Holiday Movie Preview 2010

Black Swan

Directed by Darren Aronofsky With Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder

Opens 12.3

Nina, the Prima Ballerina of Black Swan–director Darren Aronofsky’s fantastically insane damnation of the ballet business–is a role Natalie Portman was born to play. Chronologically a woman, Nina lives frozen in a little girl’s pure, perfect world. In her bedroom full of pink pigs in tutus, she falls asleep to the sound of a music box wound by her hovering mother (a terrifying Barbara Hershey). When she awakes, she dresses in some combination of soft gray, pink or white and goes to Lincoln Center, where she dreams of bringing the same standard of pretty perfection to the stage.

The company’s Balanchine-like director, the cold-eyed, elegant Thomas (Vincent Cassel), is putting on Swan Lake. “Done to death, I know, but not like this,” he says–which might also be said about Black Swan in reference to cinema’s standard aspirational ballet stories. Nina, with her innocence and precision, is ideal to dance the part of White Swan (Odette in the Tchaikovsky original), a princess transmogrified by a sorcerer. But Thomas doubts whether she can handle the other half of the dual role: the seductive, passionate Black Swan. He taunts her by suggesting that newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis, Portman’s sexier doppelgänger) would be a better Black Swan. To have her dance her fullest, Thomas wants Nina to break out of her sheltered bubble and live more (unlike Moira Shearer’s Vicky in the classic The Red Shoes, whose mentor ordered her to choose between dancing and living). He gives Nina an assignment to masturbate; she tries but is continually stymied. She finds self-mutilation easier. This is a very disturbed young lady, and we don’t so much sympathize with her as recoil from what is in her head.

There’s a natural comparison here to Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, since that tale of strange creative passions made everyone–including members of the Motion Picture Academy–rethink their perception of Mickey Rourke. Black Swan will probably do the same for Portman, who did most of her own impressive dancing for the film. But in its narrative arc, Black Swan is more like Aronofsky’s remarkable, harrowing Requiem for a Dream. Nina is addicted to an ideal of perfection better represented by ballet than almost any other art form, and her cravings lead the film into the realm of horror. What I loved most about it was how wild and elusive its truths remain–did Nina really tear off her own fingernails? Does the luscious Lily really make love to her?–until the bitter, beautiful end. The movie is peculiar and ridiculously, spectacularly over the top, a lot like ballet itself.

How Do You Know

Directed by James L. Brooks With Paul Rudd, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Jack Nicholson

Opens 12.17

In a youthful version of It’s Complicated, Reese Witherspoon plays a professional softball player torn between a pro baseballer (Owen Wilson) and a nice guy with serious legal troubles (Paul Rudd). Jack Nicholson takes a supporting role, teaming up again with his As Good as It Gets director James L. Brooks.

Rabbit Hole

Directed by John Cameron Mitchell With Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart

Opens 12.17

She needs help finding somebody’s number on her husband’s cell phone. He walks over to help, and they stand inches apart. A year ago, in their tender, decent marriage, she’d have concluded the lesson with a lovingly automatic kiss. Now she can offer only a wan smile and a thank-you. It’s not a rebuke, just the maximum amount of grace a grieving woman can summon.

Eight months after the death of their young son in a car accident, Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) are still in a kind of walking shock, adjusting to their misery, feeling that the best part of them died in the accident. Becca seems more deeply mired in remorse than Howie, but being close reminds them only of their estrangement from each other. They could both use a change. Can Howie find warmth in another woman and Becca, somehow, in another son? Perhaps she can take comfort in the notion of parallel universes: that this world “is just the sad version of us” and that “somewhere out there I’m having a good time.”

The story of a couple who have lost their only child: there have been so many of those, so many books and movies and Lifetime dramas, most of which pluck the heartstrings like a cheap fiddle, that simply to hear the plot of Rabbit Hole could induce a case of mourning sickness. But the tone achieved by writer David Lindsay-Abaire (adapting his Pulitzer Prize–winning play) and director John Cameron Mitchell (who did the splendidly rambunctious indie films Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus) is fine and generous, an unbroken series of poignant, privileged moments.

Kidman, in a career-best performance, and Eckhart lend pitch-perfect calibration to the couple’s shared or separate agony, which is conducted often in whispers and silences. It’s as if previous treatments of the subject were a series of failed experiments, and Rabbit Hole is the Eureka! moment. This is how movies can bring a great, grave theme to indelible dramatic life.

