Jake Gyllenhaal Shines in Thought-Provoking "Prisoners"

Jake Gyllenhaal brings the intensity in Prisoners.

Although commercials made it seem like a variation on the Taken formula, Prisoners is actually a pretty serious drama with a lot on its mind.

In general, it occupies the same playground as Gone Baby, Gone, another pulpy and thought-provoking crime thriller about an investigator’s dogged pursuit to solve a child abduction case. But there’s also a strong political thread that recalls Zero Dark Thirty in the way it forces viewers to consider the value of torture.

The film revolves around the reactions of two sets of parents (Hugh Jackman and Mario Bello and Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) when their little girls are abducted by an unknown villain. When a mentally unstable suspect (Paul Dano) emerges and the cops aren’t able to find suitable evidence to charge him, the Jackman character takes measures into his own hands. Each parent responds to his actions in a different way, serving as analogs for the differing ways people respond to the use of torture tactics.

To say much more about the plot would ruin the film, but I will say that it’s beautifully lensed by Roger Deakins and that, although quite long, it’s well paced and grippingly directed by director Denis Villeneuve. The film also closes with a perfect denouement, which is a rarity in movies and another way in which it echoes both Gone Baby, Gone and Zero Dark Thirty.

Jackman is great as the desperate dad driven to extreme measures, but it’s Jake Gyllenhaal as the cop on the case who steals the movie. Although his Detective Loki handles many of his early encounters with a practiced calm, there’s a coiled-spring intensity to him that’s emphasized by his twitchiness and constant blinking. This is a man with a past (there’s all those tattoos and one scene implies he’s the product of an abusive childhood), and while he’s instantly sympathetic, there’s an unsettling sense that the guy could just go off at any moment.

Loki is a great character, and like J.J. Gittes in Chinatown or Patrick Kensie in Gone Baby, Gone (I know, I keep bringing up that movie, but it’s so good), he’s a detective you want to see tackle other cases in other movies. That’s unlikely to happen, but there’s no denying that Gyllenhaal, often cast for gentle quirkiness, is a total revelation in the role. Even being a fan of his previous work, I wasn’t really prepared for what he brings to the table here. It’s easily a top five performances from 2013 in my book, even if it didn’t get treated that way during awards season.

There’s a high level of melodrama on display and the film has the type of circumstantial “everything fits together” web that often plagues crime dramas. For those reasons, not to mention its dark subject matter and general dreariness, Prisoners isn’t for everyone. However, I found it to be one of the better films from last year. Ultimately, the character work, ace tech aspects and thematic and tonal strengths of the movie outweigh any negatives. A-

The Wolverine Marks a Wasted Opportunity

Hugh Jackman is one hugely jacked man. See what I did there?

The Wolverine has done relatively well with critics due to its atypically somber and intimate approach to the superhero genre, but, by and large, the praise is overblown.

The film aspires to be a slow burn, character-focused actioner with a flawed and broken antihero, something along the lines of the underrated George Clooney film The American or even Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. However, while star Hugh Jackman seems game and there’s some interesting themes buried in the narrative, The Wolverine collapses under the weight of nonsensical plot machinations, lackluster development and a silly finale.

The movie opens with a Yeti-looking Wolverine eking out an isolated existence in wilderness of the Yukon, still haunted from being forced to kill ladylove Jean Grey at the conclusion of X-Men: The Last Stand. However, after being tracked down by pixie-cute martial artist Yukio (Rila Fukushima), he quickly finds himself enroute to Japan to bid farewell to Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), a Japanese acquaintance he saved from certain death during the bombing of Nagasaki.

When he arrives, Wolverine learns Yashida has become a billionaire industrialist and that, instead of saying goodbye, what he actually wants to do is take Wolverine’s regenerative power, saving his own life while simultaneously granting Wolverine mortality that will eventually lead to the peaceful and honorable death Yashida believes he desires. After Wolverine unexpectedly scoffs at the idea, Yashida dies in the middle of the night.



"Poison Ivy," I mean "Viper," terrorizes Wolverine's girlfriend.

From there, Wolverine gets embroiled in family politics, becoming the protector of Yashida’s granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto) who Yashida names as heir to his empire. This revelation causes uproar with Mariko’s father, and ultimately the Yakuza, an ancient clan of ninjas and Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova), a mysterious mutant who weakens Wolverine’s regenerative capabilities, factor into the plot.



There’s plenty of action, including a standoff on top of a bullet train and a beautifully shot sequence in which Wolverine goes up against numerous arrow wielding ninjas, but the film’s actually more of a drama in which our hero comes to terms with his immortality and learns to love again.

