School’s out, the sky is blue, and that summer sloth will be cured by just one thing—caffeine, and lots of it. Thus coffee shops are still the hangout du jour in the summertime, a place to chit-chat over chai or grab an ice-blended en route. But as the ceaseless summer populace buzzes in and out, people rarely notice a handful of solitary freaks in their midst: holed up in corners, avoiding eye contact, downing espresso by the gallon, these lone losers posses secret, special powers…

But their gift is also a curse, for it has made them outcasts.

These freaks are writers.

I’ve heard people say they despise writers in coffee shops because “they’re just trying to look cool,” but that’s an obvious fallacy. If I wanted to look cool, I could do better than stare into an iced Americano, noting that my reflections on the ice cubes all have the same “lost at sea” look on their ice-faces, a thousand little screenwriters adrift in a black abyss. There are few things less cool than staring at a blank white page on your laptop in public. In truth, writers work at coffee shops because they’d never leave the house otherwise, and because it is somewhat less likely that they will burst into tears, start screaming obscenities, or begin smearing their own feces on the wall in frustration if they’re in a public place. Cool? Hardly. “Writers” is on a short list of groups I’d rather not be associated with, a list that also includes Food Addicts Anonymous, My Super Sweet 16 fans, and Opus Dei.

But in the process of writing this very column at my neighborhood Starbucks, a man looked at me, grinned, and said, “Writer’s block!” on his way out the door. It wasn’t a question. Clearly he recognized my forlorn, vacuous stare into computer screen oblivion, the same way a birdwatcher would identify a familiar call echoing across the pond and proudly announce: “The common loon!”

He had me pegged. I smiled, thankful to have a kind stranger fleetingly acknowledge my eternal suffering. But as he walked on, I had to wonder… is it really that obvious?

Do I really look like a writer?

Ugh.

I’ve been called many things. Some ask if I’m an actor. Those craving a favor may ask if I’m a model. There was a period when every time I’d shop at Abercrombie & Fitch, customers would ask me to open fitting rooms for them. Last week a drunk guy who passed out in front of my garage swore he’d seen me on MTV. I’ve also been mistaken for a cocaine dealer, a prostitute, and someone trashy enough to buy chronic off a guy at a bus stop — all on the same street corner during my summer internship in fabulous Hollywood, California.

Yet none of these mistakes disturbed me quite so much as being called out as a writer.
I’ve always considered myself more of an “honorable mention” in the lineup of head cases and would-be carnies one typically associates with writing professionally — not a full-fledged member. I’m sure lots of flourishing writers come across as well-adjusted individuals by day, but the road to success is paved with Xanax, and without clocking at least a little field time in Crazytown, they’d pursue more sensible, reliable careers… such as barista. I admit to a certain degree of eccentricity, sure, but I also consider myself a fully functional member of society… not just an observer, a participant. So if I’m not even a prosperous writer at this tender young age, why carry the funny farm stigma now? I’ll have plenty of time to be freakish and socially awkward when I’m older.

I closed my laptop, left the coffee shop, and immediately set about making concerted efforts to differentiate myself from the writing community. This summer, I would boldly go where few writers had gone before. First stop? The beach!

A pallid, never-seen-the-light-of-day skin tone might earn a writer authenticity points, but it also puts him on automatic suicide watch, which isn’t very summery. A healthy, sun-kissed glow, however, seemed just the thing to help me blend in with those folks we writers call “normals,” and though I did succeed in bronzing away that “indoors” look, I did it at the expense of my poor, poor skin, which has mostly peeled away… for the Cause.

Next I decided to take up running — no longer would typing and frowning be the extent of my cardio. But this proved an even greater challenge than tanning, since it involved much less laying down. In the movies, an upbeat song would play and thirty seconds, six outfits, and as many close-ups of my “this is difficult” face later, I would reach my goal and high-five a grumpy yet paternal mentor. As it turns out, however, this only happens in the movies. Actual running involves your full body (no fitter-than-you stunt double), one sole outfit, and at least half an hour, and when you finish, you look all red and blotchy and no one cheers for you. My running remained montage-and-Miyagi-free, which needless to say was disappointing. Worst of all, I didn’t instantaneously feel like I was ready to take on any bullies or national championships or other third act obstacles, unless my big climactic moment involved tackling a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. (I earned it, okay?)

Finally, I decided social interaction was the key to ridding myself of writerly weirdness. A summer job seemed the perfect way to fraternize with new people — and pull in some extra cash to boot! Unfortunately, getting a mindless part-time gig was harder than expected. Employers somehow felt the need to ask why I wanted the job, as if I might be a secret millionaire whose inner satisfaction comes from spending summer afternoons helping bitchy tourists find pants that fit. I assumed “For the money, duh!” was a tacky response, so I went with the painful truth: “I’m a writer looking for a job that will leave me enough time to work on my scripts too…”

Well! I guess it’s too bad I didn’t get my BFA. in The Art of Retail, since nobody hired me. All that time perfecting my “I’m not overqualified for this job” face for naught.

After such rejection, I returned to my local Starucks for a venti self-pity party and considered giving up the quest to transcend my writer’s roots. I don’t tan, running is exhausting, and I had an easier time getting a job without a college degree. Perhaps my fate was already sealed. I pulled out my laptop and weighed my options, staring at that blank screen. It was then that an old man passed by and asked, “Why do you think so hard?”

I looked up and wondered if he’d been sent via divine intervention to convince me not to surrender. But then he went on: “She’s coming for you, and she’s going to give you BJ!” Then he hobbled away.

And while no such female appeared to do anything of that nature, something clicked. I looked around Starbucks at the batty old people, the twittering gossip queens, the ADD kids with their OCD parents and, yes, the writers, and I thought, “It’s not just us. Everybody in this place is crazy!”

Maybe it’s the heat plus caffeine, or maybe we’ve been mad all along, but suddenly those lone freaks holed up in the corners didn’t look so freakish; they looked one step ahead of me, as if they’d figured this out already. I decided not to give up on my summer plan, but rather to make it a three-pronged attack: Look good. Feel good. Write good.

Err… write well.

Then I promptly got to work, figuring: if we’re all crazy anyhow, there’s no shame in putting it to good use.

Though it may be time to find a new coffee shop.

*

(Throwback Thursday: This piece was first published in INsite Boston in 2006.)

There’s a thin line between genius and madness.

Or, if Frank is to be believed, no line at all.

Frank is the sort of movie that sneaks up on you all at once. If I had, for some reason, walked out of the theater five minutes before it ended, and then someone asked me what it was “about,” I wouldn’t have been able say very coherently. There is quite a lot of madness to be found in Frank, coming from a variety of different characters who all seem to be larger than life. You might be forgiven for thinking this is all just a bunch of heightened wackiness — like Wes Anderson goes to South By Southwest. (SXSW actually does make a prominent cameo in this movie.) But to write Frank off as a quirky comedy is a mistake.

The film’s final moments take a jarring dramatic detour, one that is not totally out of sync with what came before — after all, a major character dies midway through the film. But it does feel primed to leave us on a sour, sappy note, because so many indie dramedies do that when they don’t know how else to wrap things up. Too many movies force schmaltz upon us in order to end on a note of portent, as if to fool us that what we just saw had a lot more to say than it really did. For a moment, I thought Frank would, too.

Instead, it ends on just the right note, which is notable in a movie that’s all about some rather discordant music.

Frank begins with Jon (Domnhall Gleeson), trying helplessly to find musical inspiration in the everyday world. A woman in a red coat walks by, and he sings something like: “Hey woman in the red coat, what are you doing with that bag?” Even Jon knows this is not destined to be a hit. Despite his creative doubts, however, Jon still manages to tweet uplifting updates about his creative progress with a handful of familiar banal hashtags that we see displayed on screen — a clever conceit that could easily be annoying in a different sort of movie.

Then, one day, while about to eat a panini he has just tweeted about (#nomnomnom), a chance spectacle has him run across a band with an unpronounceable name that is in dire need of a keyboardist. It’s immediately clear that there are several odd things going on with this band, and it is telling that the craziest member of this group may not be the frontman, Frank, who wears a giant papier-mâché head at all times. (He may not even be the second craziest, in fact.) While Frank is the accepted leader of the group, the driving force behind it all, it seems the strings are really being pulled by the hostile chain-smoker Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who may or may not be romantically involved with Frank. Additional members of the band include Baraque and Nana (Francois Civil and Carla Azar), who remain in the background for much of the film, and the potentially unstable Don (Scoot McNairy), who has a thing for mannequins.Yes, this is a quirky bunch, and for a fairly long stretch of the film it seems we’ll just follow these kooks as they behave in increasingly absurd ways. (Which is not such a bad thing, since many moments in Frank are laugh-out-loud funny.) Clara has a lot of killer one-liners, mostly spewing hatred and threats of violence (not idle threats, as it turns out). The band’s recording sessions are one-of-a-kind and, to put it kindly, less than sonorous. Frank has one of the weirdest soundtracks a movie could ask for, including the delightful “Frank’s Most Likeable Song… Ever” and “I Love You All,” which becomes hauntingly lovely when paired with the themes of the film. (Be warned: I’m not sure any of this music works out of this context, however.)

Most movies follow a fairly predictable set of story beats. Like Frank’s music, Frank the movie follows an entirely different rhythm, so that you can never predict what will happen in any given scene or where the next one will take us. If most movies are Top 40 pop songs, then Frank is straight-up jazz.  It’s both refreshing and a little off-putting, but in the end, quite worth the spin. This is no standard behind-the-music movie; there’s no scene of musical inspiration where every member of the band starts jamming together in perfect harmony (except maybe in the very end, and it works). With the exception of “I Love You All,” Frank’s music isn’t very catchy. “Frank’s Most Likeable Song… Ever” isn’t that likeable at all, which ends up being a tragically funny parody of the kinds of songs people actually do like. (Kissing and dancing — that about covers it, right?)

Jon is our protagonist, and Frank uses up-to-date social media both to give us a 21st century spin on voiceover and to further the plot, as Frank and his crew are “discovered” and invited to perform at South By Southwest thanks to the YouTube page he has surreptitiously created to document the creation of Frank’s opus. In many movies, this would be the climactic, triumphant moment, but Frank is unlike just about every other movie out there, so don’t expect things to go too well. Jon is debatably talentless as a songwriter, and we keep expecting him to get better, perhaps with some inspiration from Frank, because that’s what normally happens in this kind of movie. I won’t spoil whether or not this happens, but the film does make some rather bold narrative choices; it takes a Great Gatsby-like approach to its protagonist, telling one man’s story half-heartedly so that it can display the much more fascinating story of another.

As Frank, Michael Fassbender gives a bizzarely captivating performance, given that he’s buried under plaster for nearly all of the movie. (Let’s also give credit to that impassive, Mona Lisa-like giant head, which manages to register shifts in emotion without moving a muscle.) Why cast a movie star in the role at all? we might wonder. Well, for the same reason we hire the beautiful Charlize Theron to play Aileen Wuornos in Monster, then make her sit in makeup for hours just to ugly her up enough so that she looks like an ordinary woman. Because it’s more fun that way. It’s practically a crime to cover up that handsome mug, which shows the daring of director Lenny Abrahamson. Sticking a papier-mâché noggin on the titular character feels like a “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” gimmick, but it isn’t — that is all based on a true story, believe it or not. Many movies use mental illness as a source of easy comedy, and maybe Frank does too, but it does so without pandering. In fact, our ostensibly “sane” protagonist ends up faring the worst in our eyes by the end.

Jon’s interactions with the band play out as if Ed Sheeran had somehow found himself as a member of The Doors, and if you think that sounds like a good match, then you probably have no business seeing this movie. To be a truly gifted artist, perhaps one needs also to be truly batshit crazy, damaged beyond repair, tormented beyond belief. True genius comes at a high, unforgiving price, while the rest of us can only hope and hashtag, counting followers and subscribers in order to stall on creating. Music needs madness, and the mad need music. That’s the world according to Frank, a world best not intruded upon by the rest of us (except by watching this movie). It’s particularly poignant in the wake of the suicide of Robin Williams, another artist who has recently been described as brilliant despite — and possibly because of — his inner demons.

Frank is a boldly unusual film. On the surface, it treads where many quirky dramedies have gone before, but ultimately goes somewhere much deeper and darker at the core. The film’s final scene says everything — it’s one of the more beautiful endings I’ve seen lately. I’m eager to watch Frank again through the prism of what I now believe it is about. How true artistry may be at odds with popularity and social media; the thin line between a mentally ill person and a celebrity. It’s a film that makes fun of anyone who has ever worshipped a musician — which is to say, all of us. In the film, Frank is a genius until he takes his big head off, whereas Frank the movie is revealed to be genius at that very moment. When Frank finally reveals who he is under that large happy mask, the film also reveals what it’s truly about.

In both cases, what’s underneath is freakishly beautiful.   

*

It’s official. 2014 is the year of the doppelganger.

I said it before, and I’m saying it again. I may even say it again a time or two before the end of the year, if the trend continues. Two significant films this year dealt with misanthropic men encountering suaver, smoother versions of themselves in trippy, dreamlike realities. I’m speaking, of course, about Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, and The Double, featuring Jesse Eisenberg, both of which stand a good chance of making my Top Ten at the end of the year. There’s also the low-budget sci-fi treat Coherence, which takes that basic premise to another level with doubles, triples, quadruples, and multiple characters getting in on the doppelganger action.

And now there’s The One I Love, in which a married couple portrayed by Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss head out on a relationship-repairing weekend in a picturesque location in California and find that not only is the scenery idyllic, but so, all of a sudden, is their partner. This is because their spouse is not their spouse, exactly, but rather, some sort of robot or clone or entity from a parallel dimension posing as their spouse. (Maybe.)

What’s the deal, 2014? Why are we suddenly so preoccupied with doubles? There are so many of these movies with identical plots, it’s almost like they’re replicating themselves…

Like The Double, The One I Love mines humor from the unlikely situation it puts before us. A therapist (Ted Danson) sends Ethan and Sophie on a nice little retreat to a secluded home with a guest house, and soon Ethan and Sophie are smoking pot, having sex, and otherwise having a grand time with each other. But not together — since it turns out both Ethan and Sophie are having a different experience with their better halves — better halves who turn out to be even better versions of their better halves. A little investigation reveals that both Sophie and Ethan have a double living in the guest house, a doppelganger who appears only when they venture inside alone. Ethan’s instinct is to high-tail it the hell out of there, but Sophie is intrigued enough to want to go back, paving the way for plenty of conflict when Ethan begins suspecting that Sophie might prefer the sweeter, fitter, more genial version of her husband than the actual man she’s been married to all these years. (And we can see why she might.) Ethan, on the other hand, seems more put off by the Stepford-esque Sophie, whose primary virtue is that she allows and even encourages him to eat bacon. (Sophie is a vegetarian.)

There are many directions a story like this could go — one which includes over-explaining everything to a degree where it’s no longer fun anymore, and another which explains almost nothing and lets the metaphor stand for itself. (This latter approach is how 2014’s other doppelganger movies presented their stories.) The One I Love splits the difference, offering up about half of an explanation for what’s happening — one that really just raises more questions. While there’s something eerie and unnerving about the too-perfect Ethan and Sophie, the script by Justin Lader mostly plays the scenario for laughs without allowing things to get too serious until the final act. There’s a past infidelity still haunting Ethan and Sophie, which is part of the reason they’re in marriage counseling in the first place, and though some intriguing issues crop up early on, the film seems too distinctly made from a male point-of-view, spending a lot of time on Ethan’s paranoia that Sophie is “cheating” on him with Better Ethan. This, in a way, puts Ethan in the moral high ground rather than submerging both characters in some complex murk. The One I Love, directed by first-time filmmaker Charlie McDowell, doesn’t totally fulfill all the thematic promise of a killer premise, but it’s a perfectly enjoyable ride along the way.The One I Love is, of course, a bit of a punny title, given that there is not just one that either Sophie or Ethan might end up loving. Love Is Strange might have been an equally apt title, but that title has been snatched up by an indie dramedy in which love is actually much less strange in comparison. Co-written and directed by Ira Sachs, it concerns George and Ben (played by Alfred Molina and John Lithgow), a couple who has spent nearly forty years together but was only recently granted permission to tie the knot officially and legally. That they do, but news of their union causes the Catholic school where he works as a music teacher to unceremoniously oust him, which puts George and Ben in a precarious financial position.

Kind of. George and Ben live privileged lives in New York City, and even with the loss of George’s job, they’re not exactly penniless. They have to give up the cushy condo they currently reside in, which is unfortunate at their age, but they still have at least a tiny nest egg left over from the sale, and multiple friends and family members are willing to house them temporarily. Love Is Strange is Woody Allen-esque in a number of ways, not the least of which is its cluelessness about what actual financial hardship might be like. George and Ben are living in the most expensive city in America, after all, without considering much whether moving somewhere cheaper might be a good solution. I’m not sure I, or anybody else, would wish to watch a film in which this gay couple ends up on the streets, digging into dumpsters to procure their next meal. However, the script fails to make their situation truly dire, or anywhere close to dire. The stakes of this movie are never raised above mild inconvenience.Love Is Strange has Ben and George separated physically — Ben goes to stay with his nephew and his family, while George takes up residence on the couch in an apartment owned by two younger gay cop buddies (Manny Perez and Cheyenne Jackson) that we never get to know as well as we might like. What ensues are two mostly separate dramas, as Ben gets embroiled in the petty upper-middle-class problems facing his family members and George must contend with rambunctious Dungeons & Dragons games, Latin dance parties, and Game Of Thrones marathons — apparently, the sort of things youngish gay cops engage in every night of the week. It’s somewhat curious that George and Ben both choose to stay in Manhattan apart rather than go elsewhere together — Ben’s niece offers them shelter upstate. We’ve heard, many times, that New York city is a character in movies, but in this one, she’s the mistress.

