"The Impossible"

 4.5 / 5 

By chance, I stumbled across the remarkable Channel 4 documentary "Tsunami: Caught on Camera" about a year ago and was mesmerized by the enormity of a calamity that is barely comprehensible.  A quarter of a million people died in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, and tourists were only a fraction of them, so I was dubious about The Impossible.

Would it be, well, possible to capture the scope and scale of the devastation, both physical and emotional, through the lens of Hollywood, with beautiful people like Ewan MacGregor and Naomi Watts suffering nobly through wet clothes and unglamorous makeup?

The opening moments of The Impossible don't bode well: Here are fair-haired white folks anguishing over spoiled-people problems like whether she'll have to go back to work as a doctor if he loses his job.  Then, without warning, it happens -- and the disaster-movie-veteran reaction takes hold: This had better be good, we'd better be wowed by this big wave.

We are.  That's when The Impossible begins going places most movies wouldn't dare.  It's excruciating, nerve-wracking, nausea-inducing and altogether riveting in its depiction of a family quite literally torn apart by a disaster of unimaginable proportions.

Viewed solely as a technical exercise, The Impossible is extraordinary.  The visual effects are peerless: You can have your Avengers and your Prometheus, here is visual-effects mastery in absolute service of the story.  The omission of The Impossible from the short-list of possible Oscar nominees is shameful, but perhaps explained by the awesome accomplishment here -- not once do you consider that what you are watching is not real.  It makes a similar, shorter sequence in Clint Eastwood's The Hereafter pale by comparison.

But The Impossible aims for more than visceral thrills, and quite wisely steers clear of the Grand Hotel-style dramatics of '70s-era disaster movies.  From the moment the wave strikes, we're with Maria, the mother in the previously pretty family, who miraculously finds her son amid the deadly waters.  This is no feel-good discovery: They wind up lost and alone amid the devastation, horribly injured with no way to know the fate of the others.

The movie focuses tightly on this family, particularly Maria and her young son Lucas (the stunningly good Tom Holland).  She is gravely wounded, and he's the pouty, sullen pre-teen who has to grow up instantly.  There's a simultaneously grueling and touching scene where residents of a wiped-out village find them and offer them care -- and that unprompted humanity is one of the movie's running themes.

Later in the movie, there's a painful moment where Henry, the father, asks one of the film's few Americans to use a cell phone, and the response he gets is certainly a slap in the face for the U.S.A. -- and perhaps rightly so, because the post-disaster scenes the world sees after American tragedies tend to be of looting and chaos, not the kind of stoicism and compassion on display here.

There is much beauty in The Impossible, but it's not visual.  This is one of the most excruciating and terrifying films you'll ever see, unflinching in its depiction of real loss and devastation, not to mention the physical consequences it has on people.  Maria ends up in an overcrowded hospital, clinging to life with Lucas by her side -- until suddenly, wrenchingly, for the second time in an anguished day, he isn't.

The Impossible is an emotional gut-punch, honest and true, bordering on maudlin only in its final 10 minutes or so.

Much has been made over the filmmakers' decision to focus on a nice, white, fair-haired family, and the criticism isn't unfounded.  We see very little of the effects of the tsunami on the Thais themselves.  But, then The Impossible is telling a large story at a very human level, and the only way to do that is to focus tightly on one family.  It's a film that is often impossible to watch without flinching, maybe never more so than the moment Henry finally finds a cell phone and calls his parents back home.  In that scene, The Impossible shows us beautifully, perfectly, the overwhelming depths of despair, isolation and suffering that survivors experienced ... and the compassion and humanity that saw them through.

The Impossible is difficult, gripping and altogether exemplary.

Viewed 12/22/12 -- ArcLight Hollywood

2010

Catching Up: "Magic Mike"

 3.5 / 5 

Magic Mike feels, impressively, a lot like a 1970s character study about troubled and lonely people, but is marketed as a salacious, flashy 21st century piece of high-concept pabulum.