These through lines are strong conceptually, but the film botches them. For Wolverine’s existential crisis to carry weight, the film should’ve devoted more screen time to the development of Wolverine’s friendship with Yashida, perhaps even showing our hero vocalizing the burdens of everlasting life while hiding in a hole after the bombing. A similar criticism could be levied at the film’s romantic relationship. Although Jackman and Okamoto have a nice chemistry, there’s just not enough there, and, from a story perspective, it makes little sense that Wolverine would pull a Casablanca and fly away from the woman he loves, simply stating “I’m a soldier, and I’ve been away to long.”



Apparently, this scene intentionally evokes Akira Kurosawa's

Throne of Blood. That's cool.

However, that nonsensical plot point is nothing compared to the ludicrous (but telegraphed) twist in which viewers discover Yashida faked his own death and took up residence in an adamantium robot, biding his time until he could steal Wolverine’s power by force via drilling into his claws.

Forgetting for a second that the adamantium-heavy plan makes little sense in it’s own right (Wolverine’s actual powers have nothing to do with the adamantium skeleton Stryker grafted onto him), it’s tough to comprehend why Yashida would go through all the trouble of faking his death and putting his granddaughter in harms way when he could simply imprison Wolverine while he’s sleeping under his roof. It also doesn’t make sense why Mariko and Yukio wouldn’t be in on this plan, and why exactly Viper is helping Yashida at all.

Overall, the film plays like a series of artistic compromises, and while some parts are effectively thoughtful, others are mind-numbingly cartoonish.  Given the end result, it’s easy to imagine why original director Darren Aronfsky was attracted to the project, and why he ultimately bailed on it.

 

In watching The Wolverine, I was reminded of Last Stand, another X-Men film with some interesting ideas that downgraded at director right before production. Although most X-Men fans revile that film, The Wolverine has been embraced as a return to form for the character after two disappointing entries (Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine). However, from where I’m standing, it’s basically the same as Last Stand – a wasted opportunity. C

Les Misérables Fails to Garner Emotional Investment

The casts' Oscar performance was more enjoyable than the film itself.

Steve already provided a thoughtful and in-depth analysis of Les Misérables, so I’m going to cut straight to the point with my assessment. I found the film to be the weakest of the 2012’s Best Picture contenders. Part of that has to do with this year’s strong slate, but, outside of that, I just wasn’t into the film, which left me pretty cold and uninterested (a major problem for a production that relies heavily on emotional investment).

To be fair, I’m not the biggest fan of the stage production anyway, so the deck was stacked against the movie. I think Les Mis has a fantastic soundtrack, and the strength of the music can make for quite an emotional rollercoaster on the stage, but as a narrative, I’ve never been all that impressed. Other than two martyrs and a hardhead, every character is woefully underdeveloped. This is especially obvious in the case of Cosette, who’s nothing more than a plot device despite being the connecting tissue that binds most of the major characters together. In other words, she’s basically the human equivalent of a macguffin in an Indiana Jones film.

Getting back to the film itself, director Tom Hooper is a major part of the problem. Although I admire his decision to have the actors do all the singing live on set (a call that led to a well-deserved sound mixing Oscar), his cutting of the film is almost nonsensical at times, especially during the first hour or so. He makes the interesting choice to use extended close-ups during solos, but more often than not, that results in the whole affair seeming small when what he’s really going for is intimate (if that makes any sense).

Samantha Barks and her distractingly tight corset.

All of the actors do decent jobs with what their given. Hugh Jackman does most of the heavy lifting in this thing, and he’s solid throughout and has a great voice, so his Oscar nomination was hard won. And Anne Hathaway is fully-committed in the role that won her an Oscar. It’s essentially a one-note performance, and I wasn’t nearly as moved by the portrayal as many critics were, but girl’s a good actress and she sings pretty well, so that’s that.

Meanwhile, despite the plethora of criticism I’ve heard, I found Russell Crowe to be pretty good. Hooper does the man no favors with the way his exit scene was cut and staged, but Crowe lends a sense of gravitas to a relentless role that can get pretty frustrating for viewers at times. As for his singing voice – it’s not all that bad. He’s clearly not a match for his cast mates, but it’s not like he pulls a Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia. He carries the tune well enough, and his voice has a unique quality to it that contrasts nicely with the rest of the cast.

Oddly enough, I thought the film came across as a powerhouse during the Oscar ceremony itself. The clip reel they cut to showcase it was expertly edited, and the entire cast performed a fantastic medley on stage. If I hadn’t seen the movie already, I would’ve have been tricked into thinking this was a truly great movie musical. But regrettably, the spark from that telecast is not in the actual film. C+

Les Mis Mixes Acting and Singing, Does It the Right Way

 

The one thing I disliked most about doing musical theater in high school was the fact that people’s opinions about certain shows – especially the more popular ones – were usually so biased or so stacked in the favor of professional versions they had seen or their original Broadway cast album that our paltry pubescent performances seemed like a kindergarten play. Of course, opinions about movies can also go in a similar direction.

