more bear-y: the lumbering walk on all four paws, rather than the absurdly dainty upright gait; the pupils darkening and dilating; seeing Merida as just a human and not her daughter.

Brave brings moving insight to the mother-daughter relationship, a love complicated by unsettling self-identification, awkward communication, and frustrated expectations.  Mothers and daughters see themselves in each other – a mother sees her past, her potential, her mistakes; a daughter glimpses her future, the possible outcomes of her choices.  Merida’s spell provides a distance that allows her and Elinor to see each other more clearly, not just as reflections of each other.  They’re able to recognize each other’s particular strengths and understand each other’s motivations.  And how can you not be moved by Elinor’s literal mama bear protectiveness and Merida’s surprisingly fierce protective instincts towards her mother?  It’s girl power at its most elemental.

Early on, Merida chafes at the way her mother tries to force her into the prescribed role of proper lady.  Over the course of the movie, I would’ve liked to see Merida understand how her mother’s own choices were circumscribed by patriarchal expectations.  That may be asking too much, though.  As it stands, I’m impressed that the point of Brave isn’t for Merida to find heterosexual romantic love, but to deepen her love for her mother.

Flight doesn’t really have anything new to say about addiction, but Denzel’s performance as airline pilot Whip Whitaker and the spectacularly staged plane crash at the beginning of the film almost make you not notice that.  I don’t want to ruin the harrowing thrills of the crash sequence for you, so I’ll just say that I actually felt sick to my stomach by the end of it.  Director Robert Zemeckis is also good at establishing the stakes involved in Whip’s self-destructive habits, so that a bottle of vodka takes on the menace of a loaded gun.  As Whip dodges the reality of his addiction, Denzel captures his bravado, vulnerability, and sense of being hounded by his own demons.

Let’s talk about Denzel’s walk for a minute – the confident, loping swagger, just this side of arrogant.  He uses it to great effect in a couple of scenes, when Whip is drunk, high on cocaine, and feeling on top of the world.  Of course, the irony of is that he feels ready to fly a plane or take on the world when he is in fact severely impaired.

Can we also talk about Denzel’s tears?  There’s a moment after the plane crash, when Whip is in the hospital, his face banged up and one eye completely bandaged; he’s talking to his former colleague and only real friend Charlie (a wonderfully humane Bruce Greenwood), and a few tears slip out of his one visible eye.  Whip is hardly aware of the tears; there’s no stagey pause for dramatic effect and no sense of the actor forcing the emotion.  It’s a sign of how Denzel is living this character down to the core:  Whip is processing the shock of the crash, his loneliness (he realizes his estranged wife and son probably won’t visit him in the hospital), and the fact that the experience has, at least temporarily, scared him sober.  The tears are heartbreaking, and the moment reminds me of the single tear rolling down Denzel’s face in Glory, signaling pain, defiance, and rebuke.

Zemeckis sometimes tends towards the unsubtle.  He telegraphs characters’ personalities or the mood of a scene through a too-obvious soundtrack.  For example, when John Goodman first appears in the film, the accompanying music announces his personality.  It’s a fun moment, but I wish the director would allow us to discover some things on our own.  Similarly, the coda of the film has Whip summarizing what just happened in the prior scene.  It’s clear that something shifted inside Whip at the NTSB hearing, compelling him to finally be honest about his addiction.  But, just in case we don’t get it, Zemeckis re-states it for us in Whip’s monologue.  “I finally feel free,” Whip says, a line too pat to do justice to Denzel’s bone-deep performance.

Looper is like an inverted Terminator: instead of a hitman traveling back in time to kill someone, the victims are sent back in time to the hitman to be killed. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, one such contract killer who matter-of-factly blows away his victims the instant they materialize in front of him.  The first section of the film is tight and immersive, as director Rian Johnson introduces us to a fully-realized dystopian 2044 – a decaying metropolis where wealth and power are hoarded by a gun-toting few and where those guns are the only law.  The film sags a bit in the middle, when Joe and his time-traveling older self go on the run outside the city, toward something that doesn’t really become clear till the final section of the film.