Ben’s story seems to take up considerably more screen time, as his niece by marriage Kate (Marisa Tomei) grows increasingly frustrated by his benign imposition. Like a Woody Allen movie, this is the sort of story in which most major characters are artists. George is a music teacher, Kate is a novelist, her husband Elliot (Darren E. Burrows) seems to be a filmmaker, and Ben is a painter. (Whether or not he was ever gainfully employed is not explored.) Kate gets irritated that Ben talks too much when she’s trying to write her novel; a later family blow-out involves Kate’s son Joey (Charlie Tahan) and his buddy Vlad (Eric Tabach) possibly stealing library books. Yes, this is the sort of movie where the biggest argument revolves around a teenager’s illicit activities involving French literature.

Love Is Strange is a genial, likeable little film, and it seems unkind to poke at it too much for not providing much in the way of actual, tangible drama. Many subplots are introduced and mostly forgotten, including a number of supporting characters, and the resolution of Ben and George’s housing crisis is an absolutely maddening deus ex machina that will leave anyone who has ever lived in New York City tearing their hair out in exasperation. The epilogue is a curiously sad denoument that feels tacked on and focuses on one of the least interesting supporting characters in the film, and also steals some thunder away from the injustice that the movie started off (and should have been) about.

But Molina and Lithgow are wonderful apart and together, much better than most recent roles have allowed them to be. The film only truly comes alive when they’re together on screen, which unfortunately is a small percentage of this movie. Ira Sachs previously directed the gay romance Keep The Lights On, which similarly introduced a lot of subplots that never quite added up to a full movie. Unlike that film, however, this one concerns a relationship that actually does work, one that is easy to invest in. George and Ben pull us through even when this screenplays lets us down.

I liked Love Is Strange just fine, but left the theater with too many loose ends and magical solutions to complain about. Love isn’t particularly strange in Love Is Strange, but it’s fucking wacky in The One I Love, so you can probably guess which of these little love stories I ended up loving more.

*

Enemy is one of my favorite films of this year. But not everyone feels that way. The film’s surprising and confounding ending has left many scratching their heads, searching for meaning.

I know, because it has led them here.

Several inquiring minds have found their way to this blog through Google, usually through a search involving the phrase, “What the hell?”

“What the hell just happened in Enemy?”

“What the hell is Enemy about?”

And, a more specific search: “Enemy movie blueberries Jake.”

My initial review didn’t contain any answers, though, because I was reluctant to spoil the fun for those who still had yet to see the movie. If you haven’t seen it, the following probably won’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, and I would urge you to check out this trippy, fun mindfuck of a movie.

And if you have seen it, I think I’m ready to delve into some of the movie’s specifics and at least offer some theories about what it could be about.

First off, let me say that I don’t think there is any definitive explanation for Enemy. Which is not to say that the writers and director do not have one in their own minds, but I don’t think any amount of evidence can prove one theory and disprove others.

Enemy gives us many, many hints as to what is going on, many of which seem to contradict each other. None of the most blatantly obvious possibilities that come to mind quite work — twins separated at birth, clones, body snatchers from outer space. Perhaps there is a “logical” explanation that makes sense out there somewhere, but I don’t think you can view Enemy so literally. In my eyes, there is virtually no way to explain every element of this movie in a straightforward and rational way, no matter how fanciful that explanation may be. Instead, it requires the employ of dream logic. Metaphor. Allegory.

Of course, the most obvious metaphorical interpretation is that Anthony and Adam are two sides of the same coin, two halves of the same person co-existing somehow in the physical world. Anthony could be a figment of Adam’s imagination, or vice versa — except that they each have their own lives and interact with other people. This kind of story has been told many times, and frankly, I don’t think Enemy would be so fascinating if this were all that was behind it.

There are a number of other theories floating around out there. Adam and Anthony are psychological doppelgangers representing two halves of the same psyche; all of Toronto has fallen under a totalitarian regime. These certainly have merit, but neither is fully satisfying to me. Neither, in particular, explains the use of spiders throughout the film.

So what is going? I’ll offer up some observations I made during my three viewings of the film, and why they might be significant, and then present my own interpretation, based entirely on my own reading of the film.

1) After one of many shots of the Toronto skyline, Enemy begins with Adam (or Anthony) in a car and a shot of Helen pregnant. Over this is a voicemail from Adam’s (or Anthony’s) mother, expressing concern over his new apartment. “How can you live like that?” she asks. When we see a naked Helen, it doesn’t look like she’s in the gorgeous bedroom of the apartment she shares with Anthony, but rather in Adam’s dingier, yellower-looking digs. Then we get a quote: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” We can assume, then, that the events of the movie are chaotic because there is some truth that must be deciphered, and it is quite likely the movie will end when that truth is grasped.

2) Spider #1. The first we see of spiders in Enemy, one is served up on a golden platter in an underground club. There’s something dangerous and sexy and dream-like about this place. It seems to be Anthony, rather than Adam, who is visiting; there’s obvious a very hush-hush, “members only” vibe to this place. Maybe we are meant to take this literally; it’s possible that these rich-looking men have a fetish for sexy women stepping on bugs. More likely, though, this is all highly metaphorical. We learn that chaos needs to be deciphered, then cut to Anthony unlocking a door in a mysterious hallway. So it seems that whatever is in this room — in this case, spiders — is the key to “unlocking” the mystery of the movie. Got that? Spiders are the key.

3) The Doorman. Later in the movie, Anthony’s doorman begs Adam (whom he believes to be Anthony) to take him back to the spider club because he can’t stop thinking about it. Does it make any literal sense that Anthony would bring his doorman along to a weird sexy spider-stepping secret society? Not really. So why the doorman? Let’s think about metaphor some more. This is literally the man who holds the keys to Anthony’s apartment; he is instrumental in allowing Adam into Anthony’s world, and thus in letting Adam become Anthony at the end of the film. It is interesting that the doorman is asking to be let again into Anthony’s secret world at the same moment that he is unknowingly letting Adam into Anthony’s. While the doorman is eager to go back, Adam himself is rather cautious and reluctant to step too far into Anthony’s world; Anthony seems to be delaying an inevitable confrontation with some truth, inching toward it rather than fully pursuing it.

4) Adam’s history lesson. A much more obvious script would have Adam teaching his class about duality, since of course many, many great works of literature have dealt with that. (Jekyll And Hyde, perhaps?) Instead, Adam talks about dictators asserting their control over the populace. If you view the film in an alien-spiders-taking-over-Toronto light, then this is all pretty expository. But what else might it mean? Adam talks of “bread and circuses” — entertainment — being used to divert people’s attention. Later, Adam — who claims he doesn’t like movies — will become distracted by one piece of entertainment in particular, one in which he discovers his own doppelganger. Adam mentions another strategy dictators use: limiting education and information. We’ve already established that there is some information we’re not yet privy to, because it has yet to be deciphered (by Adam). Adam talks about history repeating itself, and patterns — perhaps, then, the events of this movie are a reflection of something that already happened? Adam’s lesson also mentions that artistic self-expression is forbidden; later, his mother will tell him that he needs to give up his dream of being a third-rate actor. We watch as Adam’s life repeats itself. This Adam seems to be “controlled” by some higher power. Overall, Adam’s lessons seems to suggest that a lot of what we’re seeing is a rote cycle, a distraction from some greater truth.

5) The night that Adam watches the movie breaks the pattern. Adam’s life seems to consist of the same day over and over — until he rents the movie. After watching it, he tries to engage Mary in sex while she’s sleeping, which causes her to get angry and leave. Prior to this, we also see and hear her leave several times. Is this because, later in the movie, Mary makes a more significant exit after a different sort of violation by Anthony? Mary’s exit seems to a major part of the “pattern” Adam is experiencing, and it isn’t until he watches the movie that things change ever-so-slightly and she leaves in anger. This seems to be inching closer toward a realization that involves her leaving in anger. Adam watching that movie is a turning point in more ways than one.

6) Adam doesn’t notice himself in the movie right away. Instead, the fact that he’s an extra in Where There’s A Will There’s A Way comes to him in a dream, which makes the discovery that much more surreal. This sets up a pattern of revelations coming to Adam via his subconscious. (And we already know patterns are important!) Also, what’s with that movie title? It seems unlikely that a cheeky-looking comedy would have such an earnest title; maybe we can assume that the title is a pun, and the “will” of the title has something to do with the estate of a deceased person? If so, that’s a nod toward death being a major factor in what brings Adam and Anthony together. Adam tells the man who recommended the movie that he could use something cheerful — he wants entertainment to be a pleasant distraction, just as dictators do — but it doesn’t exactly pan out that way, because the movie is the first step on the road toward Adam’s very dark revelation at the end of the movie.

7) Adam is constantly sneaking into places Anthony has access to. I’m not sure this really helps solve the mystery, but we first see Anthony easily gain access to the spider-smooshing club. Adam, on the other hand, has to sneak into Anthony’s talent agency, has to use the doorman to get up to Anthony’s apartment, and has to wait until he finds the second key to visit the spider-smoosh club. Adam and Anthony meet in a motel room, which is also a place that can only be accessed with a key. Also worth noting: Anthony rides a motorcycle and a sports car, getting him to and from places quickly, while Adam tends to walk and use public transportation. In these and other ways, Anthony has the idealized life — and the one time he uses public transportation is when he is stalking Mary and plotting to become Adam for a night.

8) Anthony and Adam decide to meet in a hotel an hour outside the city, and neither of them comments on how strange this is. Any logical person would say, “Hey, why not a cafe around the corner instead?” No one wants to meet a mysterious stranger in a dimly lit hotel room, for obvious reasons. There is no reason for the meeting to take place here, unless it’s symbolic. Something important obviously happened in this motel room, which is made even more clear when Anthony takes Mary to this same hotel later in the movie. And when Anthony and Adam meet, Anthony asks Adam, “Show me your hands,” to which Adam reacts defensively. Why? Perhaps because those hands played a major part in something else that happens in this hotel room… later, when Mary notices Anthony’s wedding ring.

9) The Hotel/Motel motif. Is it a coincidence that the movie Anthony is an extra in takes place at a hotel, and features him as a bellhop, and then their first encounter is at a motel? Doubt it! Also of note: when arriving at the motel, Adam takes a long look at a woman who appears to have blonde hair hidden under a black bob wig. Flashback? Is this Mary? I’m hesitant to read much into it, except that blonde women seem to have a lot of pull here (whereas the only dark-haired woman of note is Adam’s mother). That woman is seen holding a motel key card, and we’ve already established that keys play a pretty significant role in this story. Hmm.

10) We see things more from Helen’s point of view than Anthony’s. This is a curious choice. If the film were concerned with Adam and Anthony sharing equal confusion about why they look so much alike, we’d likely follow Anthony more. Instead, there are several scenes in which it’s Helen’s confusion that we identify with. We get only a few glimpses at Anthony’s thought process, so neither we nor Helen nor Adam can completely trust him. It doesn’t seem like he’s “in on it,” exactly, but it does often seem like he knows more than he’s letting on. (Helen even says as much.) So what’s the significance of Adam and Helen? Midway through the film, Adam and Helen have a strange encounter on his campus — she knows who he is, but he doesn’t know her. The film ends with them reunited. Clearly, this coupling is significant somehow — moreso than Anthony and Helen’s relationship is. Adam and Helen seem to have a purer, sweeter love, while Anthony and Mary’s brief fling is sinister, manipulative, and ends in death.

11) Helen is clued in to most of what is going on early on, but Mary never has any idea. Adam never mentions to Mary that anything strange is going on. In fact, once Anthony enters Adam’s life, we barely see them together at all, and Adam doesn’t put up any sort of a fight when Anthony suggests that he take Mary out to the motel. Instead, he is drawn toward Helen. This suggests that Mary isn’t remotely important to Adam, but Helen is. Why? My guess is that a lot of what we’re seeing involving Mary is some kind of memory or flashback. Anthony stalks her, first on his motorcycle, then on a bus, following her to work. Mary doesn’t see him, but if a man who looked exactly like her boyfriend was in her vicinity all that time, it seems like she’d probably notice if we were meant to view these scenes at face value. Instead, we’re probably seeing some sort of flashback of Adam/Anthony’s first time seeing Mary, becoming captivated by her, and wanting to begin an affair with her. But Mary isn’t ultimately important to Adam/Anthony. Helen is.

12) When Adam calls Anthony, Helen is suspicious, as if she believes Anthony is talking to another woman. This also indicates that Anthony has previously had an affair, possibly with Mary. If Helen suspected Anthony of cheating, and this is all a dream-like retelling of prior events, it makes sense that here, Helen would also be a suspicious person who is clued in to the strange events, and even goes on to investigate Adam herself. I believe that Enemy is a mixture of a dream state and a mixture of past events playing themselves out again, history repeating itself as it does in Adam’s lecture. It’s a fantasy story, a piece of entertainment distracting Adam from a painful realization.

13) People often cast blame outside themselves, rather than looking within. This explains why Adam and Anthony might be a fractured fantasy of the same person, which is pretty common in doppelganger movies and heavily implied here. Adam is boring and inoffensive — he doesn’t seem like a whole person, which means he might literally be Anthony distilled down to all of his “good” qualities, while Anthony is more like the id version. That way, Adam can blame Anthony for what went wrong rather than having to accept his own flaws and point the blame inward.

14) Movies represent reality. It’s no accident that Adam first encounters Anthony in a movie. We see “ourselves” in movies all the time; that’s the point of them. We’re meant to identify with fictional characters as a means of discovering things about ourselves.

15) Anthony is already a double of himself. Adam discovers the name of the actor who so eerily resembles him: Daniel Saint Claire. But that is not his actual name — it’s a stage name, a pseudonym. This already gives us a sense that he is not a real person. Adding to that is the scene where we see him “practicing” his dialogue to Adam in front of a mirror. Actors are constantly taking on new names and personalities, and Anthony seems to be more of a character than a full-fledged person. He is already all too used to seeing different versions of himself that all look like him because of his profession.

16) Adam tells Anthony he’s “great” in his movies. Would anyone really tell an extra he was “great”? Adam is saying this because he wants Anthony’s life. It’s like Adam telling himself he could be great if he was an actor. Adam is desperate to meet Anthony because he wants to “meet” that side of himself; Anthony is reluctant because that side of his psyche doesn’t want to “meet” and accept the pathetic, true version of himself.

17) Helen is pregnant with Anthony’s child. When it comes to actually doubling ourselves, we do so via procreation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Anthony has a child on the way; replication is already on this man’s mind even before the trippiness begins.

18) Adam’s name is Adam. The first man, according to the Bible. Is this to imply that he is the “original”? Just an observation.

19) Mom tells it like it is. Adam’s mother contradicts herself when she tells Adam he lives in a nice apartment — in the beginning of the film, we heard her saying exactly the opposite. (Mom has flipped!) She also has two other significant snafus here, telling Adam he likes blueberries and suggesting he give up acting. Both of these are Anthony qualities, not Adam qualities. We could assume that it’s Anthony in this scene, not Adam, but that doesn’t track because Gyllenhall is giving a very Adam performance here. It seems the lines between these two are beginning to blur. In my opinion, this scene’s mother is all wrong — if we can believe that the message at the beginning about the shabby apartment is true, then her saying his apartment is nice is false, and so is everything else she says here. It makes sense, if this is a fantasy, that this mother figure would be the one to start poking holes in the little fiction Adam’s psyche has created for him, because that’s what mothers do. They tell it like it is.

20) Lucid Dreams. Not surprisingly, the actors and filmmakers play cagey in the film’s rather unsatisfying Blu Ray extras, without providing a definitive answer for what the movie’s about. In fact, the clearest consensus seems to concern a man’s duality regarding whether or not he wants to remain faithful to his wife. This is certainly a major aspect of the story, though it still doesn’t explain those spiders. Curiously enough, it’s the title of the DVD extra, “Lucid Dreams,” that may provide the biggest clue. A lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer knows he is dreaming. Now, I know that a film’s writer and director aren’t often involved in creation of DVD extras, but that’s a curious title choice for a movie that’s not about a character who is dreaming or fantasizing what’s going on. So let’s assume he is!

SO WHAT THE HELL?

Okay, now that I’ve presented some evidence, it’s time to explain what I think is going on here. My best guess is that Adam/Anthony’s psyche has fractured into two personalities, but neither of them is the “real” version. More likely, the truth exists between them. Adam/Anthony is dead or dying, and his subconscious is struggling to accept that, fraught with guilt over how he died and anxious about the future going on without him.

It’s something like this: Adam is a history professor living in a shabby apartment… with his pregnant wife. He always wanted to be an actor. He wishes he were a guy like Anthony. But because he has done something he’s feeling guilty about, he projects those things onto the “other” version of himself. Adam may be having doubts about fatherhood. He cheated on his wife with Mary at that motel an hour from home. Mary then freaked out when she noticed the shadow of the ring on his finger. Adam and Mary fought in the car on the way back and Adam got into an accident in which he killed or nearly killed himself. Now he is struggling to make sense of what happened. In his guilt, Adam wishes he could be back with his wife without the “bad” version — the cheating version — being there. In his fantasy, Anthony and the mistress die in an accident and Helen is left with the “good” Adam, a happy ending of sorts.

At least, until… a giant fucking spider replaces her. We’ll get to that in a moment. Here are a few additional matters to consider.

21) Tarantulas. A few facts about tarantulas seem relevant to Enemy‘s plot (though reading too heavily into it might be didactic). Females have much longer lifespans than males. Females often show aggression after mating. Tarantulas shed an exoskeleton. Take that for what you will.

22) Spiders are scary. “Why spiders?” is a common question related to Enemy. And indeed, the spiders feel random. They could just as easily be anything else. But if I had to guess, I’d say that Villeneuve is using the spiders as a visual representation of death. Why spiders? Because they’re scary! At least, according to a large percentage of the population. There’s no physical being or object more feared than spiders, and it wouldn’t exactly work for Helen to turn into “heights” or “public speaking” (or any of the other phobias people have) at the end of the movie. So: spiders. When Anthony and Mary are (presumably) killed in the car crash, the windshield looks like a spiderweb. If this is the last thing Adam/Anthony saw before slipping into this lucid dream, or death, or whatever, it explains why spiders would be on his mind as his subconscious fights to grapple with what is happening.