True Grit

Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen With Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and Hailee Steinfeld

Opens 12.22

These are not words typically applied to Coen brothers films, but their adaptation of Charles Portis’ classic American western, despite being well populated with corpses–some rotten and fetid, others freshly created in our presence–is surpassingly sweet, tender even.

The movie marks the reunion of Jeff Bridges with his Big Lebowski directors, who give him a part he can really chew on in the allegedly pitiless U.S. Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, a one-eyed fat man with a fondness for whiskey and deadpan humor. (“That didn’t pan out,” he says after a particularly messy shoot-out.) But this is not his movie in the same way the lively, schlocky 1969 version was John Wayne’s (it got the Duke his Oscar). The spotlight focuses, as did Portis, on narrator Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a 14-year-old girl determined to find her father’s killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), and bring him to justice.

A Texas Ranger named La Boeuf (Matt Damon) is already hunting Chaney, but Mattie briskly dismisses him as a spur-jangling poseur and instead hires Rooster, whom she believes to have true grit. The joke is that no one has more grit than Mattie herself, and all these grown men come to see and admire that–even vicious outlaw Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper). The remarkable Steinfeld, about to turn 14, has the adult poise and lingering childlike delicacy to capture the central incongruity of the part: that this remains no country for a young girl, even though Mattie is no ordinary one.

In all ways, the Coens’ True Grit is a classier, truer version of the tale. It’s beautifully shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins in appropriately scrubby territory. Damon expertly navigates the line between foolish and lovable, and Bridges is sublime. As you’d expect from the Coens, the bloody and weird rise and shine. The small disappointment, based on the sky-high standards the brothers have set, is that True Grit is a classic expertly revisited, not one newly reborn.

The Tempest

Directed by Julie Taymor With Helen Mirren and Russell Brand

Opens 12.10

Julie Taymor (Across the Universe) unleashes her creative urges on the Shakespeare classic, starting with a twist: sex change! Wizard Prospero is now Prospera (Helen Mirren), the displaced Duchess of Milan. Scampering about the stunning Hawaiian locations are Russell Brand as the drunkard Trinculo, Ben Whishaw as the spirit Ariel and Djimon Hounsou as Caliban.

Somewhere

Directed by Sofia Coppola With Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning

Opens 12.22

Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) belongs to a social class that might be called the homeless elite. A Hollywood star of undefined wattage, he stays at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard–that funky-cool faux-French hotel where Greta Garbo and Howard Hughes lived and John Belushi and Helmut Newton died. All amenities available: twin blondes performing a sexy pole dance right in your room, and an old waiter who’ll sing Elvis’ “Teddy Bear” on request. Johnny is restless; he knows his life needs direction, but which direction? Just … somewhere. For now, though, he’s a permanent transient.

Sofia Coppola, who often accompanied her father Francis as he made movies around the world, has been in more hotels than the Gideons, and her own work as a writer-director often reflects her touring days with Dad. Lost in Translation, which won her a screenplay Oscar in 2004, booked Bill Murray, as a middle-aged movie star, into a Tokyo hotel where he found a temporary cure for the spiritual blahs in Scarlett Johansson’s smile. Johnny, who leaves the Marmont only to hole up at other hotels in Las Vegas and Milan, is another such anomic guy. He is thrown an emotional lifeline when his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) is sent to stay with him–and, as Sofia frequently did, becomes her dad’s hotel pal.

Somewhere could be described as the inside-movie story of a loner star–say, Entourage without the entourage. It’s also Lost in Translation without Bill Murray’s sad comic touch. The humor here is either subtle or affectless, and Dorff lacks the star personality that would help clue audiences in to what’s going on inside Johnny–or, for that matter, inside the film.

Those secrets must be gleaned from the gifted young actress playing Johnny’s daughter. The younger sister of Dakota Fanning, Elle gives Cleo a fresh, winning goodness. She likes rock ‘n’ roll, cooking, figure skating and the Twilight saga. She’s something you don’t find in most movies, especially movies about movie people: a nice, normal kid. Coppola eschews the big redemptive ending, but viewers will intuit that for Johnny the Hollywood nomad, Cleo’s heart is his true home. She is the somewhere he needs to get to.

TRON: Legacy

Directed by Joseph Kosinski With Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde

Opens 12.17

A 3-D sequel to the 1982 film beloved by techno-nerds everywhere. Jeff Bridges returns as computer genius Kevin Flynn, who slipped inside a computer in the original; he kept visiting that world, we find out, and eventually got stuck there. Now his grown son (Garrett Hedlund) wanders in to find his long-missing father, only to be confronted by two Jeff Bridgeses (one a digital re-creation of the actor in his ’80s youth). Keeping with TRON tradition, it’s visually arresting despite being fairly ridiculous.