It’s curious that Looper focuses on a backwater portion of the world it establishes.  It seems like 2074 is where the real action is:  time travel has been invented and rival mobsters are violently consolidating power.  But the film takes an off-center approach, thirty years before the real action begins, focusing on one hitman among many doing a soul-deadening job.  The reason becomes clear about halfway through the film, when old Joe decides he’s going to save the future by killing a few children, one of whom (he’s not sure which) will grow up to be the person responsible for most of the terror and violence in 2074.  Young Joe decides he’s going to redeem himself and assuage his Judas-like guilt (he gets paid in silver pieces and has betrayed a friend) by saving one of the children.  Again, the premise inverts Terminator’s: instead of being about a young boy who’s going to grow up to save humanity, it’s about a young boy who’ll grow up to destroy it.

*SPOILER ALERT*   Do you remember the genuine shock of the moment in Taken when Liam Neeson shoots an innocent woman in the arm? Well, Looper one-ups that moment by having old Joe actually kill a little boy, a child who’s too young to have made or to be held responsible for any evil choices. It’s shocking enough to let us know that this film is willing to violate established narrative conventions.

And it does so again soon after, in a bravura slow-motion sequence that reveals the telekinetic powers of the boy that young Joe is protecting.  In a wonderful piece of misdirection, it looks like the boy’s mom is rushing to protect him from a fall down the stairs, but she’s actually trying to save Joe from the havoc that the little boy is about to wreak.  It’s a jaw-dropping scene that snaps the film’s off-center approach into sharp focus and dramatically raises the stakes in a story that’s seemingly about one lost soul.

Argo is a great, polished suspense film – unshowy in its period details and confident in its use of plotting and editing devices to ramp up the sweaty-palms tension.  It convincingly depicts and balances three different milieus in 1979-80: Tehran; the CIA and Washington, D.C. bureaucracy; and Hollywood.  It’s also unexpectedly topical, carrying extra emotional resonance in light of recent events.  You can’t watch protesters scaling the U.S. embassy walls in Tehran without thinking of similar scenes in Cairo and Benghazi last month.

Argo draws a connection between the CIA and Hollywood, two seemingly different enterprises.  At one point, CIA agent Tony Mendez and Hollywood producer Lester Siegel discuss their estrangement from their families; the film suggests that the artifice, the lack of authenticity, inherent in both settings makes it difficult for the men to form meaningful connections to something real – to their families and children. “It’s hard to wash the bullshit off after being covered in it all day,” Lester remarks.

Argo also doubles down on the ersatz nature of movies.  If all films are artifice, then the fake film-within-the film is a fake of a fake, sort of doubly empty.  Yet this simulacrum does end up saving lives, so it has very real consequences.  And a storyboard image of a father and son – a token of nothingness, of a film that will never exist – actually expresses Tony’s very real love for his own son.

By intercutting scenes of the fake film’s table read and press conferences in Iran, Argo also questions the “staginess” of seemingly real events. “Do you ever wonder if it’s all for the cameras?” Tony asks Lester about the televised protests in Tehran.  “Well, they have the ratings,” Lester responds rather flippantly.  Then both men sober up, realizing that even if the unrest is stage-managed, it is costing people’s lives.

Tony and Lester’s comments about what’s on TV reflects Argo’s broader interest in the media, not just Hollywood.  Diane Sawyer, Ted Koppel, and Mike Wallace pop up frequently on TV sets throughout the film.  The prominence of television coverage of the hostage crisis suggests nostalgia for a time when we all, for the most part, watched the same thing on TV, turning to the same news sources, before the media splintering of the 24-hour cable news channels.

With its in-jokes about inept directors and producers, Argo is catnip for industry types.  I watched the film at a SAG-AFTRA/Writers’ Guild screening, and the biggest laugh was for Lester’s comment to Tony about following the right process to option the script for the fake film: “You’re worried about the Iranians, try the Writers’ Guild.”  I suspect the industry-friendly humor and the skillful suspense will make Argo an awards-season favorite.

I’m all for that, except for one issue – why isn’t a Hispanic actor playing Antonio Mendez?  I have a problem with white actors portraying people of color (Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart comes to mind), especially when there still seems to be resistance toward actors of color portraying even characters of color (I’m thinking of the Twitter-kerfuffle over Amandla Stenberg being, and I’m paraphrasing here, “too black” to play Rue in The Hunger Games). Given that general mindset and the underrepresentation of actors of color in lead roles, I think it’s a shame that the makers of Argo squandered the opportunity to have a Hispanic actor play the lead role in a major film.