23) Back to Spider #1. The spider-smoosh club doesn’t feel like a real place, does it? Taken as metaphor, the film begins with sexy women serving up death on a platter, and teasingly raising a high heel over it, as if to squash death. Do we see the heel come down? No. Because death can’t be squelched. This is the smallest spider in the film because it’s at the point where death is least present in Anthony’s mind.

24) Spider #2. The shot of a woman with a spider’s head walking on the ceiling more literally conflates women and death. Specifically, sexy naked blonde women. Why? If Anthony/Adam is dead or dying, he knows that his extramarital transgression with a certain blonde caused it, so it makes sense that he would now see a hybrid of the two. The scene comes directly after Helen has confronted Anthony about “the man” (Adam): she asks what’s happening, then says, “I think you know.” In the back of his mind, Adam/Anthony does know, and this more human version of a spider is the realization of his death creeping up on him again.

25) Spider #3. Now we see a ginormous spider hovering over Toronto! We’re probably not meant to take this literally. I take this spider as a further metaphor for death — looming over everything, but ignored. Notice how there aren’t military aircraft shooting at this titanic arachnid — it has gone unseen even though it’s pretty fuckin’ present. Just like death itself.

26) “I want you to stay.” Adam finds the key he gave to Anthony, the one that leads to the spider-smoosh club. He’s getting ready to go, and Helen says she wants him to stay. Does this mean she prefers Adam to Anthony? Kind of, but the line seems to have a greater meaning, too — Helen, or this version of Helen existing in Adam’s subconscious, wants Adam not to realize that he has died and continue to live in this fiction. But that doesn’t seem to be a possibility.

27) Helen’s last line in the film is “I forgot to tell you that your mother called.” What did the movie begin with? Oh, yes. A call from Adam’s mother. This is the last thing we hear from Helen, just as the movie has come full circle. In fact, Adam then asks Helen a question and gets no response, prompting him to go into the room and see what the matter is. Of course, the matter is that she is a giant fucking spider, but why now? Is this just a coincidence? No. Adam asks if she has plans for the night, telling her that he has to go out. He means to the spider-smoosh club. If spiders represent death, then his “going out” is rather permanent. He’s got the key now, thus he’s ready to face his death. Helen tellingly never answers Adam’s question because Adam is dead and he will never know what his wife’s plans for the future are. Instead, he faces death — in the form of a giant spider.

28) The final shot is not a spider. Ask anyone what the last shot of this movie is, and most of them would probably tell you it’s the shot of that big-ass tarantula. It’s not. It’s a shot of Adam reacting to it. Does he scream? Does he jump back in fear? That is certainly what any normal person would do if actually confronted with a colossal arachnid. Instead, Adam’s reaction is rather understated. It seems like he’s having a realization — and not a major revelation, but an awareness of something he’s been putting together all along. This confrontation seems inevitable, rather than a sudden surprise, which makes sense given that he’s been gathering clues all this while. The look on his face is one of acceptance, possibly even relief, in that all the chaos he’s been faced with finally makes sense. It has finally been deciphered.

29) The song that plays during the closing credits is “After The Lights Go Out,” by The Walker Brothers. Assuming that this is a carefully selected piece of music thematically relevant to the movie, the title of this song supports the idea that Anthony/Adam is dead/dying and having some sort of disturbing “life flashing before his eyes” experience, likely after the car wreck we see late in the movie. The song opens with, “As the sun goes down / My silent little room is growing dim / And the man next door / Is saying what a lousy day it’s been,” which reminds us a lot of Adam in the film’s opening. Even more relevant are these lyrics later in the song: “Someone called for you / But I hung up the phone / What could I say?”, which remind us of Adam’s calls to Helen and Anthony. (Find full lyrics here.) If Adam is the speaker of the song, he seems to be mourning the fact that death is separating him from Helen.

30) The movie itself is a doppelganger. Enemy is based on The Double by Jose Saramago. (The original Portuguese title is The Duplicated Man.) Another doppelganger movie this year, The Double, was based on a novella of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The former novel presents the bare bones of the story we see in Enemy, but the movie takes it in another direction entirely, including the addition of the spiders. So don’t go looking for answers there.

Ultimately, the movie is open-ended enough to support any number of interpretations. The one I’ve presented here is the one that, I think, best explains away most of what we see in the movie, in comparison to other explanations I’ve read. But who knows? I’d be curious to read any supplements or critiques of my theory in the comments.

*

Back in the pre-podcast era (circa 2000 or so), I used to claim that I hated talk radio. “I don’t like people yammering on in my ear!” I claimed.

As it turns out, though, I do like people yammering in my year — as long as they’re yammering about something I yammer on about myself. Sports talk, uninformed chatter and canned interviews with celebrities, bitchy advice from bitchy shrinks — none of this ever struck my fancy. But the wonderful world of podcasts struck my fancy in all the right places, and just kept on striking it. Podcasts are specific enough that anyone can find a subject they don’t mind a stranger babbling on and on about, and they’re fine company for when you’re doing laundry, at the gym, on the subway, or stuck in traffic.

Now I subscribe to so many podcasts, it’s stressful just keeping up with them, but there’s something oddly comforting about that recurring blather. It’s hard to get lonely when familiar voices are always at your fingertips. When the house is too quiet, or I realize that the most significant human interaction of my day was telling my barista that I don’t need my receipt, I fire up Downcast and fill my ears with the scintillating conversations of people who are technically strangers, but I have come to know quite well.

Naturally, the ideal podcast for me tends to be film-related. It took me a while to stumble upon my favorites, so here I will share a few faves that listeners with a casual interest in cinema may enjoy also. I usually find that if I listen to two or three, I’m hooked. They’re like crack, I’m telling you!

1. How Did This Get Made?

“Let’s wallow in the mediocrity of subpar art.” So says the theme song to this podcast, hosted by comedians Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, and June Diane Raphael, along with a special guest on most occasions. My friends and I have been watching bad movies and ripping them apart for ages, but on the occasions when I want to make that experience portable, I have How Did This Get Made?, which eviscerates the most horrendous movies of all time, from The Room to Batman & Robin to Birdemic to Speed 2: Cruise Control and everything in between. These comedians aren’t exactly cinephiles; they’re just people who like the schadenfreude of mocking some of the most ill-advised cinema of all time. And who doesn’t?

Perfect For: Anyone who’s ever watched a godawful movie and asked, “How did this get made?”

Recommended Episode: Any will do, but you can’t go wrong with The Room.

 
2. Filmspotting: SVU

Filmspotting proper is also a podcast I digest regularly. In fact, it was one of my first. But this newer spinoff deals specifically with streaming films (“SVU” = “Streaming Video Unit” = get it?), so if you’ve ever spent an hour idly browsing what’s on Netflix, hosts Matt Singer and Alison Willmore can fill you in on what’s worth watching. They cover all kinds of platforms, VOD and rentals, Amazon and Hulu and Vudu and so on, but the show is quite Netflix-centric since that’s the language just about any streamer speaks. (And they also cover web TV like Orange Is The New Black too.)

Perfect For: Anyone who’s big on Netflix Watch Instantly, or who misses Alison and Matt’s glory days together on the defunct IFC podcast.

Recommended Episode: #6, “Unsexy Movies About Sex.” Because this is pretty much my favorite genre.

 
3. Slate Culture Gabfest

This isn’t specifically a film-related podcast, but they discuss a recently released movie more often than not, it seems, and one of the resident hosts is a film critic. Hosts Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner, and Dana Stevens discuss whatever smart New Yorkers are talking about in any given week, which might be a Slate article, a book, a TV show, a meme, or really, anything that pops up on the culture radar. Julia and Dana are a delight, while Stephen is like the grating, opinionated, totally pretentious uncle you love to hate (or hate to love). Plus you can play a drinking game along with this podcast — take one shot when anyone says the word “delightful,” two shots when Stephen says he’s going discuss something “really quickly,” and chug when Stephen finds a bizarrely obnoxious way to say either of his co-hosts names (which he invariably does at least once per episode). While their discussions of the latest blockbusters can range from joyful to slightly perfunctory (in weeks that it seems no film need be discussed at all), these critics are some of the smartest around and always bring a fresh and insightful perspective to current events, whether it be Boyhood or The Lego Movie.

Perfect For: Anyone aspiring to be a little smarter than they are, without the time or initiative to actually seek out the best pop culture events themselves.

Recommended Episode: Whichever is most recent is probably best, and Slate has plenty of other worthy podcasts as well, including the XX and Political Gabfests. Trust me, your topicality will grow twofold.
 

4. Fighting In The War Room (formerly Operation Kino)

As the name might suggest, the opinions fly fast and furiously on this one, and few of the hosts hold anything back from the impassioned discussions. (“Tell us how you really feel” will never been employed in earnest here.) As with any banter involving people with firm opinions, you are bound to be challenged and annoyed by some of the opinions expressed here, by certain hosts more often than others. (I won’t name names, but one of them can be a little pedantic.) My tastes frequently fail to align with this foursome’s, just as their tastes usually fail to align with each other’s, and this is definitely the most “inside baseball” of the podcasts I listen to (meaning: not for anyone who isn’t pretty serious about current film releases of all shapes and sizes). I’ve even had moments of frustration which caused me to question my commitment to this podcast, and yet it is almost always one of the very first I listen to when it pops up in my feed and I find that it keeps me very well-informed about smaller releases on the horizon. (Also, several of these guys picked Shame as 2011’s best movie, just like I did, so there are moments in which we’re totally simpatico.) It is everything you should expect from a podcast named after a Stanley Kubrick movie.

Perfect For: People who want to recreate the film school experience of discussing, debating, delighting in, and decrying movies new and old with their peers.

Recommended Episode: I enjoyed their discussion of Magic Mike, but as with most podcasts, the more recent the episode, the more relevant it’ll be.

5.  Nerdist Writer’s Panel

I’m not sure how interesting screenwriting is to anyone but screenwriters, but Nerdist collects panels of writers from all kinds of entertainment (TV mostly, but also lots of comic books), from Buffy to Breaking Bad to Friends to Game Of Thrones and so on. They all chit-chat about how they got started in the business, how the writers’ rooms of various shows operate, and what went on behind the scenes of shows they’ve worked on that have since been canceled. TV writers tend to be funny people, so there’s plenty of comedy, plus it’s a sharp look at how the industry really works. (Spoiler alert: it’s brutal.)

Perfect For: Nerds, duh. Screenwriters, in particular. Or anyone who wants the juicy insider gossip on their favorite shows.

Recommended Episode: Any of the ones with the Buffy writers. (Not that I’m biased.)

*

So give these a listen and report back on what you think! I’m also curious to know which ones everyone else out there listens to (if any), so feel free to comment with recommendations.

The strong, silent type is a character that goes all the way back to the beginning of cinema… but that’s mostly because those movies were silent.

Still, stoic males have been front and center in countless dramas, especially those geared toward men. The grittier the movie, the quieter the antihero at the center of it all. Ryan Gosling probably spoke less in Drive and Only God Forgives combined than any character does in a single scene in a Woody Allen movie.

Tom Hardy is not unfamiliar with such roles — in Warrior and Lawless, for example — in which his brawn outmatches his verbal skills. Arguably, his evil beefcake character in The Dark Knight Rises should have done even less talking, since we could hardly tell what he was saying through that mask anyway.

Earlier this year, Hardy starred in Locke, in which he did nothing but talk — well, talk and drive — given that he was the only character who appeared on screen. Most movies named after their protagonists feel titularly uninspired, but in this one, Locke is pretty much all we get, so the title’s fitting. Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a Welshman overseeing a major construction project that he has abandoned in order to make his way to the hospital where a one-night stand is giving birth to his child. The problem is that Locke is otherwise involved with a wife and children who are waiting for him to come home and watch football, and he still loves them very much. In fact, he only slept with this mysterious “other woman” once — he felt sorry for her because she was so lonely. (While this sounds like a brilliant new entry in the Cheating Husband Excuse Handbook, Hardy actually sells that this reasoning is valid.) Locke drives. And drives and drives and drives. And talks on the phone the whole way there. We’ve seen a number of thrillers that take place in a single location — from Lifeboat to Buried — but Locke is not a thriller. There is some suspense as to whether or not Ivan’s wife will abandon him when she learns the truth, whether or not Locke will be fired for choosing a near-stranger’s baby over his own work responsibilities, but that’s just drama. Usually, movies like this throw in everything but the kitchen sink as an obstacle to constantly up the ante and distract us from the fact that we’re not seeing a lot of change otherwise, but Locke doesn’t get a flat tire or run out of gas. Nothing like that. That’s probably a good thing, but it does risk leaving us rather underwhelmed at the end of it all, despite Hardy’s fully committed performance. (Imagine this movie with an unskilled actor, and it would be excruciating.) Locke is competently executed but not exactly tantalizingly conceived, and works mainly as another showcase for Tom Hardy.

The same could be said of The Drop, a more conventional drama based on a short story by Dennis Lehane, whose work has inspired more notable film adaptations like Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island. The Drop has a workmanlike approach to its writing and direction — no single scene etches itself in our memory, and though there is some suspense as to what will happen (and to whom), it ultimately follows a pretty tried-and-true formula. It’s the sort of movie that seems destined to play on cable during the daytime, and I don’t even mean that as a bad thing. The one (accidentally) momentous thing about it is that it features the final performance of James Gandolfini, which is, perhaps, reason enough to see it.In The Drop, Hardy stars as the Brooklyn-raised bartender Bob Saginowski, who is tangentially involved in shady criminal dealings but not really interested in such things, as he reminds us, “I just tend the bar.” Bob is not a particularly smart man, yet he may be the wisest person in this movie since he’s the only one who wants nothing to do with double-crosses and robberies that will, inevitably, get most of those involved killed before the credits roll. He’s the typical stoic antihero, capable of swift violence but not necessarily prone to it, with a decent heart underneath it all. (He’s also religious, and in real life the sort of guy who would almost surely be a lot uglier than Tom Hardy, but that’s movies for ya.)

Early in the film, Bob encounters a bloodied dog in a trash can and rescues it from an unknown fate, an act which unwittingly inserts him into a love triangle with a man who may or may not be tied to his past. The owner of the trash can is Nadia, played by Noomi Rapace, who displays a soft spot for a broken puppy (and, let’s be honest, a soft spot for a broken guy who looks like Tom Hardy) and agrees to help Bob look after the little pit bull. Unfortunately, the dog was left for her intentionally by an ex-con named Eric Deeds, played by Matthias Schoenaerts of Rust And Bone (looking far less studly here, leaving hunk duties to Hardy in order to play the weasel of the piece). Deeds is Nadia’s ex-boyfriend, an unpredictable sociopath who begins stalking Bob in a number of nervy, unsettling encounters. Nadia is scarred, both literally and figuratively, by her druggie past with Eric, and he’s not about to let her move on to the next tough guy with a puppy.Meanwhile, Bob is also being watched by police detective Torres (Jon Ortiz) who is sniffing around an old murder case that involves Cousin Marv’s bar and, coincidentally, Eric Deeds. In the film’s opening moments, we learn that Cousin Marv’s is one of several drop locations for cash procured by the local Chechen (not Chechnian!) mafia. Things go south when Marv and Bob are robbed by a couple of young punks (one played by Animal Kingdom’s James Frecheville) who quickly find themselves in over their heads after they’ve messed with the wrong bar. It all builds to a pretty cool conclusion set on Super Bowl Sunday, and while the final twists aren’t exactly blindsiding, they’re probably not trying to be. Hardy is solid in the lead role, and Gandolfini goes out on a high note playing a much smaller-time criminal than Tony Soprano. (It’s almost jarring to see him cowed by other bad guys in a way that Tony never would have stood for.) Meanwhile, Ann Dowd has unfortunately little to do as Marv’s sister, and Rapace’s character never gets to be more than “the girl.”

I can’t help but feel this film is missing a truly shocking act of violence or two to help push it over the edge into something like greatness. The elements are there, but never quite stun or surprise. The Deeds character doesn’t quite pay off as he should; he’s this film’s wild card, the character who feels the freshest, and if his character’s impulsive violent tendencies had been pushed a bit further, it could have elevated The Drop above its fairly elemental level. As is, The Drop is just a drop in the ocean of crime dramas, but certainly not a bad one on any level. (As a bonus, there are plenty of scenes of Tom Hardy playing with a cute puppy, which is bound to be your cup of tea if you are a gay man or a straight woman.)

Tom Hardy still hasn’t been given a leading role in a major movie that quite deserves him. His Bane paled in comparison to Heath Ledger’s Joker (a flaw in the writing, not Hardy’s acting) and his other post-Bronson films, while smartly chosen, have all had the Drop-esque feeling that they should have been a drop better. (Again, nothing to do with the quality of his performances. Hardy’s always brought his A-game.) If Hardy were a decade younger, he almost surely would have been called upon to play the lead in David Mackenzie’s Starred Up, a prison drama about a boy who contains within him all the unpredictable fury of a caged animal. The role actually went to Jack O’Connell of the UK teen soap Skins, whose performance I will describe as fearless (even though that’s become a cliche). O’Connell plays Eric Love, a young inmate who gets “starred up” (AKA transferred into the adult prison system early).

