Moon
Directed by Duncan Jones. Written by Nathan Parker, based on a story by Duncan Jones. With Sam Rockwell, Matt Berry, Robin Chalk, Dominique McElligott, and Kevin Spacey. (R)
Somewhere between The Twilight Zone and today, sci-fi became the province of action films, filled with drooling insect man-killers and deadly viruses, ray guns and zero-G sexcapades. There were some high points along the way, but the overall feeling was one of regression: a return to the "space Western," where the good guys were us and the bad guys were whatever wasn't.
Now it's official: science fiction is making a comeback, and Moon is at its leading edge. (See also District 9, due out this August.) Directed by Duncan Jones (son of Ziggy Stardust himself, David Bowie) and starring Sam Rockwell as a lonely miner pumping Helium-3 out of the moon, the film has nothing crawling through the airshafts, and even GERTY, the omniscient computer voiced with a preternatural calmness by Kevin Spacey, isn't the threat one might expect. In many ways, there's no threat at all.
Rockwell stars as Sam Bell, a contract worker a few weeks away from completing a three-year stint on the lunar surface. Alone except for GERTY, he spends his time whittling a wooden recreation of his hometown and watching pre-recorded messages from his wife back on earth. But before he can return, an accident lands him in the infirmary, where he wakes up to an unlikely new reality (to say too much would ruin it).
What I can say is that Rockwell amazes, easily carrying a film in which he is virtually the only character. As Jones and screenwriter Nathan Parker probe ever deeper into Sam's profound sense of loneliness, Rockwell never takes the easy road of simply going crazy, but instead slowly unravels until he reaches an essential truth that will set him free. It's a marvelous performance in a deeply felt film, and hopefully a sign of things to come.
Public Enemies
Directed by Michael Mann. Written by Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann, and Ann Biderman. With Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Stephen Dorff, Billy Crudup, Rory Cochrane, and Lili Taylor. (R)
It should come as no surprise that upon unearthing a photo of John Dillinger—the career criminal and American icon who is the subject of Public Enemies—the resemblance to Johnny Depp is less than immediate. (They both have mustaches, but that's about it.) Yet who better to play the matinee idol of the Depression Era crime scene than Depp, a matinee idol most widely known for his portrayal of a charismatic pirate?
Depp, a longtime admirer of American outlaws and outsiders, captures the glamour that emanated from and surrounded Dillinger: the star status and personal charm that made women drop everything to run away with him, the outsized confidence that allowed him to bluff his way out of a prison cell using a fake gun he carved from wood. Throughout his career, he was at the head of a gang of dedicated co-conspirators ready to follow his every move, including steadfast girlfriend "Billie" Frechette (La Vie en Rose's Marion Cotillard).
But that headline-grabbing lifestyle brought attention; so much, in fact, that Dillinger's escapades helped foster support for the founding of the FBI, the agency that eventually clipped his wings. Director J. Edgar Hoover, here played with a serpentine shiftiness by the excellent Billy Crudup, staked his claim on capturing Dillinger, bringing in sharpshooter Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) to do the job.
It's a riveting story, full of cat-and-mouse, hair's-breadth escapes, dark suits and Tommy guns. And while Depp is magnetic, it's Bale, finally dropping the guttural vocal delivery he picked up during his stint as Batman, who is the best thing in the film; his is the only main character given real depth. And that's what keeps Public Enemies from being better; director Michael Mann has made great crime films (Heat), but has also made glossy crime schlock (Miami Vice). The balance here tips too much toward the latter—Mann is a bit too in love with the glamour to really look at the guts.
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Also this week: UMass Amherst's DEFA Film Library wraps up its Summer Film Institute with a collection of films from the 1960s and 1970s, shot in East Germany after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Though an entire generation has now grown up without any memory of that most potent symbol of the Cold War, the cultural artifacts that are still coming to light today remind us that the "Berliner Mauer" remains an important piece of our modern history, if one now often overlooked in the West. As a high-school student, I was in Germany in the aftermath of the Wall's collapse, renting a hammer and chisel from a young entrepreneur in order to take home a piece of history—the nearest mix of chaos and jubilation I've encountered since was during the party atmosphere of the Obama inauguration.
Though five films are screening as part of the festival this week, Frank Beyer's (Jacob The Liar) 1978 feature The Hiding Place is the sole film that has been subtitled in English. With a screenplay by the director and Jacob author Jurek Becker, the film is a look at ex-lovers Max and Wanda. Max is on the run from the authorities but hoping to win back his lover; Wanda, despite having begun a new relationship, agrees to shelter him. Her new boyfriend—rather understandably, one would think—doesn't cotton to the situation, and threatens to go the police. The Hiding Place screens Friday July 17 at 1 p.m. in Weinstein Auditorium at Smith College, and, as with all the films in the Summer Institute, admission is free.
In Smith's Graham Auditorium, a clutch of German-language-only films will unspool over Thursday and Friday. They include Monolog for a Taxi Driver, a television work banned in the '60s for being "formalist" and "decadent"; four excerpts from the sprawling From Our Time, a 1970 film made by an "Autorenkollectiv"; the 1961 piece On The Sunny Side, which reimagines the romantic comedy genre within socialist worker tropes; and Dr. Sommer II, the tale of an idealistic young surgeon and his seat-of-the-pants training in a small town in Germany.
At Amherst Cinema, the Belle Epoque love story Cheri continues its run. Reuniting Michelle Pfeiffer with director Stephen Frears—the pair mined similar themes together in Dangerous Liaisons—the film is based on Colette's 1920 novel. Pfeiffer stars as Lea de Lonval, an aging courtesan on the verge of retirement. As a parting grace, she agrees to tutor the 19-year-old son of her former rival Madame Peloux in the ways of love, only to find herself succumbing to an unexpected romance. The two find a happiness that Peloux, played with gleeful deceptiveness by Kathy Bates, undermines when she arranges to have her son marry a younger woman.
At Pleasant Street Theater, another story of May-December romance plays out in Whatever Works, the latest film from Woody Allen. While Allen still seems a bit fixated on young beauties, he had the good sense to cast the acerbic Larry David (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm) as his alter ego for this return to his Manhattan playground. David plays Boris, a would-be suicide who leaves his wife and stumbles into an awkward relationship with 21-year-old Melodie (The Wrestler's Evan Rachel Wood). Despite Boris' insults and dour worldview, the artless former beauty pageant contestant is somehow charmed—enough so to propose an unlikely marriage.
