Redbelt (2 stars)
Written and directed by David Mamet. With Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alice Braga, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon, Emily Mortimer, and Tim Allen. (R)
Writer/director David Mamet has built his career on a deep curiosity about the inner life of the human male and a love for the minutiae of the many ways men manipulate each other. His plays and films, stocked with more twists than the Labyrinth of Minos, often play out like primers on the fine art of the con, and much of the pleasure in watching them comes from watching the puzzle pieces snap together.
At the same time, Mamet is a divisive director; his male-centric worldview is sometimes derided as out of touch at best and misogynistic at worst (though his female characters are often in positions of power), but in the end his love-him-or-hate-him style always comes back to one thing: dialogue. Purposefully mannered, the machine-gun rhythm of his writing seems designed to be delivered with a minimum of inflection, the better to hint at an immutable and interchangeable masculinity. His characters—the ones who aren't the patsy—use it as a curtain to cover their secrets or vulnerabilities, revealing little beyond the words themselves. It's a style that creates its own Delphic sense of mystery: characters speak in epigrams, and we wonder what their words will come to mean later.
But in Redbelt, Mamet's latest foray into the world of grift, the words just feel like words. An ill-fitting blend of betrayal drama and martial arts movie, the film is a sort of modern-day samurai story, with one man and his code of honor at its center. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Mike Terry, a Jiu-Jitsu teacher who is guided by a rigid sense of tradition and respect for his art, even if it means his martial arts school is unable to pay the rent. He doesn't so much speak as make pronouncements—"Improve the position! Control your emotions! There's always an escape!"—and even for Mamet the lines come across as stilted.
When his wife Sondra (Alice Braga) sends him to her shady brother's bar to ask for a loan, he finds himself the unexpected savior of action-movie star Chet Franks (Tim Allen) during a brawl. Soon after, Mike is invited to the set of Franks' latest flick, and asked to sign on as co-producer so he can share his expertise. Sondra, meanwhile, seems to hit it off with Franks' wife Zena (Rebecca Pidgeon), and the two are soon discussing a business venture together, one that quickly takes a disastrous turn. Amazingly, Allen is right at home in Mamet's world, and it's surprising we don't see more of him here; once his purpose is served—introducing Mike to his greasy producer, played by Mamet regular Joe Mantegna—he's gone. Luckily, Pidgeon doesn't hang around for long either; her dogmatic take on her husband's style has long been a difficulty in his films.
When Mike discovers that Mantegna's producer and fight promoter Marty Brown (Mamet stalwart Ricky Jay) have appropriated one of his training techniques to use in a garish pay-per-view extravaganza, he finds himself trapped. He'll never win a lawsuit—his adversaries have some evidence that would ruin a friend and bring disrespect to his own dojo—and the only way to save himself from financial ruin is to fight on the undercard. All those puzzle pieces don't fit so snugly together here, and the exact machinations that land Mike in his predicament are never satisfactorily elucidated, especially in the character of his lawyer, well played in a severely underdeveloped role by Emily Mortimer. It's a shame, because with Ejiofor and Mortimer, Redbelt features some of the better performances in a Mamet film.
It's no surprise that the big fight is fixed—it's telegraphed in literal black and white early on in the film—but the rest of the film is such over-the-top melodrama that it's laughable. The last 20 minutes unreel like a cross between Rocky and the late night theater of televised wrestling, ending with an absurd freeze-frame that strives for a deep meaning it doesn't deserve.
The Visitor (2 1/2 stars)
Written and directed by Thomas McCarthy. With Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Jekesai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass. (PG-13)
What a surprising little film is The Visitor. Touching without being sentimental, sweet but not cloying, political yet never strident, it manages to hit every right note as it moves from an empty grief to a life renewed. Working with a cast of busy but relatively unknown actors, writer/director Thomas McCarthy proves that his first film, the small and charming The Station Agent, was no fluke.
Richard Jenkins stars as the timeworn Walter Vale, a Connecticut college professor who has been living half a life since the death of his pianist wife. He teaches his one course halfheartedly, marking another year by whiting out the date on last year's syllabus, and holds his students and coworkers at a remove. At home, he runs through piano teachers in an attempt to hold on to some piece of his wife's life, firing them as soon as they deign to teach him.