The Fighter

Directed by David O. Russell With Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo

Opens 12.10

If there’s one movie subgenre as calculated to touch the hearts of moviegoers and Oscar balloters as a noble true-life British period drama (see The King’s Speech), it’s the proletarian true-life sports drama about an athlete who battles alongside and against his family to realize his dream of becoming a winner.

This year’s candidate is The Fighter, the saga of the Lowell, Mass., boxer “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), whose goals were to win the welterweight crown and escape the sad shadow of his elder half brother Dickie Eklund (Christian Bale), a former boxer turned crack addict. Mixing hoke and hope, lower depths and sweet ideals, The Fighter is Rocky plus The Blind Side plus your pick of Boston-area fraternal face-offs (Mystic River, The Departed, The Town). But it’s more satisfying than any of them because of its vigor, its affection for all these daft souls and its sense of humor, worn as proudly as the shiner on the smiling face of the guy who just won the match.

Dickie used to be “the pride of Lowell”; it’s said he once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard. Now, in his lucid moments between crack jags, he hopes to use the ring savvy he never lost to coach Micky to the top. Their mother Alice (Melissa Leo), who manages her sons’ careers, is a mixed blessing. Hard as Wahlberg’s abs and with a Ginsu-knife tongue, she wants to keep Micky’s comeback a family affair. But she has a rival in his new girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams), another take-charge female who wants to do the thinking for her man, for everybody.

The film was to have been directed by Darren Aronofsky, who also did The Wrestler. But that fight picture wallowed in cliché; David O. Russell, who took over, ensures that this one both embraces stereotypes and transcends them. For all the mouthing off and pummeled flesh, The Fighter revels in a family’s crazy passion for the blood sport of staying alive and staying together. The quartet of leading actors deserves a group Oscar for fighting off easy sentiment and landing a knockout punch of zesty humanity.

The Tourist

Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck With Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp

Opens 12.10

After Killers and Knight and Day, here’s another thriller about an innocent paired with an action hero of the opposite sex. A remake of the 2005 French film Anthony Zimmer, it’s got two seductive stars (Depp is the naïf) and the director of the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others. We’re promised intrigue and effervescence.

Blue Valentine

Directed by Derek Cianfrance With Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams

Opens 12.31

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams team up for a naturalistic portrait of a marriage, from its happy beginnings to its darkest moments of distrust and anger. The film’s NC-17 rating suggests that their sex lives are explored in considerable depth along with their emotional turmoil. With these indie acting powerhouses, we’re in.

Another Year

Directed by Mike Leigh With Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen

Opens 12.29

As you might guess, four seasons pass in Mike Leigh’s brilliantly insightful portrait of middle age, during which a happy couple named Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) tend their vegetable garden, attend a funeral, throw some small parties and generally lead a peaceful middle-class life. These affectionate hippies can curl up contentedly each night and reflect on how sweet their lives are.

If that sounds suspiciously cheery for Leigh, who brought us Naked and Vera Drake, meet Tom and Gerri’s friends and family. Overweight, alcoholic, wheezing Ken (Peter Wight) might drop dead at any moment, but not until he’s eaten that steak. He’d qualify for the title of loneliest man in the world if it weren’t for Tom’s brother Ronnie (David Bradley), who smiled last perhaps in the 1980s, before the birth of his beastly son Carl (Martin Savage). But by far the saddest creature of all is Mary (Lesley Manville, a frequent player in Leigh’s films), a faded, pretty secretary who works with Gerri.

She’s a single girl of about 50 whose only vision of the future is one in which she’ll be part of a couple like Tom and Gerri–a hope somewhere south of dwindling. Leigh teases us with the notion that Mary and Ken could pair off and comfort each other, but Mary has the arrogance of the oblivious. She still believes she can do better. She’s inappropriate, self-centered and romantically rapacious–even eyeing Tom and Gerri’s son at one point–and it’s a wonder that she and Gerri are friends. Or are they? Gerri keeps up the relationship partly out of amusement (Mary can liven up a party) and partly out of pity; behaving kindly to Mary makes her feel virtuous. But we see the way that pity can cause her friend an even deeper sort of pain.

Manville embodies wretched Mary so vividly that long after the crushingly astute Another Year is over, you imagine her, still rattling about London in her crappy car, her too-youthful outfits and the delusions of another year. She’ll keep wearing the face she keeps in a jar by the door. What other choice is there for lonely people?