So, obviously, this was the first thing I thought about as I was watching Les Misérables in the theater. I’ve purposely avoided reviews of the movie not originating from top film critics because Les Misérables is one of those shows that so many people feel some sort of personal relationship with, for some reason or another. As a result, I imagine most people familiar with the show will or have had difficulty viewing the movie objectively. In other words, for a theater diehard, this movie is probably a cruel mixture of a wet dream and terrible nightmare realized.

Trying to be objective as possible,* I thought the movie was a well-conceptualized, well-cast, well-shot and well-adapted musical movie. Instead of simply taking the most beloved musical of all time by every woman a well-known musical and shooting it with a camera, director Tom Hooper makes what feels like an original movie. Of course, anybody who is remotely familiar with the show, or simply the music, will know the whole thing. However, the brilliance of what Hooper does is he makes the movie easily digestible for those not familiar with it and gives the diehards enough nostalgia to hug and enough new and interesting material to chew on.

What Hooper does for those not familiar with the show is he rearranges the order of some of the songs, changes occasional lyrics and injects some extra wording so that Les Mis newbies know exactly what the heck is going on. One example is changing around some of the lyrics so that the audience knows who General Lamarque is and why his death is important to the student rebels (it drives them to fight). Another is injecting the name of Enjolras, the rebel leader, more than it appears in the play – once or twice max, which I always thought was weird for one of the story’s most influential characters. Additionally, the movie is played as a movie, filled with beautiful cinematography and not just an opportunity to shoot singing soliloquies, which I am assuming many fans of the musical might expect.

For the Les Mis fans out there, it stays faithful to the musical in that it only eliminates two not-entirely-necessary songs in “Dog Eats Dog” and “I Saw Him Once,” only cuts the lyrical fat when it makes sense (e.g. Gavroche’s “Little People,” a song that sounds so anachronistic to the feel of the movie and the emotion of the scenes surrounding it that cutting out most of it seems like a blessing). In terms of bringing in something original, the song “Suddenly” fits in well to the tone, although its sound is a little different from the rest of the score, and helps to strengthen the audience’s understanding of where Jean Valjean is emotionally at the point in the film when he buys Cosette from the Thernadiers to raise her as his own. The movie also brings back stars from the original theater productions in smaller roles, such as Valjean-originator Colm Wilkinson as the bishop.

And, of course, my favorite part of the movie that I think helps to draw in both newbies and fans alike is the fact that (most, I assume, and not all) vocals were recorded live on set as opposed to being recorded previously and receiving the lip synch treatment. Fans can appreciate the “live,” non-produced quality of the singing while unfamiliar moviegoers can view it as a movie with calculated acting decisions and emotional heart stitched within every note. This isn’t the first musical movie to ever utilize this post-talkies, but it’s definitely the most high-profile and one that makes amazing use of it.

If this were Taylor Swift being held, the internet would have

stormed so many barricades and brought this film to its knees.

Les Misérables deserves most of the accolades it has received, and that is without even touching upon individual acting and singing performances. When the movie was in the midst of casting decisions, fans filled the internet with angry words about their thoughts on Anne Hathaway and Fantine and seemingly pubescent uproar about the possibilities of Taylor Swift and other well-know actresses possibly being cast as Eponine, the girl every woman ever high school girl thinks defines her.

However, in my humble (and probably incorrect) opinion, this movie truly benefits – in some way or another – from the casting of each of the main characters. And, yes, that includes Russell Crowe, too, angry internet people.

Although you could argue that the musical itself features an ensemble of characters, the story is essentially the story of Jean Valjean, a prisoner jailed for stealing bread for his sister’s family, who eventually breaks parole in an attempt to change his life for the good of himself and others and stop living with the anger against the world that he believes has done him wrong all these years. It his emotional journey that lays the foundation for the entire story. And it is Hugh Jackman’s ability to harness that emotion, tie that into every lyric he sings, sing it well and give the audience the opportunity to see such a distinctive, remarkable change in such an amazing character that lays the foundation for the rest of the actors’ performances.

Jackman, a Tony winner, is obviously a skilled singer and displays his range prominently. Even his rendition of “Bring Him Home,” a reflective song that serves as a pause during the action-packed battle sequences and challenges the actor to spend a lengthy amount of time in the higher registers, sounds appropriate coming from his mouth.



 

Calm down, internet. He's not that bad.