As portrayed here, the British prison system has a few notable differences from the American one, but is every bit as unpleasant and gritty as we’ve been led to believe. Starred Up makes Orange Is The New Black look like Downton Abbey — we begin with Eric’s arrival at HM Wandsworth, and no other film I can think of captures the experience of being incarcerated so well. Eric says very little to begin with (another stoic leading man), but immediately upon his arrival he is already shrewdly making and hiding weapons in his claustrophobic cell, so we get a pretty good sense of what his life has been like up until this point. We may initially worry about this young man’s safety amongst larger, more dangerous-looking criminal types, but that goes out the window once we realize that Eric is his own worst enemy and much more likely to be the instigator of any violence on the horizon. He’s a feral animal, kicking and screaming and biting (or almost biting, in one of the film’s most memorable moments). What could turn a young boy into such a beast? Well, Starred Up answers that question with the fact that Eric’s father Neville Love is incarcerated in the exact same prison.Neville, played by Ben Mendelsohn (who I have never seen not breaking the law in a movie), is less the typical machismo prisoner and more of a wounded puppy who now turns dangerous when provoked. (The way Mendelsohn plays him, Neville seems just a notch or two above mentally handicapped.) We don’t get many specifics on why either Eric or Neville is in prison, but it was clearly in the cards for both almost from the get-go, and though Neville seems to have earned a certain degree of respect in this institution, it’s actually his son who has the ferocity and nerve that will either make him the top dog around these parts or get him killed for trying. Eric gets involved in an anger management program run by Oliver (Rupert Friend) that allows for some of the film’s most dynamic scenes of prison life, as hot-headed men spar over next to nothing to the point where they might kill each other. It’s immediately obvious how all of these guys ended up behind bars. Starred Up is a movie about rage in a cage; when you put a bunch of angry men in a box together and shake them up, the result is bound to be explosive. Eric Love has probably never known anything else. O’Connell’s performance is electric and quite probably star-making, while Mackenzie’s direction is expert and Jonathan Asser’s script is spare on eloquent dialogue but remarkably true-to-life (he did work in actual prisons, much like Oliver).

I’m not sure Starred Up quite packed the punch I was hoping for dramatically, but it’s admirably lean. Eric’s interactions with his fellow anger managers and his final confrontation with his father both satisfy dramatically (in a way that left me wanting even more satisfaction). The film has a dark streak of humor that adds just the right note of levity. I have a feeling that this one will be more rewarding on a second viewing (perhaps with subtitles, given the thick working class accents).

So watch out Tom Hardy — Jack O’Connell is coming for you, and he means business.

*

“Dad’s dead.”

These are the first words of the book This Is Where I Leave You, spoken by Wendy Foxman. How does she say it? “Offhandedly, like it’s happened before, like it happens every day. It can be grating, this act of hers, to be utterly unfazed at all times, even in the face of tragedy.”

These are not the first words of This Is Where I Leave You the movie, which begins instead with a shot of our protagonist strolling merrily through the streets of New York with some coffee in hand. (Real original, right?) It isn’t until several scenes later that Judd gets a phone call from Wendy (portrayed by Tina Fey in the movie), who says: “Dad’s dead.” How does she say it? Not offhandedly. Not like it’s happened before. She’s crying.

From there, we cut to a funeral for the aforementioned dead dad. It’s a beautiful fall day, and everyone is in proper mourning attire, and there’s some overwrought music from the score announcing this as a Sad Moment. It made me incredibly depressed, but not because I was feeling the loss of the family patriarch.

Because at that moment I realized that someone had seriously fucked up the movie adaptation of a pretty wonderful novel.

This Is Where I Leave You is the inevitable movie version of the well-received 2009 novel by Jonathan Tropper. I just read the book this week, so I was extra-attuned to which elements of the story were kept the same, and which were altered for the big screen. I recognized pretty much every line of dialogue that was taken directly from the book, cocking my brow at those that were added or exchanged, carefully keeping a tally of which changes were for good and which were for evil.

And I know: novels and films are different mediums. They need to be treated as such. A good book adaptation is not necessarily a faithful book adaptation — it’s all about capturing the spirit of the original text, which can mean axing full story threads or killing off supporting characters before we ever meet them on screen. It’s for the greater good. Oftentimes, movie adaptations suffer from trying to be too faithful to the book, cramming in way too much material instead of being true to the theme of the story. It’s a common mistake.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel flummoxed by some of the changes made here. The Foxman clan’s last name switch now makes them the Altman clan, a rather boring choice, and Judd’s cheating wife Jen is now, inexplicably, Quinn. I winced every single time someone mentioned the name “Quinn.” I winced every time we cut to a shot of Judd’s iPhone announcing that Quinn was calling. (It happens a lot.) And every time there was a scene with Quinn Altman, I had the urge to shake her and ask, “Who are you, bitch? And what have you done with Jen Foxman?”The world will never know how I would have reacted to Quinn Altman if I had not read the book, if I had never known Jen Foxman. I know this alteration doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s the kind of thing that makes me want to show up at director Shawn Levy’s house with my copy of Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You and throw it at him, shouting, “Did you even read this thing?” (I would not do the same to the screenwriter, because the screenwriter is Jonathan Tropper.) You know how Buffalo Bill in Silence Of The Lambs cuts off pieces of womens’ skin and wears them? This Is Where I Leave You is kind of like that. All the same characters are here, and most of the things that happen are very similar to what occurs in the book, but it’s like a movie wearing the skin of the novel. All the pieces are right, yet what’s underneath is all wrong. The soul is missing.

This Is Where I Leave You is the story of the Foxman — sorry, Altman — family, led by matriarch Hilary (Jane Fonda), a famous (and newly buxom) child psychiatrist who based all of her parenting advice on her experiences with her own children. These children are now, uniformly, a mess: Wendy is a harried mom who married a certifiable asshole after a teen romance went askew; Paul (Corey Stoll) lives in his father’s shadow trying to hold the family business together but can’t start a family of his own because he’s sterile; Phillip (Adam Driver) is the bratty baby of the clan, always getting to trouble; and Judd has discovered his wife Jen — sorry, Quinn — sleeping with his asshole boss Wade (Dax Shepard).

Oh, and as for their father? Dad’s dead.Apparently, dad’s dying wish was for all of his children to sit shiva, even though he was an atheist, which means this group of sparring siblings will need to spend a whole week under the same roof. That leads to a lot of drama, as well as a few old romances rekindled. Paul’s wife Annie (Katherine Hahn) is actually Judd’s ex, and she’s pretty okay with having a baby by any of the Altman brothers; Wendy was once involved with the Altmans’ next door neighbor Horry (Timothy Olyphant), who’s still around; and Judd just might hit it off with Penny Moore (Rose Byrne), who always had a thing for him. Because when Rose Byrne is single and has her eye on you, are you seriously thinking of going back to a cheating whore named Quinn? (By the way, if you think the above description of the story sounds complicated, I have only covered about half of it.)

This Is Where I Leave You is a plethora of plots in search of a unifying theme. The book was told from a male’s point-of-view; it mostly shoved Wendy and Hilary to the sidelines and focused on the relationships between the three brothers, Judd’s feelings about his father’s death, as well as Judd’s marital woes, rivalry with his jerky boss, and lust for just about every other woman he encounters whom he is not related by blood to. (The “by blood” is an important distinction, because he actually does sleep with someone he is related to by marriage in the book.) Most of these aspects are still in the movie, but the movie also throws a bunch of other stuff at us; when not told through Judd’s first person narration, everything is given equal weight, and in a movie as stuffed as this one, that ends up being virtually no weight at all.

The main trouble is that Judd, played by Jason Bateman, is a bit of a nothing as a lead character. He’s a lot like every other character Bateman has ever played, especially Michael Bluth in Arrested Development — the calm eye at the center of a storm of a family. While that once worked really well, I’ve grown tired of seeing Bateman in this role; I’m not sure whose fault it is, exactly, that the Judd character has been so watered down, but this movie is sorely missing his perspective on what’s happening. Judd in the book was horny and bruised, torn between his feelings for two women, indifferent about becoming a father and uncertain in his grief over his own father’s demise. That irony is lost in the film, particularly because Judd’s scenes with Jen — sorry, Quinn — are by far the film’s weakest link. They’re poorly written, poorly acted, and poorly directed, and no offense to Abigail Spencer, but she seems awfully miscast in the role.

I grew frustrated with Judd in Tropper’s novel because Jen was, in my opinion, a heinous bitch, and did not warrant Judd’s deliberation about whether or not he should return to her when Penny was so much better. At the same time, Judd’s mourning of his marriage felt totally palpable, even in the way that it eclipsed his mourning of his father. The way he was haunted by his hatred for his adulterous wife also felt real. In a sense, the movie handles this better by not allowing Judd to waffle between his feelings for Quinn and Penny, skipping right to the conclusion that he and the unfaithful ex will raise their child as a divorced couple. But then why have so much Quinn in the movie? Dax Shepard is also miscast as Wade, which means pretty much everything involving Judd’s marital strife comes off pretty poorly. Wade is supposed to be an ultra-macho blowhard in his forties — Dax Shepard makes Wade too much an echo of Phillip, and not a serious threat whatsoever.The script reeks of studio notes demanding that Judd be “likeable,” which means not pining for his cheating wife, not lusting after every woman he lays his eyes on, not “accidentally” sleeping with his sister-in-law, not physically assaulting Wade on multiple occasions, not being such a jerk to Penny, and not being responsible for his brother’s attack by pit bull during their adolescence. Some of these are good and necessary omissions, but guess what? This Is Where I Leave You is about how guys are jerks; about how an emotionally distant father can create emotionally screwed up sons; about this chaotic family in which everyone is a little fucked up. Except now Judd is not fucked up. He’s an Everyman. A perfectly likeable guy.

So tell me where you’ve heard this one before. With an outrageous mother, an absentee dad, a sister in an unhappy marriage, two nutty brothers (one of whom is sleeping with a woman who reminds us of his mother), a host of kooky friends and acquaintances, Judd Altman literally becomes Michael Bluth and This Is Where I Leave You is basically just a big screen version of Arrested Development, except not nearly as skillfully written or directed. It’s all been done before, and much better. Tropper’s book never once reminded me of Arrested Development, because it had its own point-of-view. It was about something. This Is Where I Leave You is mostly just about a bunch of crazies sitting shiva.A lot of this is thanks to Tina Fey’s beefed up role as Wendy, and on the one hand, I get it — you have Tina Fey in your movie, so why not use her? But Wendy played a pretty small part in the book. She was, arguably, the seventh most important character, here beefed up to second billing. Most of her scenes are pretty good; I’m glad she had something to do here. But too many of them feel shoehorned in from another movie. If this adaptation had to sacrifice a storyline or two in order to be leaner and more focused, I wish it had dropped the Horry character. This movie doesn’t have room for a brain damaged neighbor, though Timothy Olyphant does what he can with a handful of scenes. We can sense that there could have something good there, but this film doesn’t have time to develop it.

Alternatively, Horry might’ve fit in just fine if the film had sacrificed Connie Britton’s Tracy — Adam Driver’s Phillip is enough of a wild card that he doesn’t necessarily need his own love interest. The film would’ve worked just fine with him as the cad he is, minus his former shrink and future wife. I liked these characters in the book, and I like the actors in the movie, but something’s gotta give in a movie with this many disparate stories. As is, the second half of the film feels like ending after ending after ending, with so many scenes of resolution that leave us to wonder, “Okay, fine, but where were all the scenes of conflict leading up to this tender resolution?” Yes, what I am essentially saying here is that I’d like to go back in time to rewrite and direct this movie.

Jonathan Tropper’s script might even be fine; I suspect that Shawn Levy’s direction is mostly to blame for what has been lost in the translation from page to screen. My reasons for suspecting this are as follows: The Internship. Real Steel. The Pink Panther. Cheaper By The Dozen. Date Night. All of the Night At The Museum movies. I have seen only one of these, Date Night, which hooked me with Tina Fey and Steve Carell before I knew any better. (Beware, beware the movie Tina Fey stars in but did not write.) The reason I have not seen the rest of these is quite simply because almost nobody thinks they were any good. And not a single one of these titles suggests that Levy is capable of handling the emotional complexity of This Is Where I Leave You.

This Is Where I Leave You begins badly. Judd walks in on his wife fucking his boss, and in his hands is her birthday cake. So what does he do? Smash the birthday cake over the fucking couple, right? Because: physical comedy? No — that’s what Judd does in the book, but since that is, I guess, not likeable, Judd doesn’t do anything. The first ten minutes of this film are pretty lame, though fortunately it picks up after the funeral. The cast is talented, so seeing them play off each other works more often than it doesn’t. Adam Driver has surprisingly good chemistry with Fey and Bateman; Rose Byrne makes the most out of not that much, which is what she does so well; a busty Fonda delivers her handful of one-liners with appropriate aplomb; there are several genuinely good scenes here, but they’re smashed together artlessly without any sense of how they hang together.

I know I’m coming off pretty negatively about This Is Where I Leave You, even if I ultimately enjoyed watching it. It’s certainly not an abomination, although a handful of scenes are outright bad. Everyone around Judd is more worthy of their own movie, so why follow him? I’m not sure it’s fair to blame Levy for the casting and for Michael Giacchino’s obnoxious, intrusive score, but I’m going to, anyway. Even the house the Altmans live in feels too chic and upper-middle-class for this story. Maybe that’s just how I pictured it, and maybe that’s my own fault, but you’ll have to take my word for it: the movie in my head is better.The movie in my head is actually a lot like The Skeleton Twins, which is also about screwed up siblings coping with an uptight mother and a deceased father, though the similaritiesend there. A few years back, a movie about twins played by Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader would sound like a slapstick comedy that might best be avoided, but that was before this particular wave of Saturday Night Live alums began to show off their dramatic chops. In The Skeleton Twins, we get the best of both worlds — the movie is, at times, hilarious, but it’s also wrenching and real and a bit of a downer. Wiig and Hader aren’t jut actors playing at being funny; they actually are funny, and that makes a big difference here. Other actors might’ve been able to fake some of this, but we get a sense that this movie’s strongest only work because they’re performed by Wiig and Hader. The two have a sibling-like rapport that fills in all the gaps that would’ve been left gaping by a pair of actors who weren’t so familiar with each other. These two have some major chemistry going on.

Fortunately, the script is up to the task of bringing these fine comedians together. Hader is Milo, who decides to slit his wrists in a bathtub on the same day that his twin sister Maggie contemplates swallowing a handful of pills to end her life. Milo’s depression seems justified: he’s still hankering for the closeted English teacher who broke his heart in high school, he’s failing as an actor in Los Angeles, and he hasn’t spoken to his twin sister in a decade. Maggie’s unhappiness is initially harder to fathom — she’s married to Lance (Luke Wilson), the sweetest guy imaginable; she holds down a decent job, lives in a nice house, and is quite likely on her way to motherhood.Gradually, we learn a lot more about both Milo and Maggie and their very flawed parents, as well as the rift that caused them to go radio silent for so long. The information is doled out perfectly and organically, rather than in awkward expositionial chunks like a certain other movie about emotionally damaged siblings that I may or may not have just reviewed above this one. Milo and Maggie’s dad committed suicide many years ago, which is at least part of the reason they’re both fucked up, but certainly not the extent of it. The rest of it is best left discovered as the movie unfolds, but let’s just say this movie isn’t afraid to test the likeability of its protagonists, unlike a certain other movie about emotionally damaged siblings I may or may not have just reviewed above this one.

It’s hard not to view The Skeleton Twins as a study in how This Is How I Leave You should have been made. It is tight and focused, whereas This Is How I Leave You is sprawling and messy; there are only six consequential characters, and many appear in only a small handful of scenes (or even just one). It deals with death in a very real, somber way, and it is not afraid to show its characters with all warts displayed. And yet it also manages to be much funnier than This Is How I Leave You — it’s the rare movie that is dark as hell but with terrific moments of levity, thanks to Hader and Wiig. It’s not often that a movie so drenched in suicide can be so funny, and yet the strength of the comedy does not in any way cheapen or undermine the more dramatic moments. In fact, Milo and Maggie are probably the most well-rounded and realistic characters I’ve seen in a movie this year.It shouldn’t surprise anyone by now that these and other SNL alums can do such heavy lifting. Both stars sell the dramatic moments as easily as the comedic ones. It’s easy to imagine many actors being as good in the sadder scenes, but impossible to imagine anyone else nailing the comedic timing with such precision. Milo is the sort of moody gay you’ve probably met at least once. He’s sarcastic, he’s morose, but he’s also totally ridiculous, always finding a silly silver lining even in the bleakest of moments. And Maggie? She has it all on paper, but there’s a self-destructive streak running through her, as she has too successfully fled from the past without properly dealing with. And, well, who can really blame her for being attracted to Billy (Boyd Holbrook), her Australian scuba diving instructor?

The Skeleton Twins is expertly written by Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman, skillfully directed by Johnson. It is the perfect matching of light and dark. It features several actors who come across better here than they usually do, including Luke Wilson and Ty Burrell; Joanna Gleason gets one killer scene as the twins’ icy, New Age-y mother Judy. But it’s really Hader and Wiig’s show, and they constantly steal scenes from one another. The scene in which they get high on nitrous oxide is the comedic high point of 2014 — at least until the scene in which they sing along to Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” which should go down as one of the great musical moments in cinema history.

The Skeleton Twins is the funniest movie I’ve seen in 2014, and it’s not even really a comedy. This Is Where I Leave You has a very talented cast, including the usually unbeatable Tina Fey, but when it comes to comedy, I guess two Saturday Night Live grads is better than one.

*

Marriage is a contract. We select one person we love and trust, and pledge to continue loving and trusting them until our dying breath. We give them equal stake in all our assets. We promise to be with them and them only. We will eat, sleep, and travel with this person. Their friends become our friends. Our friends become their friends. Their interests become our interests, and vice versa. Words like “we” and “us” replace “I” and “me.” They will have more influence over us than any other person we have ever known — our parents, our best friends, our siblings — even if we have known this person for only a couple of years. We refer to that person as a “partner.”

And, when you think about it… isn’t that a pretty fucking insane agreement to enter into?

(I’ll attempt not to spoil specific plot points, but if you really want to go into this movie cold, you may want to discontinue reading.)

