One of the best ways to get caught up on films that you sort of wanted to see but never managed to get around to for one reason or another is to take a round-trip transatlantic flight. During our recent trip to France I watched two movies on the outbound journey and three on the return. Of course, the drawback is that the screen is about the size of an iPad without nearly the resolution, and the audio is less than 5.1. More like 1.5. But still, it passes the time.
1) Source Code. I’ve been curious about this film ever since it came out in theaters, but not enough to go to the cinema to see it. We’ve watched the trailer a bunch of times on our OnDemand system, but always found something else to watch instead. Jake Gyllenhaal is a reliable performer, but I’ve liked Michelle Monaghan ever since I saw her in Gone, Baby, Gone. It’s an interesting premise—that a person can be sent back in time to a specific moment to take over the body of someone who was present at that instant. There is a lot of hand-waving going on to explain the rules, which are admittedly fairly arbitrary. There’s a problem to be solved and only eight minutes to do it in, but you can keep going back again and again to extract the next step in the mystery. Fortunately there’s more going on than just the sci-fi element: there’s a love story and the development of a real, human connection between Gyllenhaal’s character and his handler.
2) The Adjustment Bureau. A good companion piece. The always solid and personable Matt Damon as a politician with a promising future who always seems to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory meets up with an intriguing and attractive young woman in the men’s restroom on the evening of his most recent political collapse. He wants to see her again, and they do have some other chance encounters, but events seem to be conspiring against them. In fact, they are. The people who make sure that things happen the way they’re supposed to are bound and determined that they won’t ever meet again. This group is led by a dapper John Slattery (Roger Sterling from Mad Men). There is a lot of silliness in this film, from the significance of the hats the adjusters wear to the turning of doorknobs one way or the other to the nature of the “boss” behind all this, but it’s a fun romantic adventure. They could have gone very metaphysical, but instead decided to play it safe. The concept of doors that get you from one place to another will be familiar to any Dark Tower fan.
3) The Beaver. This one was an experiment. It came out during the worst part of Mel Gibson’s career, given his repeated and public meltdowns, but I like Jodie Foster so I thought, what the hell. I can always turn it off. Gibson plays a guy who inherits his father’s gene for depression. He’s spent the last two years in a foggy haze, sleeping through most of it, allowing his business to go into the toilet and ignoring his two kids and his wife (Foster). She’s stood by him as long as possible, but her kids are suffering from his neglect, so she decides he has to move out. He finds a beaver hand puppet in the dumpster when he’s disposing of some of his personal belongings and, through a strange series of events, ends up waking up next morning, hung over, with the puppet on his hand. And it talks to him in a voice and accent reminiscent of Bob Hoskins. It becomes his voice, saying all the things he’s been unable to face. Though it’s patently absurd, his family and employees believe it’s part of a prescribed treatment for his mental illness so they go along with it. And, wonder of wonders, it works. He starts paying attention to his younger son (Preston, his older son, Anton Yelchin from Hearts in Atlantis is mortified), he returns to work and gets his business back on the right track, and reconnects with his wife. He becomes famous, too, when one of his new inventions becomes the must-have buy of the year and he goes on TV with the beaver to promote it, discussing depression in the process. Everything is great—until it isn’t any more. His wife wonders when this treatment will end, but there’s no sign it ever will, and she’s getting frustrated sharing a bed with her husband and the puppet. The only person truly delighted by all this is his young son. There’s a parallel plot involving Preston, a high school senior, who writes term papers for his classmates. He knows how to capture their voices perfectly so he, too, is not speaking in his own voice. He meets up with a girl, mayhem ensues. Think what you will of Gibson, but I really liked this film. It has emotional power.
4) Super 8. I saw this one in the theaters when it came out, but I couldn’t resist watching it again. Really not designed for the ultra-small screen, but I liked it just as much the second time around. Elle Fanning is remarkable.
5) The Company Men. Definitely not the feel-good movie of the year, it taps into the effect of the recession on a group of men who had it good in the boom times. Ben Affleck loses his job at a large company that undergoes a few rounds of layoffs to try to save it from being taken over by a rival company and losing too much money. After 12 years on the job, he’s ill-prepared to go on the job search, especially when so many others are trying to win the same spots. He refuses to moderate his lifestyle, thinking that he’ll be back in the saddle again soon, endangering his entire family’s well-being in the process. His wife (played by Rosemarie DeWitt) tries to get him to cut back on the spending, but he’s of the opinion that he needs to carry on with the golf club and other costly items to keep up appearances. A similar but opposite problem afflicts Chris Cooper, laid off at the age of sixty. His wife makes him “go to work” carrying his briefcase every day so the neighbors won’t know he lost his job, thereby compounding his humiliation, since at his age he isn’t likely to get another job. Even Tommy Lee Jones, who helped build the company from the ground up, isn’t immune to the downsizing. Affleck’s greatest challenge comes in the form of his brother-in-law, Kevin Costner in one of his better performances, who owns a construction business and with whom he’s never gotten along. The two are oil and water, town and country, but desperate situations call for desperate measures. Like I said, definitely not a feel good movie. Filled with frustration and tragedy, though it does rebound a little at the end for most of the characters.