As an actor, he meets his match in Russell Crowe, who has the brooding down to a science with his characterization of Javert. Now Crowe has been getting a lot of flak for his singing in this movie. It is obvious he doesn’t have the same singing chops as most of the other actors. However, he’s not really all that bad of a singer (see here for a pretty good defense). He hits all the notes after all. The problem is he can’t hold all the notes, and he’s not on the superior level one would assume from an actor cast in the movie version of Les Misérables.Here’s why it doesn’t bother me though. I’ve heard renditions of the character where Javert’s songs are almost talk-sung. Of course, this is not really the case with the solo numbers “Stars” and “Javert’s Suicide.” All in all, Crowe did best when his singing could be blended into his excellent acting, such as during “The Confrontation.”

Anne Hathaway is adequate as Fantine – nothing out-of-this-world amazing but also pretty good at the same time. I’ve heard a few criticisms saying she doesn’t really sing “I Dreamed a Dream,” that she more breathily pants the words. A lot of that has to do with the live-on-set singing. But Hathaway is also playing a broken person, a woman whose life is being quickly destroyed as she tries to do everything she can to make sure her daughter’s life does not follow the same path. Similarly, Amanda Seyfried does well as Cosette, acting and singing well in the limited screen time she has.

No, every girl in the world. You are not Eponine. Samantha

Barks is, and she's pretty fantastic in this movie.

The female standout, in my mind, is Samantha Barks as Eponine. The smartest thing the people behind this movie did was cast her in the role that – along with possibly Fantine – was going to be the most scrutinized, a role that almost caused the internet to shut down when it was rumored that Taylor Swift might be inhabiting it. Barks brings a likable and subtle freshness that makes her friendship with Marius believable and sings with an innocent sweetness that helps the audience empathize with her and make the emotions Barks displays seem genuine.

 

Eddie Redmayne and Aaron Tveit are both very good as Marius and Enjolras, respectively. Redmayne is definitely a good singer with an operatic voice and a boyish charm. His handling of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” is impeccable, aided by the static camera and the choice to focus on the emptiness of the café room. And the role of Enjolras is a powerful but ultimately thankless role – partially due to the lack of name recognition throughout the play – that Tveit ably powerhouses.

As the Thernadiers, Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter (or Tom Hooper or a combination of the two) made the decision to play the innkeepers in a way that mixes the lighthearted comedy of the roles with their dark ruthlessness and indifference toward humanity. What was most enjoyable was the affection the two characters showed for each other; in many renditions of the play, they are often portrayed as reluctant comrades. In the movie, they do their misdeeds literally with a wink and a nod.

Colm Wilkinson has always looked like an elderly clergyman. He's finally

won the role of his lifetime. Hugh Jackman, eat your heart out.

My favorite casting of the whole movie, though, is Colm Wilkinson, the original Jean Valjean on the West End and Broadway, as the Bishop of Digne. Wilkinson’s voice has always had an older and patriarchal tone to it. That tone worked well for Valjean all those years ago but is spot on for the bishop in this movie. Wilkinson’s acting and singing are both solid. And in both a nod to his – that is, both Wilkinson and the Bishop of Digne character – importance to the evolution of the telling of Les Misérables and a brilliant directorial decision, we see Valjean spiritually comforted by both Fantine and the bishop, instead of the Fantine-and-Eponine duo seen in the play.

A few additional notes:

• Anybody familiar with the play was probably expecting to see the rebels’ barricade as a huge mountain, as it is depicted in the musical, stationed upon a rotating stage. In this movie, however, the students have only built a small hill of furniture and various wares they have found in the neighboring buildings. I really liked this for the reality of it all. When it comes down to it, these kids were…kids, students whose opinions did not permeate beyond their own heads. They were small in number, didn’t have a huge army and didn’t have a lot of time (or engineering and architectural know-how) to build a monster of a barricade. And I thought it greatly captured that they were isolated in their attempts to revolt, ignored and left to die by the rest of the citizens.
• Accents. It’s always funny to me that whenever an English-speaking movie takes place in a foreign-language country, the base accent used is always British. Of course, Australians Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe and Irish Colm Wilkinson keep their respective accents. But Americans Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried switched over to Bristish singing accents for this movie. This isn’t a criticism, but more of an amused observation.
• One thing I’ve noticed in hearing the soundtrack played during award shows or via audio clips is that one really needs to be watching the film to truly appreciate the quality of the singing. Due to the live, on-set singing, the singing isn’t as polished or produced. In a way, that might stop people from purchasing the soundtrack. But it also, in my mind, helps to bolster the quality of the acting performances and the singing, combined as they were meant to be.

*I actually was in Les Misérables in high school right when they first released the rights for schools to perform it (I was Marius). My school was one of, I believe, the first 10 schools to get the rights. As a result of the familiarity, I’ve always appreciated the show. I’ve also seen it performed on the West End and on national tour. I’ve also read (most of) the source material by Victor Hugo.