Gone Girl is the latest thriller from David Fincher, who is treading in similar waters to his Se7en, Zodiac, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in some ways. And in other ways? Not at all. (Though there actually is a rather crucial similarity between the central mysteries in Gone Girl and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, when you think about it.) When all is said and done, Gone Girl might have more in common with Fincher’s Fight Club in some rather crucial, twisty ways, and also in tone. Gone Girl is, in the end, a critique of our modern way of life, and of marriage in particular. Just as Fight Club had some intriguing and ultimately satirical ideas about masculinity, Gone Girl has plenty to say about the ways men and women relate to each other, in particular once they become lawfully wedded (for better or worse, ’til death do ‘em part).

Yes, it is nearly impossible to have a meaningful discussion of Gone Girl‘s themes without massively spoiling the big twist from Gillian Flynn’s uber-popular page-turner. Suffice to say, for the moment, that Gone Girl stars Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, a husband whose wife has up and vanished, an event that quickly begins to uncover just how toxic that marriage was. Nick turns to his supportive twin sister Margo (played by The Leftovers‘ fantastic Carrie Coon) as the world begins to turn on him, as the world tends to do when a dashing husband seems too cavalier in the wake of a tragedy involving his pretty wife. That wife is Amy, portrayed by Rosamund Pike in, I would argue, her first role that demands the world take notice of her. As in the novel, we alternate between seeing how Nick copes with cops and the mystery surrounding his wife’s disappearance, and flashbacks from Amy’s diary chronicling their early romance.

Gone Girl features a number of compelling performances, from Kim Dickens as the competent but confounded Detective Boney, the lead investigator in Amy’s disappearance (and Patrick Fugit as her more cynical right-hand man), to Lola Kirke and Boyd Holbrook as a couple of trashy rednecks whose connection to the plot I shall keep secret, to Emily Ratajkowksi as one of Nick’s sexy students. The media itself is another character in the story, from the sharky celebrity defense attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) to the Nancy Grace-esque Ellen Abbott (Missi Pyle) to the ruthless Sharon Scheiber (Sela Ward). There’s also Casey Wilson as Noelle Hawthorne, a woman who claims to be Amy’s best friend, and Neil Patrick Harris as Desi Collings, a preppy rich guy from Amy’s past who just might be her soul mate.Amy is a star long before her disappearance makes her the topic du jour on the nightly news; her parents pilfered her childhood in the children’s book series Amazing Amy, which saw Amy constantly one-upped by an illustrated version of herself. As she tells it, Amy and Nick meet cute at a party with banter so rapid-fire the lines seem to crash into each other, enhanced by a disorienting (but very intentional) approach to the editing that comes off like Aaron Sorkin on speed. (Yes, even more speed than Sorkin is usually on.) It’s one of many masterful filmmaking touches in Gone Girl meant to throw everything off-kilter, because unlike most such scenes, we’re not supposed to fall in love with Nick or Amy in this moment. We’re supposed to feel… unsettled. Because there’s something off in this relationship… isn’t there? Is one of these people not who they claim to be? Are they both hiding something? Reasons to distrust Nick pile up as the investigation ensues, and though he claims to be cooperating with the police, he certainly isn’t divulging everything. If Nick and Amy both seem too clever for their own good when first they meet, that’s not an accident.

(And this is the part where I delve into slightly more spoilery material, though I’ll still be somewhat vague about it.)

If you were determined to, I suppose you could make an argument that Gone Girl is misogynistic. Never mind that both the book and screenplay were written by the same woman, and the movie features a number of women in significant roles — there are more influential females in this movie than in any other comparable thriller I can think of. The lead investigator is a woman, and you could argue that the film is from her point-of-view, at least in the first half — she’s the one investigating Nick’s involvement in Amy’s disappearance and also reading Amy’s diary. Additionally, Margo is one of the film’s most likable characters, and one of the more likable screen characters in general recently. (I wouldn’t mind a Nick-and-Margo spinoff a la The Skeleton Twins.) Sure, a lot of the women in this movie come off as bitches — especially those associated with the media — but the men don’t come out looking so great either. There’s one man who is particularly creepy in the way he wants to own and dominate his woman — things don’t turn out too well for him, and it’s hard to feel that bad about it. Gone Girl isn’t any more misogynistic than The Silence Of The Lambs is anti-male. It’s a cool and complicated feminist twist on the kind of story we’ve seen a thousand times, and a lot of it is actually intended to be darkly funny.The book Gone Girl has the advantage of taking us into Nick and Amy’s heads, which the movie can only do in a more limited fashion. That’s how the novel’s Amy wins us over — at least partially — with a rant about “cool girls” that is so dead on, it feels like it should have been made in something less pulpy and beach read-y. Fincher’s version tries to replicate this “cool girl” moment, but does so at a moment that contains such a multitude of new information that I’m afraid Amy’s astute observations about gender roles get lost amidst the plot twists. A lot of Nick’s inner maleness is also lost in translation from book to screen. (The book’s Nick is sort of a douche, while the movie’s Nick is more of a Ben Affleck, which may or may not also be synonymous with “douche” to you.) The gender politics are still present in the film adaptation, however muted, as the film ultimately becomes about the contract of marriage, and how we have somehow decided as a society to put on a game face outwardly and let the disappointments and deceit eat away at us privately, behind closed (and sometimes locked) doors.

I could delve deeper into Gone Girl, because there’s a lot going on here, and I don’t just mean the twists and turns at the most basic plot level. The film starts as a mystery, takes a turn into feminist-tinged character study, plunges into some psychological horror, and the final act is a black comedy. There’s at least one very bloody moment that’s seriously fucked up, and seriously memorable, pushing the envelope in a way that is just barely palatable for the mainstream, as Fincher tends to do. It’s reminiscent of the rape scene in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — a scene invented by Steig Larsson, not the filmmaker, as this one was invented by Gillian Flynn — but Fincher doesn’t flinch. He portrays such disturbing moments as graphically as he should, without watering them down as many other mainstream filmmakers would. (The word “cunt” is also applied more liberally than you’d usually see in a studio movie. It’s kind of like they’re itching for a fight with the feminists.)Gone Girl is an incredibly faithful adaptation of the novel, though it suffers a bit from skimping on the characters’ inner monologues. Ben Affleck is fine in it, though I think another actor might have brought more to the role, so that in the climactic showdown, the involved parties felt more evenly matched (as they are in the book). Nick Dunne needs to be a charming everyman in one sense, but there should also be something potentially dangerous about him, and that’s a quality Affleck lacks. Rosamund Pike, on the other hand, is pretty delicious as Amy, and will likely find her profile boosted a thousandfold from this. Fincher is an ideal auteur for this material, enhancing certain sequences of the book that never quite jumped off the page, such as all that business at the lake house. The second half of this movie is probably superior to the second half of the book, except I wish we’d gotten more from Nick and Affleck.

Gone Girl isn’t exactly a satire, but it does mock the American media and the institution of marriage. It flips the sensational stories about missing and murdered wives on their heads, taking that to the most outer edge of extreme “what if…?” scenarios. Those who are usually victims are, instead, villains, and the usual suspect is instead a victim but not so innocent after all. The media swings back and forth like a pendulum; it can be manipulated like a puppet (Punch and Judy, perhaps), just as any person can if they don’t watch out. And you have to love the idea that women, who are nearly always victims in these sorts of stories (fictional and not), are calling the shots here. Media tales of marriages gone murderous are aimed, mostly, at those very same suburban wives, watching at home while the kids are at school. Who better to exploit the media than one of those very same wives? We’re supposed to feel sorry for Amy Dunne, and everyone knows it, because these stories are meant to be predictable. It’s always the husband, right? Husband = killer. Wife = victim. That story has been playing out over and over again on the news for such a long time.

Going to the movies is a contract. We sit in the dark and tell Mr. Fincher, or whoever, that he can play with us for a couple of hours. We challenge him to make us laugh, cry, gasp, sweat, and think — some combination of those things — and he attempts to deliver. Surprise is a tall order at the multiplex these days, but Gone Girl should astonish anyone who hasn’t read the book (and those of us that have will delight in the way it pulls the rug out from under the people around us).

In a way, Gone Girl seems like Fincher’s answer to a body of work that has otherwise been pretty masculine (with a few exceptions). The blonde doesn’t end up with her head in a box at the end of this movie. (And yet her head is very important.) It’s like Vertigo with even more vertigo. This is a film about, of all things, a woman’s mind, and isn’t that pretty novel? Amy is a powerful character, one with the strength to manipulate an entire genre, and she’s able to do it because we don’t expect much from her. We’ve been trained not to. There are many people who underestimate the titular, supposedly absent female in Gone Girl, and most of them will end up regretting it.

It’s dangerous and potentially deadly to get bored in a marriage — to give in to mediocrity. To settle. There’s a character in Gone Girl who won’t tolerate such a thing; who is determined as hell to wake us all up out of our American stupor. Anyone who walks into Gone Girl expecting familiar story beats is in for quite a surprise, because this is not a movie that will lie down so easily. It has the feisty spirit of the character who turns out to be the killer, and a similar desire to fuck with us. Why? Because it can. Because it’s easy. Because it’s smarter than we are. It knows what we’re expecting — it saw it on the news, as we have. It will toy with us and get away with it, because we won’t see it coming, because we haven’t seen it done that way before, and therefore the possibility never entered our minds. We’re not prepared for a story like this.

*

Annabelle. Gone Girl. Ouija.

It’s no accident that such films are released in October. That’s when audiences are most in the mood to be thrilled and chilled, perhaps even killed, at the movies.

Most Octobers come and go without adding a truly classic villain to the repertoire — a Jason, a Ghost Face, a Freddy Kreuger. Yet this October, there is a new big screen baddie coming to a theater near you. A twisted psychopath who preys on guileless teenagers, who strikes fear into the hearts of all who invoke his name. You see him coming, you run the other way; but usually, by the time he’s set his sights on you, it’s already too late. He’s a monster.

Michael Myers and Leatherface, meet your new contemporary: Terence Fletcher.

I may be exaggerating a little, but then again, so is Whiplash. Terence Fletcher bursts into rooms with the same fury Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone might have in the eighties. It’s a wonder the doors don’t fly off the hinges. He wears an iconic porkpie hat that might as well be a hockey mask, dresses in all black almost always. He leaves his students bleeding on multiple occasions. He is not to be fucked with. Whiplash is an entry in the popular “inspirational teacher” subgenre, but only in the loosest sense. It’s like if Robin Williams’ John Keating had showed up to that first class in Dead Poets Society with an Uzi.Make no mistake: Terence Fletcher is a villain. Maybe not a murderous one (though he may be tacitly involved in one former student’s death, as we come to find out). He’s like the male version of Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada — but instead of clicks of the tongue and withering looks, Fletcher really is a physically terrifying individual who is capable of doling out bodily harm, and he’s awfully fond of the word “faggot” (and so many other choice insults). In this case, the ingenue is not Anne Hathaway but rather Miles Teller, who also comes to develop a complicated love-hate (or respect-hate, at least) relationship with his tormentor-turned-mentor. The Devil Wears Porkpie, maybe? Fletcher may come at his students with the best of intentions, but his methods are highly suspect and possibly dangerous. I don’t know that I’d call him a bad guy, but he’s not a guy I’d want to cross paths with — especially not in a dark alley.

Whiplash is an invigorating new film about jazz music, a novelty in and of itself, and one of the most buzzed-about projects to come out of this year’s Sundance. It won both the jury and audience awards, and it’s easy to see why. Damien Chazelle’s direction has as much energy as the jazz. At times, it feels like an action movie. And in the music scenes — particularly the invigorating grand finale, set (but not filmed) at Carnegie Hall — he’s basically creating the world’s first jazz porn (that I’m aware of). There are lingering, fetishistic shots of golden sweat dripping off of cymbals, and off of Miles Teller. This is not a film that asks us to sit back and take in the music, but actively makes the audience a part of it, with cuts that feel as percussive and hard to pin down as jazz itself. The film’s title comes from a piece that proves central to the film’s story, but it also describes the feeling you may have watching it. (Cue whip-cracking sound.) Chicago is off somewhere sulking in a corner feeling sorry for itself after seeing Whiplash. It’s all that jazz, and all that other jazz, too. It is all of the jazz everywhere, so fuck you.Teller plays Andrew Neiman, bringing his usual earnest cockiness to a role that turns out to be a lot more physically intense than you’d expect in a movie about a jazz drummer. He likes to see classic movies with his father (Paul Reiser), he has a crush on the cute girl who sells him popcorn and Swedish fish at the theater (Melissa Benoist), but mostly, all he cares about is jazz. He can identify classic pieces played in obscure pizzerias and spends his free time listening to Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich instead of Foster the People or Mumford and Sons. He wants to be the best, and he’s willing to go through a lot of hell to get there, which includes bloodying his hands for his art. (He’s as much a perfectionist as Natalie Portman’s Nina in Black Swan, but thankfully a little more mentally balanced.)

Alongside him to crack the whip is Fletcher, the fearsome instructor at Schaffer, a Juilliard-esque music school in New York City. Fletcher, too, wants nothing but the best, and he is willing to terrorize and dismiss any student who doesn’t give it to him. His methods include throwing things, slapping students, and a hell of a lot of cursing, mocking, and screaming, the kind we usually hear from drill sergeants and football coaches. (In fact, there’s a scene that directly contrasts Andrew’s achievements with his cousin Travis, who is not as good a football player as Andrew is a drummer.) He reminds me a lot of my 7th grade P.E. teacher, who might very well be in jail right now. I used to have nightmares about him.Are Fletcher’s frightening teaching methods truly believable in the real world? No, not really. They’re exaggerated to an intentionally comic extreme, and J.K. Simmons chews into the role like he’s the next Avengers villain. (In truth, he’s actually much more menacing than anyone we’ve seen out of the Marvel universe lately.) I don’t buy for a second that Fletcher could have been teaching this long without some kind of intervention by either the faculty or the police, but the character and movie built around him are so intense and seductive it hardly matters. What does matter is that we understand how sheepish these students must feel in front of Fletcher, the complicated way he keeps them in a vice grip. Teacher-student relationships like this are a real thing, even if the physical violence isn’t.

Simmons is likely well on his way to an Oscar nod for his troubles, and perhaps even a win, though there’s some debate over whether he’s a Lead Actor or Supporting. (I say Supporting, but just barely.) It’s anything but a subtle role, and there’s an almost-unnecessary scene late in the game that attempts to humanize him, but it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Fletcher and Andrew both want complete and utter perfection. They’re willing to go to extremes to get it. And no one else in the movie really gets that.Is perfection worth it? That’s one question that floats by as Andrew breaks up with Nicole in anticipation of her holding him back when she feels herself competing with his commitment to jazz, and inevitably losing. Most prodigies aren’t so prescient, and I admired the way Chazelle didn’t waste our time with unnecessary hemming and hawing over a love story that doesn’t much matter. (There’s also a refreshing lack of cliched father-son drama of the sort we often find in these movies.) Whiplash shows us what Andrew could have if he were an ordinary student rather than a musical prodigy, then takes it back because being the best at something means sacrificing everything but that passion. Fletcher is probably a lonely man, and there are a lot of indicators that Andrew will be, too. But so was Charlie Parker. Is being the best worth being alone and miserable? For a small segment of the population, the answer to that question is: hell yes. And if that isn’t your answer, get the fuck out of Fletcher’s classroom.

In case I haven’t already made it clear, Whiplash is a highly entertaining movie, one with just enough downer gravity at the core to give us something to chew on once it’s over. The Fletcher character, as written and as portrayed by J.K. Simmons, is so over-the-top it’s borderline campy, which might not have worked in a movie that didn’t feel so coolly and confidently assembled. In Whiplash, all the elements come together with just the right skill, at just the right tempo, like a perfectly trained band. This year’s Frank might be a more moving account of a tortured genius, but Whiplash is more rousing and kinetic. I listened carefully, and couldn’t identify a single false note.

I don’t know if that’s perfection, but it’s a hell of a lot more than a good job.

*

What has Michael Keaton been up to lately?

I don’t know the answer to that. I know he’s appeared in a handful of movies I haven’t seen (and have no desire to see) such as RoboCop and Need For Speed. He voiced the hilarious Ken doll in Toy Story 3, a fairly recent blockbuster. I still think he’s the big screen’s Batman, in the big screen’s best Batman movies.

But on the whole, it doesn’t seem like Keaton’s been on the Hollywood radar since the late 90s. Thus Birdman feels like something of a comeback, even though I acknowledge that Michael Keaton never exactly went anywhere. (He always knew where he was, even if the rest of us didn’t.) At least Keaton’s still getting paid, which makes him better off than Riggan Thompson, the character he plays in Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance). Thompson and Keaton are both famous for playing superheroes named after flying animals, so it’s hard not to feel like this is a little autobiographical. But the superhero connection is hopefully all these two have in common… because Riggan Thompson is nuts.

Birdman is mostly a love letter to actors — both in its storyline and also in the sense that it gives so many actors juicy, quirky scenes to play with. Keaton is not playing himself, but in a way, he is playing all actors, everywhere, reduced to their basic form: an ego. A bundle of neuroses. A child in an adult’s body, desperate to be loved. An in this case, a man who has allowed inhabiting other people to take him over, so that now these other characters are free to come and go through his mind as they please.Riggan hears the voice of Birdman frequently throughout the film — it’s his own voice, but angrier and raspier and, it must be said, more like Christian Bale’s Batman voice than Keaton’s own. It makes sense that such a ridiculous-sounding character would be the one to manifest itself in an actor’s psyche. Birdman is a brash and invincible movie hero, the counterpoint to the fragile man Riggan Thompson has become. Birdman is beloved, and Riggan Thompson is, too, but only because the general public can’t tell the two apart. Riggan is approached by several fans in the film, and none of them have any regard for who he is as a person or what he might be going through at any given moment. To them, he’s still a costumed character, even when he’s dressed like any other person. He’s a photo op, an autograph, and — once he gets locked out of the theater in his tightie-whities — a meme. No wonder Riggan is losing his grip on who he is. Most of the people in the world are confusing him with Birdman, too.