Here’s the pitch: Matthew McConaughey owns a strip club and Channing Tatum is his stripper.  You can imagine the response this one had in the development rooms – “Gay guys and straight women will love it, which is more than you can say for that female stripper movie with Cher.”

So, that’s the movie they thought they were getting, a crazy, flashy number filled with hard butts and chiseled abs.  Except this movie is to stripper movies what Popeye was to comic-book movies.  It’s an auteur’s film through and through, and fortunately bringing an artistic director’s eye to pulp material works a lot better for Steven Soderbergh than it did for Robert Altman.

Magic Mike is indeed about male strippers, and it has some awfully pretty boys fronting it.  We’re at the point now where Matthew McConaughey has turned into the elder statesman (an odd point to be, it should be noted), but even he gets a very long moment to flash his butt and his pecs

Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer are the handsome young boys – Tatum is the titular character, who thinks he’s doing pretty Alex a favor when he suggests the boy come to work at the club.

But faster than you can say All About Eve, Alex sets his eyes on the prize: Being the lead dancer.  Things get complicated when drugs and a girl come into the picture, but then, things are no doubt always complicated in the lives of men who take their clothes off for money.

It’s would be easy to dismiss Magic Mike as prurient entertainment that turns the tables on the male-dominated movies – after all, men have been hooting and hollering at scantily clad women (serious actresses included) for centuries.

But Soderbergh gets at the grime underneath the polish, and is more interested in the desperation than the ambition.  Despite some (mostly) intentionally campy moments and the surface-level silliness of the whole thing, Magic Mike makes it clear that in this world, there are only two kinds of people: users and the used, and there are a lot more of the latter.  Tatum’s Mike doesn’t understand which kind he is until pretty late in the game, and then he wants to change his fate – he just doesn’t have a clue how.

The acting is top-notch, the people (yes, even the girls) are impressively attractive, and the Tampa, Fla., location is just wonky enough to help make the story work even better: For a lot of these people, Tampa is as close to the promised land of Miami that they are ever going to get, a hard fact that’s just now dawning on them.  They’d give the shirts off their backs to get out of this place – too bad they threw them to the drunk chick in the front row last night.

"The Queen of Versailles"

 4.5 / 5 

His wife is not within earshot when 74-year-old time-share mogul David Siegel is asked if his marriage gives him strength.  He thinks a long time about this, the unblinking camera watching, before he says, “No. Not really.”

What would his wife, Jackie, who’s 41 years younger, think?  At one time, the thought might have devastated her, but now, well, she has too much to do – after laying off most of the servants, it now falls mostly to Jackie Siegel and two nannies to look after the eight kids and take care of the 26,000-square-foot, 17-bathroom home they have on a private island in Florida.

There are dog feces on the floor.  Boxes of paperwork fill one room.  Clothes are strewn about, and fish and lizards are dead from neglect.  The place probably stinks.

It wasn’t always this way, and the makers of the dazzling documentary The Queen of Versailles had either the good sense or the good fortune to begin creating the film in mid-2008, when the time-share market was the only thing better than the real-estate market.

Though its title would purport it as a documentary solely about Jackie Siegel, and her odd combination of looks, intelligence, insecurity and obsessive collecting (money, antiques, shoes, animals, children) would have been enough for a pretty compelling film, The Queen of Versailles uses her as a starting point for a portrayal of life after the bubble burst that is alternately illuminating, insightful, provocative, shocking, humorous and maddening.  You may feel any number of emotions when The Queen of Versailles is over, but boredom assuredly will not be one of them.

As it opens, the Siegels are in the process of gleefully building what they tout as the largest single residence in the U.S., a 100,000-square-foot behemoth modeled (poorly) on Versailles.  Jackie takes a friend on a tour, promising, “This is where we’ll have the ice-skating-slash-roller rink,” and, “When I want to go visit the children, this is the staircase I’ll take.”