Drafted to present a paper in New York on behalf of the college, he finds a surprise in his rarely visited Manhattan pied-a-terre: fresh flowers on the living room table, and a woman in his bathtub. That woman is Zainab, and when her boyfriend Tarek shows up a moment later, we learn that someone has been surreptitiously renting out Walter's apartment in his absence. The couple rather mysteriously agree to leave that very night, apologizing profusely, but Walter, perhaps startled out of his anomie by the night's events, invites them to stay until they can find a new home.
Tarek is a musician; he plays an African drum—the djembe—and Walter is taken by his music. Wonderfully played by Haaz Sleiman, Tarek is optimistic and engaging, his easy smile and kind eyes an invitation to sharing. Sensing Walter's interest in the drum, he begins to tutor the older man, taking him to the drum circles so common in the city and striking the first sparks of a true friendship. Watching these two men, so different on the surface, make a connection is the heart of the film, and they do it so well that everything that follows—an arrest, the awful holding pattern of bureaucracy, and a wrenching conclusion—becomes truly tragic.
Still, what's most striking about The Visitor is what it doesn't do. Walter isn't the white knight—even if he wants to be—and when Tarek's mother (a stately Hiam Abbass) comes to the city, the tender bond she and Walter share stays at that instead of becoming a more simplistic love affair. It's the rare writer or director who can navigate the full range of relationships on display here, from friendship and young love to bereavement and beyond, but McCarthy makes you believe in all of them.
Girls Rock! (2 stars)
Directed by Arne Johnson and Shane King. (PG)
Call it Public Access Syndrome—the unfortunate result of a worthy subject being made into a just-average film. Girls Rock! fits the bill with its talking heads, montages, and animated sequences, all of which add up to not much in the long run despite—or perhaps because of—the obvious earnestness of the filmmakers.
The film is a documentary that zooms in on a single week at an annual Oregon "Rock Camp" for girls. Designed as a place where girls and young women can come together without the endless pressures and presumptions of a supermodel-obsessed society, the camp caters to aspiring musicians, even those who have never picked up an instrument. (Some arrive as part of a program in rehabilitation.) Rock Camp may not be utopia, but even with the shaky musicianship and the inevitable arguments that arise wherever young people are thrust together, it serves as a welcome rebuttal to the usual images of female musical success. Here there are no Britneys.
Which is not to say that the idea that rock is a boy's game hasn't already been ingrained into the minds of the young campers. When one girl timidly takes her seat behind a drum set, she finds herself frozen by the idea of playing. "Can y'all face that way first?" she asks her classmates. Another camper, the teenaged Laura, talks about the frustration of trying to play music with some male friends who constantly belittle her contributions. "I've been waiting so long to admit to myself that I'm amazing," she says. Yet even here Laura is at first the outcast, the lone girl standing in the Death Metal section when campers are asked to fan out and pick a genre.
She eventually finds a band to call her own; one of the most outgoing girls at camp, Laura becomes the heart of the film, and it would arguably have been a better thing if the film had focused solely on her life before and during the camp. Adopted and a misfit who proudly wears her Iron Maiden shirts, she feels distanced from both her Asian roots and her adoptive country, but her naturally sunny nature keeps her eternally optimistic. As another camper notes, "She likes death metal and bunnies at the same time."
As the film goes on a few other girls emerge as stars: Amelia, a budding guitarist who idolizes Sonic Youth and writes a suite of songs about her dog; a pint-sized Janis Joplin look-alike named Palace who sings angry songs about her mother's trips to San Francisco. Both are autocrats who have trouble adjusting to the cooperative nature of the camp, and it's amazing to see how the dynamics of band life are the same no matter how young or old the musicians. Some compromise, some don't; when the camp week culminates in a concert, it's obvious who has learned the most.
But it's not only—or even primarily—music that's being taught. Instead it's the idea of female empowerment that's behind everything from the songwriting to the self-defense class. Unfortunately, the film often turns banal as it recites a litany of statistics about the percentage of semi-naked women in music videos, the average age of dieters, and a number of other facts related to being a young woman in America. While admittedly an important subject, the scattershot and preachy approach of the film leaves one with the feeling of an after-school special."