But a real man can’t be a superhero. Perhaps being a stage actor is the closest a human being can get — dashing into the fray so many nights a week, wearing masks, hiding one’s true persona to please the masses. Actors hide underneath other personas, and Riggan is starting to lose his mind, but the people around him don’t know it, because they’re so used to actors; crazy behavior. Temper tantrums, delusions of grandeur, outrageous demands — what’s the difference between a star and a schizophrenic, anyway?In Birdman, Riggan Thompson is a 90s action star who has fallen off of Hollywood’s radar since turning down the fourth installment in the franchise. In an effort to be taken seriously as an artist (for a change), he writes, directs, and stars in a play based on Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” His co-stars are Lesley (Naomi Watts), an actress for whom this appearance on Broadway is the culmination of a lifelong dream to “make it in the theater,” Laura (Andrea Riseborough), his pregnant girlfriend with bisexual tendencies, and Mike (Edward Norton), a hotshot Thespian-with-a-capital-T whose ego practically shoots through the roof.

Birdman does not take place in real time but does, supposedly, play out in one continuous shot — there are no visible cuts, though it is obvious when an hour or a day has passed. That gimmick lends everything a distinctly surreal vibe, enhanced by Riggan’s imagined telekinesis and the voice of Birdman that occasionally intrudes into his reality. Riggan is obviously an unbalanced dude when we meet him, and as the pressures surrounding his theater debut mount, that only gets worse. He gets into an All About Eve-style competition with Mike, who brings his own brand of crazy to the production, as Riggan’s assistant/daughter Sam (Emma Stone), lawyer Jake (Zach Galifianakis), and ex-wife (Amy Ryan) grow increasingly worried about his erratic behavior. (But never as concerned as they should be.)Birdman is an impressive piece of filmmaking, particularly on a technical level. It wouldn’t have been possible to make it this way a decade  ago — at least, not nearly so fluidly. It’s darkly comedic and, at times, straight-up dark, and gives its actors plenty of vibrant opportunities to poke fun at their profession. (There are also some sly digs at real-life celebrities like Robert Downey, Jr., Jeremy Renner, and Justin Bieber too.) In one pretty incredible scene, Riggan faces off against a bitchy theater critic (Lindsay Duncan) who is determined to sink his passion project no matter how good or bad it is merely because she doesn’t like it when Hollywood stars try and take over the Great White Way. It’s a wonder real-world critics have flipped over Birdman, given Riggan’s acidic takedown of professional criticism.

Yes, Birdman is one of this fall’s most lauded releases, and could very well earn nominations for several of its stars — most likely, Edward Norton and Michael Keaton. (Edward Norton is fresher, funnier, and more exciting here than he has been elsewhere in years.) It also has a lively percussive score by Antonio Sanchez. The story itself is not as novel as the filmmaking, however. It has the same “oh, fuck it” spirit as something like I Heart Huckabee’s, the madcap, half-grounded-in-reality satirical edge of Adaptation. We’ve seen criticism of critics in movies like Ratatouille, and the unhinged star at its center has quite a lot in common with Black Swan’s Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) — especially since both hallucinate giant bird-people at some point in the course of their stories.

But it’s a little easier to feel sympathy for the oppressed ballerina than it is for the brash, outrageous Riggan Thompson, whose trajectory is pretty obvious from the get-go. That doesn’t lessen the pleasure of watching his interactions with the other characters, all played by terrific actors at the top of their game. But I was in awe of the movie more than I was emotionally invested in it. I can’t think of a single scene I didn’t take some pleasure in, but only a handful resonated on a higher level. My favorite? An exchange between Lesley and Laura, as the two attempt to validate each other as both women and actresses, because the self-obsessed men in their lives can’t be bothered to take notice. Birdman has five pretty fantastic parts for women, and these characters come off a lot better than the men — all jerks — do. It made me wish for a story that followed them instead of the wild and crazy actor whose story I felt I’d seen before.

Birdman is quite different than any of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s previous efforts, which include prestige pics like 21 Grams and Babel. I welcome the grim weirdness from him and wouldn’t mind seeing more of it. Birdman is less of a Hollywood satire than you might expect from the premise, and much more about The Theater. Thus it is a movie that is probably most appreciated by actors and other theater-folk, who are both tenderly embraced and thoroughly mocked by this movie. Films about tortured talent are big this year — Whiplash being the more slick and entertaining release currently in the theaters, and Frank being slightly more grounded in reality. Individual moments crackle with wit and originality — I wish the overall thrust of the story had the same originality.

Instead, it’s a masterfully silly, self-indulgent movie best enjoyed by the very people who made it. That’s not really a bad thing, but Black Swan ended on a surprising note of excellence, with a bloody Nina awash in lights and applause and one sublime line of dialogue: “I was perfect.” Birdman seems poised to end on a similar beat, and then goes on. Like Riggan, Birdman doesn’t quite know what its limits are and over-reaches trying to make a grandiose artistic point that it already made several times over. Less is not more here.

I don’t suppose Riggan would take too kindly to my criticism, however, so let’s wrap this up before I overstay my welcome. Riggan Thompson had no chance in hell of earning an Oscar nomination for playing Birdman, but the same can’t be said for Michael Keaton. He’s a very good Birdman, but still a better Batman. I’m glad he’s back in a starring role, still getting nuts after all these years.

*

The secret is out.

If you don’t know the main twist in Gone Girl by now, then I feel sorry for you, because you will undoubtedly be spoiled any minute now, given the level of buzz the film has received. (And definitely by me, if you keep reading.)

David Fincher’s fantastic thriller has spawned countless articles claiming it is everything from another regressive, misogynistic entry in the psycho-bitch subgenre (joining the ranks of Fatal Attraction, Obsessed, Single White Female, and Basic Instinct) to the most feminist film in years. It has prompted debates about women who cry rape, the roles of husbands and wives in a marriage, victims as portrayed by the media.

The debate has also launched discussion of how Fincher treats women in his films. His oeuvre is best remembered by titles like Fight Club, The Social Network, and Se7en, which feature smart, sophisticated roles for males and not a whole lot of women.

But what tends to be left out of the conversation are all the strong female characters that have appeared in Fincher movies. Not every one of his films is a feminist showcase, but on the whole he’s treated women a lot better than many current filmmakers, especially those making the kinds of suspense thrillers Fincher is typically drawn to. With Fincher’s meticulous eye for detail and tendency to do many, many takes of any given scene, pretty much any actor or actress he works with delivers a solid performance that imbues the character with so much more than we tend to get from other studio films.

So here is my definitive ranking of Fincher’s films, from least to most feminist.

10. ZODIAC

Fincher’s best movie is pretty inarguably also his least feminist. The Zodiac killer murders people pretty indiscriminately, with male and female victims alike. A few of the female victims (or near victims) have satisfyingly tense scenes — in fact, they’re some of the most terrifying kill scenes ever seen in a movie. That includes Darlene Ferrin, shot by the Zodiac at a lovers’ lane, who seems to think she knows the killer but dies before confirming that; it also includes Cecelia, whose lakeside picnic is thoroughly ruined by a man covered head-to-toe in black, wielding both a knife and a gun. In both cases, the men survive but the women are killed. Of course, that’s not Fincher’s doing — that’s just what happened.

None of these victims emerges as a major character, for obvious reasons. The only female character truly present here is Melanie (Chloe Sevigny), cartoonist-turned-Zodiac-hunter Robert Graysmith’s wife, but she has only a handful of scenes and basically becomes the naggy shrew wife archetype (though she’s being perfectly rational when she asks her husband to stop provoking a dangerous and unpredictable serial killer). Given that this movie is based on true events and takes place mostly in the 1970s, it makes sense that the film’s central trio would be male (as played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr.). I don’t fault Zodiac for being a very masculine film, but it doesn’t help Fincher’s case in relation to the female roles in his films, either. Next!9. THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Another (somewhat) true story in which males take up virtually all the major roles, The Social Network does have at least one memorable female who banters Sorkin-style with Mark Zuckerberg in the film’s indelible opening scene. That’s Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), in her breakout performance as the girl who inspired Facebook to happen. That’s arguably a powerful, world-changing position for a female, except Erica Albright is fictional, a device entirely invented by Aaron Sorkin to suggest Zuckerberg’s narcissistic loneliness, and she also doesn’t actually do anything but inspire Zuckerburg to dismiss women. (Facebook is created after a rather misogynistic site that ranks the looks of female Harvard students gets shut down.) The Social Network has been accused of making up all but the broadest beats of its story, but the Erica Albright character nicely highlights how being just a few clicks away from the majority of the population doesn’t necessarily mean we’re any more connected to each other, especially in the fantastic final moments when Zuckerberg just keeps refreshing his Facebook page, hoping Erica will add him as a friend.

At least we get the sense that Erica Albright exits the movie because Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t deserve her — she is solidly in charge of that decision, and declining his friendship early on is probably the wisest thing she could do, given how he ends up treating his other buddies. Beyond Erica, we also briefly meet Eduardo Saverin’s girlfriend Christy (Brenda Song), who goes into psycho-bitch mode when she feels marginalized, and the cute college girl that clues Sean Parker into Facebook. But the female roles are largely relegated to various hookups or love interests despite Sorkin’s usual knack for writing smart women. The exception is Marilyn Delpy (Rashida Jones), a lawyer on Zuckerberg’s team who attempts to get through to him about being more likable and fails pretty miserably. Still, all these women are window dressing in a male-driven ensemble about the age of the internet and the advent of social media. Of course, it’s a very male-driven field in real life as well, for which Fincher can’t be faulted.

8. SE7EN

Se7en is another movie with a virtually all-male cast, centering on the detective duo played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman who eventually square off against a male killer played by Kevin Spacey. The film’s treatment of women — and all of humanity, really — is dark, as the female victims are a prostitute who is raped to death by a killer sex toy and a model who chooses to commit suicide rather than live as a disfigured woman. Of course, all of the killer’s victims are meant to come across as morally depraved in some way, representing lowlifes who abuse one or more of the seven deadly sins.

The lightest and most likable character in the movie is Detective Mills’ wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), who strikes up a secret friendship with Detective Somerset after moving with her husband to a big city where she doesn’t know anyone. In most such thrillers, “the wife” is a barely-there presence who tends to nag her husband about working too much and not spending time with the family. Here, however, Tracy is a fully fleshed-out character who confides in Somserset that she’s pregnant and unsure about whether or not she should keep the child.

This might seem like a curious detour for a grim procedural like Se7en, but as it turns out, being sympathetic to Tracy is key for the film’s shocking denouement, when the killer has a delivery man drop off a special “package” containing Tracy’s pretty head. (That’s the reason Se7en ranks as a favorite amongst Gwyneth-haters.) Because we got to know Tracy so well, the moment feels like a true tragedy, and we’re right there with Mills as his grief at the loss of his wife and unborn child causes him to kill the unnamed murderer. It’s gloomy stuff, but certainly not the last time Fincher dares to go where other filmmakers are less likely to. Unfortunately, the fact that the only female character in the film ends up decapitated doesn’t really give Fincher much credit as a feminist filmmaker, so, moving on…7. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

Fincher’s most widely derided movie is also the one that is his least Fincher-esque. At first glance, it seems too heartwarming and benign to come from the man who made Fight Club and Se7en, but The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button has its share of grim moments and is all about death. Though Brad Pitt is the star, in a lot of ways the movie belongs to Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who ends up taking care of the reverse-aging Benjamin as he becomes an infant (in much the same way a woman might need to take care of an aging man as he grows senile). She’s the one reading Benjamin’s diary from her own deathbed in the film’s book-ending device (which unfolds as Hurricane Katrina rages).

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button also has strong female roles for Tilda Swinton and Taraji P. Henson (who was Oscar-nominated for her work), but none of them escape the overall storybook quality of this movie, which is more about sweeping themes than characters who break any sort of mold. The female characters are all pretty typical, functioning more as foils for the male protagonist than they do as women with their own agendas and inner lives. Still, as usual, Fincher tends to work with actresses who can elevate the material, and Cate Blanchett is more than capable. The decades-spanning story allows us to see a woman’s whole life unfold — but that life that largely revolves around Benjamin. 6. THE GAME

The only major female role in 1997’s The Game is Christine, played by Deborah Kara Unger (a role originally intended for future Fincher collaborator Jodie Foster). At first, Christine seems like a hapless victim of “the game” unleashed upon the wealthy Nicholas Van Orton by the shady and elusive CSR as part of a bizarre gift from his brother Conrad. However, Nicholas soon comes to suspect that Christine is in on it — and she is. Christine and Nicholas briefly join forces as she explains that CSR has relieved him of his finances, but then he realizes she’s drugged him and he’s back to suspecting her of foul play. In the climax, Nicholas holds Christine at gunpoint as she tearfully pleads with him to realize that this is all an elaborate put-on — which is also a put-on, because Nicholas arriving with a gun was also a part of the ruse.

Christine ends up being our main source of information (and misinformation) about the culprit behind Nicholas’ wacky birthday present, and we suspect her of being both a victim and a villain multiple times before the final truth is revealed. It’s a fun twist on the typical girl sidekick/love interest archetype we often see in such films, but she’s not exactly the femme fatale either. She’s a woman doing her job, and doing it pretty damn well, and Deborah Kara Unger and Fincher keep us guessing about her allegiances all the way through. It’s a more complicated female role than anything Fincher offered up until his recent book adaptations.5. FIGHT CLUB

Of all Fincher’s movies, Fight Club has to be the most masculine, because it’s all about men beating each other up to prove that they’re men. Our narrator, played by Edward Norton, feels emasculated by too much luxury and a cushy office job. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) enters his life to shake him out of his stupor, inspiring him to cause crimes and start an underground fight club where men ranging from pretty boy Angel (Jared Leto) to big-titted Bob (Meat Loaf) can duke it out ’til they’re left bruised and bleeding on the floor. But oops! The group also has a secret anarchist manifesto bent on totally rewiring society.

The reason Fight Club ranks so highly amongst Fincher’s feminist films is because it has one truly awesome female character — the chain-smoking, terminally depressed Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who is perpetually on the verge of killing herself. We meet Marla at a support group for survivors of testicular cancer, and the lady does have balls — she tosses off quotable gems like, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school!”

It appears for a while that Marla has ditched our hero to fuck around with Tyler Durden instead, but when Tyler ends up being our narrator’s imagined alter ego instead of a flesh-and-blood character, we realize it’s his erratic behavior that’s been hurting Marla, not the other way around. The finale of the movie, featuring Marla and the narrator holding hands and watching a city crumble to pieces around them, is one of the weirdest and most memorable romantic climaxes ever put to film.

4. GONE GIRL

Is Amy Dunne a regressive character? Or have we finally just progressed enough to let women be devious psychopaths, too? Gone Girl plays on gender stereotypes by posing a whodunit that automatically revolves around male suspects, because that’s how we’ve come to expect these things to play out. Men are the killers and women are their victims. Amy knows that, too, which is how she’s able to be so successful at playing the police and the media, allowing them to come to the conclusion that it must have been Nick Dunne who did away with his wife.

Of course, it’s Amy who did away with herself, but when Nick starts playing along with her games, Amy changes her tune and decides to pin the blame on another former lover instead — Desi, who is graphically killed during an intense sex scene that leaves her covered in his blood. That Amy would go to such extremes — having sex with Desi just so she can claim he raped her — raised a lot of questions about real-life rape accusations. Is this Fincher’s view of women — Type A control freaks who will cry rape, kill, send men to prison, or trap men in a marriage  just to project the perfect image of domestic bliss? No. Amy Dunne is a horrible person who expends most of her energy getting revenge against men she perceives to have wronged her (though those wrongs aren’t always so severe). But Nick ends up returning to her, not because he’s trapped (as some seem to believe), but because their partnership in deceit begins to make a weird kind of sense to him. In the end, Nick and Amy’s relationship is a true marriage of equal partnership. They are both willfully partaking in a public deceit.

Deliciously portrayed by Rosamund Pike, Amy is far from the first female psycho-killer to grace the big screen, but the fact that she gets away with it in the end is much more novel. The killer in such films is no longer the lusty single woman who threatens the male protagonist’s family — she is the family herself. The reason Gone Girl gets away with making Amy such a total psycho is that writer Gillian Flynn grounds with film with an array of other colorful female characters, some wicked, some virtuous. (The film’s de facto hero Detective Boney is a woman, and Nick’s twin sister Margo is a surrogate for the audience.) Fincher has fun playing with stereotypes here, marrying the icy Hitchcock blonde archetype and the knife-wielding psycho in a movie that makes the villain and the victim the same person. There’s no question that Amy is driving this story — she’s a woman you don’t want to fuck with, in any sense of that word. At its most basic level, Gone Girl can be read as an exploitation of men’s fears of rape accusations and controlling wives, but there’s so much more to it than that.

3. ALIEN3

Alien3 is the weakest of the Alien series, and one of Fincher’s least-liked movies, largely because it feels like a betrayal of James Cameron’s spectacular Aliens to kill poor little Newt off-screen. Due to the mother-daughter bond between Ripley and Newt, the butch supporting player Vasquez, and the fact that the big bad villain, the Alien Queen, is also a female, Aliens definitely scores as the more feminist film in the series. (As does Alien Resurrection, which added Winona Ryder to the mix. And we can’t leave out the 1979 original, which made Ripley a lone survivor in the first place.) Alien3 sports the most masculine Ripley, head shaved and a sour attitude, the sole female amidst a ship of prisoners who face off against the aliens. Ripley eventually sacrifices herself because she’s carrying an alien inside her, another dour and disappointing plot beat after Ripley has come so far in the series.