David, meanwhile, is opening his biggest time-share resort yet, the Planet Hollywood Towers in Las Vegas, where his adult son explains exactly how they talk people into buying one-week vacation homes they don’t need.  No one exactly says they’re preying on people, but if they had mustaches they’d be twirling them.  Still, everyone is getting rich, one way or another, and no one’s getting hurt.  Yet.

David even raves about how he and his money got George W. Bush elected – but he can’t talk about the re-election because he claims whatever he did may not have been legal.

The fascination of The Queen of Versailles is that everything was caught while it happened; it’s a present-tense documentary, so neither Jackie, David nor their employees have any idea what’s about to happen.  And when it does, everything comes crashing down, fast.

David patiently explains to the film crew exactly how and why his money disappeared, and he seems genuinely pained when he has to lay off hundreds of workers.  He has less concern about the welfare of his family, and as The Queen of Versailles progresses, Jackie insists she’d be happy living in a “$300,000, four-bedroom house” and being normal – but she can’t stop spending.

So, here’s a documentary about a reality many of us lived through as the appropriately named “Naughts” wound down: The investments we made went south, we had to tighten our belts, we wondered if we’d keep our jobs, and our relationships became strained.  This time, though, it’s one of the people who caused the situation who’s at the center of a film, and because it’s happening as we watch, he can’t explain it away.

The Queen of Versailles plays a nifty trick on the audience: For its first 45 minutes, this movie has you wishing it would all happen to you.  For its last 45, it has you remembering: Oh, yeah, it did.


Viewed 12/4/12 - Virgin-Atlantic VOD

"The Imposter"

 4 / 5 

When he was 13, Nicholas Barclay disappeared from his Texas hometown while on his way home from a game of basketball. 

Almost four years later, he reappeared.  But not in Texas -- in Spain.

The blond-haired, all-American kid suddenly had brown hair and spoke with a thick French accent.

His blue eyes?  They were brown, too.

And that beard he shaved as closely as possible sure made him look a lot older than 16.

The Spanish police didn’t think he was Nicholas.

The State Department didn’t think he was Nicholas.

The FBI, called in to investigate this young man's story about where he had been for three and a half years, didn’t think he was Nicholas.

But, inexplicably, his family did.  For nearly a year, a 24-year-old man named Frederic Bourdin passed himself off as Nicholas.  He claimed he had been kidnapped, flown to Europe, tortured and sexually molested with other boys, subjected to chemical experiments that changed the color of his eyes – and that his abductors had forced him to quit speaking English, which explained his accent.

None of it makes sense, and in the documentary The Imposter, even the filmmakers seem perplexed.  They use convincing dramatizations to recreate the incidents and talk a lot with Bourdin himself, as well as the family.

The fact that no one can explain how this happens – but everyone, from the FBI on down, has excuses – is part of the deep fascination and mystery at the core of The Imposter.   We all know we can believe something so much we force it to be true, or at least true enough.  Could everyone in the family have wanted to believe this so very much that they were willing to overlook something like the color of Nicholas’s eyes?

Or might there be a deeper, even darker secret lurking here?  Might Bourdin have stumbled into territory too uncomfortable even for his warped mind?

As he tells the story about why and how he developed his ruse, Bourdin is at turns hateful and charming.  Nicholas’s family, particularly his sister, come across less well than the criminal himself – simpletons at the very least, schemers at the very worst.

And that’s where this twisted, true-life tale – which was even reported by local news at face value – turns even more fascinating.  There are more than a few moments when The Imposter pulls a Hitchcock-like twist and has you perhaps not rooting for Bourdin but definitely seeing things from his perspective.  On the other hand, it offers some moments with him that might make your blood run cold; he’s bizarre, unpredictable and challenging – then again, so is Nicholas’s family.

The Imposter begins with an incident so preposterous it could only be true, and ends with a question mark so outlandish that you’re left wondering about everything you just saw and whether you can really trust what you see and hear – because, clearly, you can’t always trust the way you feel.

Viewed 12/4/12 on Virgin-Atlantic VS23