Pineapple Express (3 1/2 stars)
Directed by David Gordon Green. Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. With Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny R. McBride, Gary Cole, and Rosie Perez. (R)
A jar of pickles—that's just one of the many things that makes Pineapple Express such a surprisingly winning example of the stoner comedy. It shows up on the trunk of the car that two unlikely—and very high—fugitives are calling home while they're on the run from a murderous drug lord. It's a small touch, little more than a background prop, but one that says volumes about how seriously the filmmakers take their work. This isn't your usual smoke-filled collection of bong jokes.
The two fugitives are Dale Denton (Seth Rogen) and Saul Silver (James Franco). Denton is a process server who carries a wardrobe of disguises in the trunk of his beat-up sedan to make his job easier—the people he's serving subpoenas on tend to run when they see him coming. Saul is the eternally lightheaded but inherently kind pot dealer who keeps Dale in weed. Early on, Saul introduces Dale to the rare hybrid marijuana that gives the film its title. (This after an inspired opening sequence describing how the drug attained its illegal status.)
The man after them is Ted Jones (Gary Cole), who has just committed a gangland execution that Dale witnessed. When he finds Dale's half-smoked joint at the scene, he's able to identify the rare weed, which leads him to Saul, which in turn leads to Dale. With his partner—a rotten cop played by Rosie Perez—and a menagerie of thugs in tow, Jones sets out to clean up the mess before the cops (at least the honest ones) get called in.
Let's be frank: this does not sound like a very good movie. On paper, any description of the plot is bound to sound like a mix of Die Hard and Cheech and Chong, and the film does use some of the tropes common to those genre works—stuff blows up, and people get high. But someone once summed up Citizen Kane as "a guy loses his sled," and something similar is going on here—what could be an average story is elevated to something more by a combination of artful writing, acting, and the details of the direction. It's the jar of pickles.
Much of the credit must go to Rogen, who co-wrote the script and never lets Dale become a caricature. Immature, yes—he's dating a high-school girl—but still recognizably human. Franco, too, brings a rich portrayal to the stock role of dealer; Saul got into the business only so he could support his grandmother's retirement home expenses. Together, the two depict what feels like a real if exaggerated friendship; against all odds, it's touching—wait for the scene of Saul, bereft, on a playground swing.
It helps to have David Gordon Green at the helm. The director is best known for dramatic films like George Washington and Snow Angels, and at first, seeing his name attached to Pineapple Express comes as a shock—it's as if Bergman directed an episode of South Park. Very quickly, though, it makes sense: this film is less about the bud than the buddy, and Green's films have always explored the relationships we build with others. Here, even the henchmen have history. There are some moments where it goes too far (especially in the showdown between Jones and his quarry, which reverts to the action movie template) but until then, Green proves adept at avoiding most of the clich?s that have plagued films like this for years.
Tell No One (2 1/2 stars)
Directed by Guillaume Canet. Written by Guillaume Canet, based on a novel by Harlan Coben. With Fran?ois Cluzet, Marie-Josee Croze, Andre Dussollier, Kristin Scott Thomas, Francois Berleand, and Nathalie Baye. (NR)
Tell No One, the new film from Guillaume Canet, is a flowchart thriller, which is to say it's the kind of movie whose plot has so many tendrils and so many characters that it almost requires some sort of visual aid to keep it all straight.
In essence, it's about a man whose dead wife may not be dead after all, and his quest to discover the truth about what happened one night eight years ago.
Caught up in the drama are Dr. Alex Beck (Fran?ois Cluzet as the presumed widower) and most of his and his late wife's family. Everyone but the doctor, it seems, may know something more than they've told, a fact that only comes to light when two bodies are discovered near the site of his wife's death, and the police and press start asking questions. One of the victims, it seems, was holding a key to the dead woman's safety deposit box.
An initially disinterested Beck is shaken out of his gloom by an email that seems to provide evidence that his wife is alive and living abroad. It's a shock that raises a host of questions—for starters, if she survived, who did the family cremate?—and sets Beck on a mission of discovery, even as he comes under the suspicion of the police, who now suspect they misattributed his wife's death to a local serial killer; and a shadowy group of thugs who are very definitely not the police.