However, it can’t be denied that Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is absolutely the most badass action movie heroine of all time, and she still manages to kick plenty of ass in the third installment, even if we end up liking her better in the first two movies. Fincher can’t take too much credit for Ripley here, as the character was kicking ass long before he sat in the director’s chair, but he benefits from jumping into an awesome feminist franchise for his directorial debut (!). Alien3 might score a tad higher if it didn’t undo so much of the good work done in Cameron’s Aliens in the process.   2. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

At first, Fincher’s decision to cast the girl who played Erica Albright as the autistic punk Lisbeth Salander in his adaptation of Steig Larsson’s bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seemed like madness. But as usual in Fincher’s films, the casting ended up being perfect. Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth is tough, resourceful, and has no patience for politeness due to a rough upbringing that left her well-being in the hands of some shady government officials. In a controversial moment, Lisbeth’s guardian ties her down and forces anal sex on her, and Fincher lingers in the moment longer than other filmmakers might in order to depict the extent of her suffering. But Lisbeth is no mere victim. She exacts her revenge in a scene that is equally graphic as the rapist becomes the victim. Many directors wouldn’t handle this material with the right touch, but the way Fincher depicts it, it feels icky in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones.

Any faults with the sexual politics in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo stem largely from the source material. Fincher’s adaptation actually tamps down some of the problematic elements in the novel, like how just about every female in the book throws herself at the male protagonist. (He’s played by James Bond, AKA Daniel Craig, but he’s supposed to be a down-on-his-luck middle-aged journalist, so it’s not quite so sexy.) Did this story really need Lisbeth to jump Blomkvist’s bones and, in the end, grow jealous when seeing him return to his editor and lover (played by Robin Wright)? Not really, but it’s in the book, and it’s kind of cool that Lisbeth takes charge and dispenses with any foreplay or niceties when she decides she that wants him. She just goes for it. Get it, girl!

As portrayed by Rooney Mara, Lisbeth Salander is pretty badass; despite her Oscar nomination, the film wasn’t exactly a runaway hit, which means we probably won’t see Fincher and Mara reteam for the book’s two sequels. (This one ends on a downbeat note that clearly assumes the story continues.) Larsson’s follow-up books are even more problematic than this one, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed that this could be the bittersweet end of the girl with the dragon tattoo.1. PANIC ROOM

Didn’t Kristen Stewart learn anything from Jodie Foster? Before playing Bella in the regressive Twilight series, Stewart played Foster’s daughter in Fincher’s Panic Room, a female-driven suspense thriller. Jodie Foster has been defying gender stereotypes since childhood, so it’s sort of fun to see her as the mother of a tomboyish daughter here. Foster is Meg Altman, who sure isn’t hurting financially after a divorce that left her with enough bank to purchase an enormous four-story brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Seriously?)

As luck would have it, Meg and Sarah end up being robbed on the very night they move in by a trio of guys looking for a payday located somewhere in the house. Fortunately, the house comes complete with a panic room. Meg and Sarah lock themselves in as the robbers attempt to flush them out. Complicating matters are Sarah’s diabetes and the fact that the money the bad guys want is in the panic room. It’s a woman and her daughter versus three big, bad men.

As usual, Jodie Foster plays a competent, compelling character. She’s also a relatable mother who is fucking terrified by the fact that there are dangerous men in her house. She’s cool under pressure but just barely, the way we like to think we’d all behave in a similar situation. Foster eventually manages to kick some ass, but this never falls outside the realm of believability, and when she calls her ex-husband for help, he shows up and becomes just another victim that Meg has to rescue. (A lot of movies would have had the male swoop in to save the day.) It is a change of heart from one of the robbers (Forest Whitaker) that ultimately saves Meg from the most murderous of the trio. Still, Foster’s paradoxical tough fragility totally owns this film, and anyone who says Fincher isn’t a feminist would have a hard time explaining this one into such an argument.

*

Birdman is one the year’s most critically beloved films. It features brilliant performances, breathtaking filmmaking, an off-the-beaten-path score, and unfolds in one long unbroken take (but not really).

And how about the story? Well, on a narrative level, it’s pretty much the same movie as Black Swan, which is why I admire the film but can’t get fully on board the Birdman train as so many critics have.

Don’t believe me? Below are 10 irrefutable reasons why Black Swan and Birdman are practically the same movie.

(Massive spoilers for both films ahead.)

10. New York City

Both films notably take place in New York City, the cultural capital of America. Black Swan is located on the Upper West Side and Lincoln Center, as is fitting for a ballet story, while Birdman is appropriately rooted around Broadway in the midtown theater district.

9. Adaptation

Birdman and Black Swan both center on stage adaptations of a previous work. In Black Swan, it’s a new interpretation of the classic ballet Swan Lake, and in Birdman, it’s Riggan’s adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

8. What is real?

Both films play with our perception of reality by depicting certain events as “real” that are later revealed to take place only in our protagonist’s minds. In both films, many scenes feel slightly surreal and “off,” tipping us off to their mental instability early on. Basically, we’re getting a taste of the crazy that’s running through Nina and Riggan’s minds.7. The Rivalry

Nina and Riggan both come up against a rival who threatens their star status. For Nina, it’s the ingenue Lily (Mila Kunis), who eventually worms her way into the role of Nina’s understudy and is praised by director Thomas Leroy as the perfect embodiment of the Black Swan. For Riggan, it is his outrageously vain co-star Mike (Edward Norton), who starts out by making suggested cuts to Riggan’s dialogue in the play and then engages in increasingly erratic antics, like breaking character to complain that his stage booze isn’t real booze and trying to have actual sex with his co-star during e performance (resulting in a very visible erection, much to the delight of the audience).

6. Duality

Duality is a major factor in Black Swan, as Nina perfectly embodies the White Swan but has a hard time channeling her inner Black Swan. (Probably because her inner Black Swan is a looney murderess.) She often sees alarming, evilly smirking reflections that suggest a darker side to herself. Riggan, too, is tormented by his on-screen alter ego Birdman, which a raspy inner voice constantly compels him to embrace. Like Nina, Riggan does eventually give in to his alter ego, further loosening his grasp on reality.

5. Opening Night

The narratives both Black Swan and Birdman build toward the opening night of their respective performances for their climaxes. 4. Lesbians!

In Black Swan and Birdman, two performers rather spontaneously engage in some steamy girl-on-girl hanky-panky — because dancers/actresses are just kind of like that, aren’t they? They’re not real out-and-proud lesbians, they just dabble in lesbianism. (Though in Black Swan’s case, the sapphic action turns out to be yet another hallucination.)

3. The Critic

The true antagonist in both films — besides the protagonists’ dark alter egos — is a bitchy female of a certain age who lives to criticize them. For Nina, it’s her mother Erica (Barbara Heshey), a former ballerina herself. For Riggan, it’s the cruel theater critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan). Nina and Riggan both explode in a fever-pitched rage at these women just before going completely bonkers, but that woman still ends up in the audience at their debut (and final) performance.2. Hallucinated bird-people.

What is it about crazy people and avians? Both Nina and Riggan’s main hallucination involves a human-bird hybrid. For Riggan, it’s himself as the costumed superhero he made famous in the 90s, and in later scenes, Riggan embraces Birdman and goes soaring before our eyes. For Nina, it’s the Black Swan. At one point, she sees (or thinks she sees) a menacing bird-man having sex with Lily (and then herself) backstage; she also sprouts feathers and literally becomes the Black Swan in her final performance. Embracing their inner birdness is an essential step on both Nina and Riggan’s pathway to crazytown.

1. Suicide on stage.

The inevitable conclusion in any story about a protagonist who is going irrevocably nuts is suicide. Both Nina and Riggan end up there, deciding to do the dirty deed on stage as the grand finale of their opening night performance. Riggan does so by replacing his prop gun with a real one, and Nina does so more accidentally, having stabbed herself in the belly with a shard of mirror while she thought she was attacking Lily. Nina’s suicide is apparently successful; Riggan succeeds in blowing his own nose off and winds up in the hospital, where he arguably makes a more successful attempt by jumping out the window. The ending of both films (Birdman in particular) is left somewhat open to interpretation as to what happens next, but the safest argument is probably that both Nina and Riggan are dead at the end of their respective films.

*

Marriage is hard work. Ben Affleck said it, rather awkwardly, in his Oscars acceptance speech for Argo, allowing us to wonder what hells he and Jennifer Garner had been through that caused him to profess such a sentiment in front of millions of viewers. And this year, Affleck stars in Gone Girl, a movie that has prompted a lot of discussion about men, women, and the holy matrimony between the two.

Marriage has been the topic of many movies this year, from one of the first films centered on a same-sex married couple (Love Is Strange) and the unconventional twist in marriage counseling found in The One I Love. Of course, marriage is such a broad topic that I’m sure every year has numerous movies exploring the subject, yet with Gone Girl bringing the topic directly to the center of the cultural conversation at the moment, it’s hard not to think of other new releases in similar terms.

With a title like The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby, you’d be forgiven for confusing Ned Benson’s new two-hander with a thriller about a missing wife, something akin to Gone Girl. The films have some surface similarities — both tell stories very distinctly from both spouses’ perspectives, with subtle (or not-so-subtle) shifts in how similar events are remembered from both sides. And both feature married people taking drastic actions to get out of their relationships.

But Eleanor Rigby’s disappearance is more metaphorical than Amy Dunne’s. In the opening scenes of her segment in the two-part movie, Eleanor takes a flying leap off a bridge, hoping to end her life. It doesn’t work — or else her chapter of this story would be a really short movie — but it does signal a sort of rebirth, as she is given the chance to discover who she is outside of her marriage, something she hasn’t considered in a while.The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby is two movies — one from Eleanor’s perspective, the other following her husband Conor. (There’s also a studio-mandated spliced-together version that is to be avoided.) The word on the street is that Her is the more successful half of the film, and because I love Jessica Chastain so dearly, that is the segment I saw and the one I am reviewing. The segment follows Eleanor Rigby (named after the Beatles tune) as she reconnects with her parents (Isabelle Hupert and William Hurt) and little sister Katy (Jess Weixler), starts up some college classes, and tries to avoid her ex-husband and any mention of the recent tragedy in their past. There are a few flashbacks to happier times with Conor, including a perfectly lovely sequence in which the two dance by car headlights to OMD’s “So In Love.”

The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Her is a character piece with no plot to speak of. The film takes its time before cluing us in on what precisely happened to dampen Eleanor’s spirits so thoroughly. Is this just a rough patch in the marriage she’s overreacting to, or is her grief valid? Without a compelling and watchable actress like Chastain at the center, the film would probably be unbearable. Instead, it’s a pleasure just to watch Eleanor interact with the people around her, including Professor Friedman (Viola Davis), who plays an entirely different kind of professor on ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder. Here, she’s a lot more grounded, and a lot less hammy, and she reminds us why she’s a two-time Oscar nominee, even if her part here isn’t flashy enough to warrant such acclaim.

A less conventional look at a strained marriage comes in the Swedish film Force Majeur, which follows a happy family’s ski vacation as it goes from idyllic to fraught with tension and several moments of peril, turning potentially deadly several times. If that makes this sound like a thriller, it isn’t. At all. It’s a comedy. And yet, there are moments of genuine dread, as we can’t entirely rule out the death of some or all of these characters. It also features some absolutely gorgeous mountain cinematography, and the rare pleasure of seeing skiing depicted in a film. (This must’ve been a bitch to shoot.)

In Force Majeur, Tomas and Ebba seem to have an ideal marriage, and their kids Vera and Harry are cute as can be (though occasionally quite bratty). Then, during lunch one day, it suddenly appears that the entire family is about to be swallowed by an avalanche. Tomas and Ebba have extreme opposite reactions, and afterward, can’t agree on what really happened. Initially, it seems the couple can brush off the incident as a briefly terrifying situation that they can now look back on with humor, but that avalanche ends up lingering in both of their minds and causing major repercussions in their relationship.

I’m being rather vague because Force Majeur is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. The film is completely unpredictable, taking us in several unforeseen directions, some of which pan out better than others. A newer couple, Mats and Fanni, end up getting dragged into the drama and finding their own bond tested by what happened to their friends. It’s a funny detour that gets dragged out a bit too long, as many scenes in Force Majeur do — much of the film unfolds in unbroken takes with dialogue that feels improvisational, and while that gives many scenes a fresh and funny energy, it also sometimes drags and makes the film feel overlong.

Tomas and Ebba’s initial disagreement over the incident takes place in front of a different couple (it’s a surprise to see Brady Corbet pop up in a Swedish film), in a terrifically awkward encounter. But Ebba’s later conversation with that woman about her open marriage feels somewhat off-topic, the necessity of its inclusion here questionable when there’s so much more to delve into. There’s no one scene in particular that shouldn’t be here, but some trimming might have helped the pacing to match the offbeat energy of much of the humor. The film is basically a weird black comedy, but it’s paced like a contemplative drama, which doesn’t always work in its favor.

Force Majeur ends on a curious note — I’m not sure what to make of it, or of the climactic-seeming scene that comes before it involving a possible ski injury and the family’s separation in blinding whiteness. The movie that gives us a lot to think about, along with the most epically awkward scene of crying I’ve probably ever seen. It’s not often that you see a movie that is this funny, and still makes you wonder if the entire cast is going to be killed in a horrible bus accident at the end.

I may not have loved every second of Force Majeur, thanks mostly to the languid pacing, but I did love the offbeat tone of the movie, and I have nothing but praise for the way it bucks tradition and presents us with a totally unpredictable and surprising narrative. The cast is uniformly spectacular, from the pathetically emasculated Johannes Kuhnke as Tomas and especially Lisa Loven Kongsli as the strong-willed, woefully betrayed Ebba. As several characters in Force Majeur state, you never know how you’ll react in a crisis until you’re right in the thick of it, and a good many of us might be disappointed to discover our own lack of bravado when the moment comes.

Not everyone can be a hero, and in both The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby and Force Majeur, it is the female half of the central married couple that must bear the brunt of the brooding and figure out how to soldier on without the support of her man. Structure aside, Eleanor Rigby is a very conventional indie drama, while Force Majeur is a strange and original dark comedy. Both are anchored by terrific female performances and, like Gone Girl, deal with wives let down by their husband’s inferiority, with plenty to say about the realities of marriage once the honeymoon is over.

*

The media is sleazy. We all know this. Films like Network and To Die For have highlighted the unscrupulous methodology of the news media in a way that, if you didn’t look carefully enough, might even feel like celebration. We hate the media, but we love to hate it. The talking heads, the sensational headlines, false urgency and faux concern. The movies that bring us behind the scenes of this industry tend to be splashy, morally bankrupt, and dripping with satire.

And now, here is their 21st century cousin, Nightcrawler, to do it all over again.

In 2014, it’s almost refreshing to see a movie about journalism that doesn’t also try to include the rapidly-changing world of social media and internet news. Nightcrawler is almost old-fashioned in that way. It is explicitly about the news we watch on our TV screens, when we wake up in the morning and before we go to sleep at night. For decades now, that’s been the primary delivery method of our daily digest of current events. These days, people are more likely to fire up a search engine than turn on their TV when a major story breaks, but Nightcrawler is not about momentous events. It’s about the daily news, the evening news, the nightly news — segments that need to be filled with content whether anything happened or not. It’s no different than any other programming. The advertisers have paid for their spots, the anchors are ready and waiting, you’re on in 3, 2…

Something has to fill those gaps. Does it have to be true? Not necessarily, as long as it can be sold as true. And if it’s on the news, people tend to believe just about anything.In Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom doesn’t start out wanting to be a part of the news media. All he wants is a job — any job — and, like many Americans, he’s having a hard time getting one. Lou, however, is willing to sink to much lower depths than many of his unemployed brethren; his try-hard affect and vacant stare suggest either autism or sociopathy, perhaps both. Lou repeats motivational go-getter sound bites he’s probably picked up from self-help gurus and TED talks. When he happens upon a horrific accident and witnesses Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) running onto the scene with a camera to capture the carnage, he suddenly gets the bright idea to give Loder some competition. Lou feels nothing for the victim of this car accident, nor any of the other hurt or dead people he’ll come across in this line of work. He feels nothing for his co-workers, either. He feels nothing. Lou seems to realize that in today’s economy, sensitivity will get you nowhere. In fact, it’s liable to hold you back. All that matters is success.

Lou buys a police scanner and hand-me-down camcorder. It’s far from state of the art, but content trumps quality in broadcast news. Within a few hours of deciding on his new line of work, Lou is already hiring a gopher lackey, Rick (Riz Ahmed), who will work for next to nothing, and he’s talking up his company like he’s owned it for years. (“Fake it until you make it” is clearly one of Lou’s many mantras.)

Lou also strikes up a compelling work relationship with Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a former on-air talent who is now calling shots behind the cameras at KTLA, which we’re told has the lowest-rated news in Los Angeles. That means Nina is hungry for hits, and her new protegee is more than willing to bend the rules, ignore basic ethics, and even commit major crimes in order to get the top story. Nina matter-of-factly lays out what kind of news her viewers will tune in for — primarily, stories about well-to-do white people being affected by urban crime. The bloodier than better.The ruthlessness of the people who run the news media is hardly a novel concept. The fresh angle here is how Nightcrawler marries it with Lou, the entrepreneurial sociopath, an empty shell of a man spitting pearls of wisdom about the American dream. Nina is a direct descendent of the power-drunk Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) in Network, the carnivorous Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) in To Die For. In a word, she’s a bitch, but not necessarily because she was born that way. We sense that a lack of options shaped the woman we see today.

Lou Bloom’s cinematic cousins are less obvious and more numerous. You could go back to Taxi Driver for a story about a Caucasian misanthrope with no real place in American society until he endeavors to carve out a dangerous place for himself. There are more aesthetic echoes of the more recent Drive. (And all three films have something else in common: a lot of driving.)