On his side are his sister's lover (Kristin Scott Thomas, continuing her good work in foreign films) and street tough Bruno, who feels a debt to the doctor who cared for his hemophiliac son. Police inspector Levkowitch is a less certain bet—perhaps wise enough to trust his instincts, but perhaps shrewd enough to simply let his prey think that he will.
As a thriller, the film is lackluster. It's built on the bones of the great Hitchcock "man on the run" films, but refuses to give up any details until the denouement, robbing the audience of one of the great joys of thrillers—figuring it out. Scene by scene, it's a good piece of work (except for the jarring musical montages, featuring a lot of English-language songs that spell out the emotional state of the characters) but by the time you reach the conclusion, the effort involved in remembering who knows who, how they know them, and why it's important is simply too much. A thriller should let you leave the theater with a sense of surprise and wonder; this one leaves you with as many questions as answers.
Brideshead Revisited (3 stars)
Directed by Julian Jarrold. Written by Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. With Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Hayley Atwell, Emma Thompson, and Michael Gambon. (PG-13)
For many fans of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited—even (and maybe especially) those that never read his novel—there's only one adaptation that matters. That would be the epic 11-part miniseries that first aired on television in 1981, launching the career of actor Jeremy Irons and sending thousands of swooning new supporters of PBS scurrying for their checkbooks.
This new adaptation clocks in at a tad over two hours; that's about one-fifth the screen time of the novel's earlier incarnation, a difference that calls for some serious compression. Unfortunately, it guts the film of much of the story's impact, resulting in a period piece that, while not exactly bad, simply can't live up to the expectations to which its title gives rise.
The stand-in for Irons here is Matthew Goode, whose Charles Ryder is the man around whom the story revolves. An aspiring painter, he meets the well-off Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) at Oxford when a drunken Flyte vomits through Ryder's open ground floor window. A contrite Sebastian soon takes Ryder under his wing, introducing him to his upper-crust coterie, the wonders of champagne lunches, and, most importantly, Brideshead. The Flyte family estate is a wonder of marble and gardens, the "most beautiful thing" Charles has ever seen. For Sebastian, on the other hand, Charles fills that role quite well.
Brideshead is also home to Sebastian's chilly sister Julia (Hayley Atwell), who is apparently the second most beautiful thing Ryder has laid eyes upon, and the Flytes' rigidly Catholic mother Lady Marchmain—Emma Thompson in a wonderful performance as a woman ready to use her considerable cunning in the service of her faith. She takes a dim view of her son's lifestyle—especially his alcoholism—but is too blind to see that it's the guilt born of his strict upbringing that has driven him to it. In Charles, she sees an agent able to right her errant son.
Waugh, a convert to Catholicism, had much to say about the power of religion and its ability to both harm and help its adherents. Some of that is shown here—Thompson is able to convey so much by using so little—but most of what are supposed to be deeply felt convictions, or at least strongly confining constrictions, instead come off as contrivance, an easy way to upend a plot. Julia's sudden piousness feels particularly out of place after what it follows.
But Sebastian is at once the strongest and saddest figure in Brideshead, the one who is willing to sacrifice the lifestyle for life. His brief and half-imagined romantic idyll with Charles is shattered when he finds his friend kissing his sister during a trip to visit the siblings' father in Venice. "We're a family of monsters, are we not?", asks the patriarch, his children on either side. As we watch the lust for riches grow in Charles, he seems to fit right in. Yet Brideshead is a place where nobody seems to get what they want, even if they mostly get what they deserve. All the players feel they're above the game, to the extent that they're unwilling to admit to even themselves that they're involved.
Again, Brideshead Revisited isn't a bad film—technically, it's well-made, with good performances from even the inanimate (Castle Howard reprises its role as the family mansion to great effect). It's simply that the scope of the source work is too wide and too deep—and too well loved—for a film this size to do it justice."
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