Nightcrawler also has a lot in common with The Wolf Of Wall Street, my favorite film of last year, which some condemned for celebrating rather than condemning the hedonistic lifestyle of the men (and some women) who laughed all the way to the bank while fucking a good many Americans over. The same people may make similarly stupid claims about this movie, which isn’t interested in meting out a punishment that real life itself wouldn’t deliver. Like Jordan Belfort, Lou Bloom is a self-made man, but he is only allowed to succeed because he lives in a world that values money and image and grabby headlines, and looks the other way at greed and injustice. In both Nightcrawler and The Wolf Of Wall Street, there are law enforcing characters who represent a more idealistic school of thought. (In Scorsese’s film, it’s Kyle Chandler’s FBI agent, and here it’s Michael Hyatt’s Detective Fronteiri.) But there’s not a lot of time for justice when the clock is ticking and you’re on in 5.

Neither Lou nor Nina has any sympathy for the victims at the center of the crimes they’re exploiting, but they’re also struggling against a system that will chew them up and spit them out if they fail at their jobs. If they don’t do the dirty deeds, someone else will beat them to the story. In this movie, American capitalism is, perhaps, an even more vicious beast than the American media; they’re two mutant titans battling it out, and human beings are just little specks on the ground, running and screaming, trying to stay out of the way of the debris. No one in Nightcrawler is all-powerful, and no one does evil for evil’s sake. It’s all to get ahead, stay afloat, move forward. At one point, Lou stumbles upon a fresh crime scene that appears to be an innocent white family gunned down by Latino monsters. Eventually, we learn that this, too, was just a bit of bad business.

Nightcrawler was written and directed by Dan Gilroy, brother of Tony Gilroy, who brought us Michael Clayton. Like that movie, Nightcrawler has the bones of the standard studio thriller, but its flesh is something else entirely. These films elevate the standard genre material and dare to dig a little deeper into their characters, and into our souls. This is a movie that is saying something, not so much with words as with actions. Jake Gyllenhaal lost a significant amount of weight to portray the slimy-looking Lou Bloom, and he’s completely convincing and, in several moments, utterly creepy. We’re never quite sure what Lou is capable of, and we don’t put it past him to snap at any moment. (He could, maybe, be American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman’s less refined kid brother.) It’s one of Gyllenhaal’s best performances to date, and only one of several stellar showings from him recently. Enemy and Prisoners had extraordinarily impressive turns, but this one is Oscar-worthy. (Whether or not it actually nabs any attention from the Academy, we’ll see.)

It’s also a delight to see Rene Russo given plenty to do as the hard-edged but more vulnerable Nina, especially in one killer scene between these partners in crime set in a Mexican restaurant. Movies these days need more Rene Russo, especially if she’s feisty. For a film that seems to say so much about the American economy today, it’s surprising to note that Nightcrawler has only four characters of much significance, and focuses primarily on just two (though Rick becomes important in the film’s final act). Though it may not measure up entirely to the recent masterpieces of some of today’s finest auteurs, Nightcrawler has as much to say about Our Times as The Wolf Of Wall Street and The Social Network, as well a more recent David Fincher film: Gone Girl, which also hatefully and deliciously lambasted the American news media.

Nightcrawler will leave you disturbed about the news you watch and the country you live in, a place where a man like Lou Bloom can thrive at the expense of anyone who stands in his way. But that is the country we live in, a place where Jordan Belfort and Patrick Bateman and Mark Zuckerburg and Lou Bloom are calling the shots. Nightcrawler may be a work of fiction, but it rings truer than much of the “news” we’re fed. Because the news is brought to us by people, and all people have an agenda. Usually, that agenda is making money; other times, it’s just telling us the juiciest possible story.

*

Last year, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity blew us away. Not everyone loved the film, but most could agree that it was dazzling to behold on the big screen (especially in 3D) and one giant leap forward in cinema on a technical level. It was a thrill ride as much as a movie, anchored by one single magnetic performance by Sandra Bullock. Gravity went on to become one of two frontrunners for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, winning Best Director for Cuaron and conceding the top prize to 12 Years A Slave, quite rightly. Gravity was an experience, but 12 Years A Slave was a film.

At 91 minutes, Gravity was lean and mean, basically nonstop action from start to finish. Interstellar is not so concise. That should come as no surprise — Christopher Nolan has not made a film that clocks in at under two hours since 2002’s Insomnia. Most of his recent films have hovered around the two-and-a-half-hour mark, while The Dark Knight Rises was even longer. Interstellar is his longest yet, coming in at 169 minutes (nearly three hours). It doesn’t feel that long, though. Nolan’s films are propulsive, even if they wobble a little getting wherever they’re trying to go.

Paramount has done a good job of not spoiling Interstellar, to the extent that many people still don’t know what it’s about. It’s probably better that way, because it’s more fun to watch a movie unfold having no idea where it’s headed, except a reasonable assumption that at some point, it’s headed into space. To preserve that experience, I will be similarly vague in setting this up.The film stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts named Cooper (no first name that we know of) and Amelia Brand, respectively; it also stars Jessica Chastain, Wes Bentley, John Lithgow, and Michael Caine, as other humans. It takes place in the future, following a rough patch in our planet’s history. A number of people seem to have died of famine, but we don’t know how many. Technology has not advanced. Food is harder to come by. It’s hard to tell what the rest of the world is like, since we’re bound to what seems like a Kansas farmhouse in the 1990s. (I don’t know why it seems like the 90s. Maybe because it reminded me of Twister.) Only a few tech advancement seem even as advanced as 2014, let alone many years into the future. (It seems Apple did not survive the collapse.)

I’m all for the less-is-more explanation of what went wrong on the planet, except for a bit where Murphy Cooper’s teachers try to tell her that space exploration never happened. (Cute meta nod to Kubrick’s 2001, though.) It seems impossible that enough time has passed to allow that theory to be introduced into the public school system, especially if there are still living astronauts amongst the population. (Cooper himself is one, we are told.) In moments like this, we wish for either more or less world-building to explain the state of mind these people are in. (Also inexplicable: why NASA decided to relocate to an underground Kansas-like location.)

I’m also fairly certain that there is a character named Cooper Cooper in this film, but I can’t say how without spoiling a major plot point.Interstellar packs an emotional wallop and has a few killer concepts up its sleeve. As often happens with Nolan, his reach exceeds his grasp. As the filmmaker who is probably least likely to be told “no” in Hollywood at the moment, the screenplay (co-written with his brother Jonathan) could have used a little more scrutiny before production. There are a number of leaps in logic one must take in order to get on board with Interstellar. Some are easier to ride along with than others. Though the fate of all mankind depends on the success of the crew’s mission, Cooper and Brand seem to be winging it an awful lot of the time, making decisions on the fly that you’d think they would have discussed before shuttling off to Saturn. Many characters are scientists and engineers and the like, but actual scientists and engineers would probably go insane trying to make sense of this film. This might be why a lot of the science exposition seems to be mumbled or swiftly cut away from. Nolan definitely doesn’t care about the actual science; his approach to science exposition is basically: “Mumble mumble relativity… look over here! Pretty!”

Interstellar owes plenty to previous science fiction entries ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Signs, but it is closest in spirit to 1997’s Contact, which McConaughey also starred in. Like that Robert Zemeckis film, it explores the love between a father and a daughter stretching from infinity to beyond, while also giving us some time to ponder our small place in a vast universe. For all its wanderings in the cosmos, like Contact, Interstellar brings space exploration down to Earth. Space is a wondrous thing in all its majesty, but the human heart even moreso, as Nolan tells it. Parts of Interstellar play in the same mind-bending surreal realm as Nolan’s Inception, and you probably won’t want to think too hard about them. This is not a movie to think about, but to feel.That might comes as a surprise to some, since Nolan’s movies tend to be more cerebral than moving. (Or faux-cerebral, at least.) The performances are strong across the board, and why wouldn’t they be? Nolan has cast various Oscar winners and nominees, including many recognizable faces in relatively small roles, plus at least one surprise movie star. McConaughey could find himself with an Oscar nod if the competition isn’t too fierce. He’s wonderfully emotive, and he’s giving quite a lot of emoting to do. (Hathaway and Chastain are good, but their characters may be a tad too thin to warrant awards buzz.) The special effects are impressive because they don’t often look like special effects. The score by Hans Zimmer is exactly as bombastic as you’d expect it to be.

Like The Dark Knight Rises and Inception, Interstellar has more supporting characters than it knows what to do with, and we get little sense of who these people are or even what their function in this world is. Character remains one of his weaknesses. Interstellar feels like a lot of Nolan films do: like a really superb outline that somehow made it into production without ever being a screenplay. The broad beats are here, but the details aren’t, quite, and neither are the answers to my many questions. His stories defy the laws of logic the same way a wormhole defies time itself; instead of connecting Point A to Point B, he just bends the rules and smooshes them together. Nolan is essentially thrusting us all into a wormhole, saying: “It doesn’t matter how you get there, if you do indeed get there! Just go with it, okay?”

Okay, Christopher Nolan. Interstellar is an epic with big ideas and bigger emotions. It’s a thoroughly entertaining journey through space. Is it remotely coherent? Not really. I still admire Nolan for being one of few filmmakers who can transform an original idea into a blockbuster. We need more movies like Interstellar, and more movies like Interstellar need more input from someone who knows how to write a screenplay.

Gravity wasn’t a perfect film, either, but it was ambitious in all the right ways, while the actual story couldn’t have been simpler. It was, essentially, one character versus tremendous odds, and we followed her singularly from the beginning of her ordeal to the end. That’s all. Interstellar wants to do what Gravity did, and also so much more — it has similar action scenes and a few familiar emotional beats, but it also cuts between life on Earth and what’s happening in the far reaches of space, including a lot of manufactured silliness taking place on the Cooper family farm that could’ve been a lot shorter. Many of the events that unfold are episodic, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though it seems Nolan is delivering the action beats mainly because a budget of this magnitude requires him to.

For all its vastness, Gravity kept things simple — one woman’s life at stake. That was it, but it was enough. Interstellar is the anti-Gravity — bloated and sprawling, caring little about the physical experience of being adrift in space, more caught up in earthbound drama. Cuaron’s take ends up being more grounded — which is ironic, given that much less of Gravity takes place on Earth. (Though, to be fair, even Gravity couldn’t resist one rather silly dream sequence indulgence.)

Gravity is a more cohesive film, one of 2013’s best. Interstellar is impressive, but far from a masterpiece. Like the universe itself, it is a beautiful mess. There is life inside it. It may be Nolan’s most moving film yet. It is not his best, but it is more personal and more alive than most blockbusters. This one is worth getting sucked into.

*

Do you want to cry like a baby?

Then boy, have I got a pair of films for you.

Julianne Moore is one of the most reliable actresses in Hollywood. I daresay she’s never turned in a bad, or even close to bad, performance, even when she’s in films that are beneath her talents. There was a period when she fell into that Kevin Spacey-esque rut of choosing prestige projects that seem like awards contenders, but end up flopping both creatively and commercially — projects like The Shipping News and Blindness, largely forgotten — which came after her heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But she was always perfectly good in them.

Her big breakout as a capital-A Actress was Boogie Nights, which earned her the first of four Oscar nominations. Shortly after, she was a dramatic dynamo in Magnolia, a comedic force to be reckoned with in The Big Lebowski, the only woman who could fill Jodie Foster’s shoes and not be laughed out of Hollywood in Hannibal, and a cog in unusual artistic experiments like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake. Her most recent Oscar nominations were both in 2002, as Best Supporting Actress in The Hours (even though she had more screen time than Best Actress winner Nicole Kidman) and Best Actress in Far From Heaven, which should have been a win.

It has been over a decade since Julianne Moore was an Academy Award nominee, which seems crazy when you look at her body of work over those years. Children Of Men. A Single Man. The Kids Are All Right. She was terrific in all of them. The Golden Globes and Emmys awarded her for playing Sarah Palin in Game Change, but the Academy has drastically undervalued her over the past decade. Recently, she’s been in quirky, small-scale fare like Don Jon and The English Teacher, though she reliably pops up in standard studio fare, too, turning in solid performances in everything from The Lost World: Jurassic Park to Non-Stop to the Carrie remake to the upcoming Hunger Games: Mockingjay. She lends such films a touch of class that they wouldn’t get from most other actresses. And though she’s been in a number of films that didn’t hit the mark, Moore herself always nails it.

My point is simple: it’s criminal that this woman does not possess an Oscar.But there’s good news: thanks to Still Alice, this very well might be Julianne Moore’s year to step up to the podium.

Still Alice is, in a sense, Oscar bait — which is not a knock against it. It’s based on a book by Lisa Genova, who I’m sure did not write the novel with a mind to win Julianne Moore an Academy Award. It’s just the kind of story that makes so much sense to adapt into a movie, and if you’re going to adapt this story into a movie, you’re going to want to cast someone like Julianne Moore, and if you cast Julianne Moore in anything, she’s going to be fucking phenomenal. So there it is.

Moore plays Dr. Alice Howland, a brilliant linguist with an equally brilliant life. She lives in New York City. She is married to John, a fellow doctor who also works at Columbia. (Moore reunites with her 30 Rock paramour Alec Baldwin here, in a very different romance.) She has three extremely good-looking children — Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish), and Lydia (a very solid Kristen Stewart, finally shedding her Twilight pall and allowed to be a real actress again). Her two eldest are on the fast-track to success, while Lydia has moved to Los Angeles to be an actress, which Alice doesn’t so much approve of. Still, Alice’s problems are distinctly upper-middle-class problems, the kind you can disparagingly hashtag — until she is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.It starts slowly. In the first scene, Alice is briefly confused at 50th birthday dinner, but it’s the sort of mistake anyone might make. Then she gets disoriented on a jog. Certain words slip her mind. Alice sees a neurologist who suspects that she could have Alzheimer’s before he says it aloud. Further tests confirm that. Worse news: Alice’s form of Alzheimer’s is hereditary, meaning there is a high likelihood that she will pass it on to her children.

Still Alice is a fairly by-the-numbers affair about a person struggling with an affliction. It touches on how Alice’s diagnosis affects her family, the highs and lows of her health, a sense of impending doom at the ultimate outcome. It could be a movie about cancer, AIDS, or any other illness, except in Alice’s case, this is a death of the mind rather than the body. That somehow makes Alice’s illness even more terrifying, and particularly ironic, because Alice is a brilliant women who has devoted her entire life to enriching her brain. And though we expect our bodies to betray us at a certain age, most of us hope that we will still be “ourselves” when we reach such a point. We can lose our bodies and still feel whole, but if we lose our minds, who are we?

The direction by Richard Glatzer and West Westmoreland finds a few competent ways to share the experience of gradually losing one’s faculties without doing anything particularly innovative or daring. Their script takes a pretty obvious course to the inevitable conclusion, but does so fairly elegantly. The story is heartbreaking and perfectly relatable, even if you’ve never known anyone with Alzheimer’s. Still Alice is a film about loss, the kinds of loss we will all face — the loss of a parent, and the loss of our own lives, and the loss of all the many things that have given our time on Earth meaning over the course of a handful of decades.

Yes, I spent a good portion of my time watching Still Alice choking on a sob, which is unusual given the number of pedestrian disease-du-jour films I’ve been subjected to over the years. This isn’t the sort of material that usually gets me, but this one did. Still Alice manages to find an angle that is just fresh enough, while still adhering to the usual tropes and tone we find in films about a person slowly dying. The bulk of the credit goes to Julianne Moore, who turns in another fearless, flawless performance as Alice. (Her triumphant moment, which involves a heartfelt speech made fairly late in her bran’s regression, makes remaining dry-eyed impossible.)

It’s hard to imagine who could beat out Moore for an Oscar this year, unless her curse continues: she’s always so reliably good that is hardly surprising to see her deliver an Academy Award-worthy turn, and awards often go to those who shock us with how good they can be. (Not always, of course, which is how Meryl Streep keeps getting nominated.) Her competition isn’t terribly formidable this year — most of the actresses up for this year’s race are either too new to pull off a win or already have one. Of course, it’s a bit early to the call race now, but if any of the four performance categories are to be called now, I’d say your safest bet was on Best Actress. (Moore might find herself again pulling double-nomination duty thanks to a supporting turn in David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars.)

Still Alice won’t be one of my very favorite films of this year, but I do want to see Julianne Moore get an Oscar. She’s earned it, dammit. Let’s give her an Oscar and then another Oscar, and ten more retroactive Oscars for all the years we missed.Unfortunately, I won’t be able to hold up Julianne Moore as my undisputed champion for favorite leading performance this year, because I also happened to catch Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, starring Anne Dorval as a mother who shares almost nothing in common with Dr. Alice Howland, except that they are both Going Through It. Unlike Julianne Moore, Anne Dorval is not an actress I am very familiar with, and not an actress who has narrowly missed several golden opportunities at the Oscars podium. She has, of course, never been nominated, and probably will remain unnominated this year, because Mommy is a Canadian film with dialogue in French that doesn’t feature any stars recognizable to U.S. audiences.

Its biggest star may be the man behind the camera, Xavier Dolan, an actor himself, though he does not appear in Mommy. He is a 25-year-old releasing his fifth feature; Mommy is likely his most mature and accomplished film to date, but they’ve all been well-received and buzzy on the indie/arthouse circuit. Mommy is Canada’s hopeful for a Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, and it stands a good chance at a nomination. (It was a big hit at Cannes.) It’s somewhat rare to see a non-English-speaking performance nominated by the Academy, though not unprecedented — some, like Marion Cotillard and Roberto Benigni, have even won. Dorval probably doesn’t have the clout it’ll take to go toe-to-toe with this year’s more likely nominees, Julianne Moore, Reese Witherspoon, Felicity Jones, Amy Adams, and Rosamund Pike, but stranger things have happened. Let’s just make this clear: it certainly won’t be because Dorval’s work here isn’t worthy of a nomination.In Mommy, Dorval plays Die, a woman many might dismiss as “white trash” — she’s loud, brash, and swears like a sailor, most often dressed provocatively, the kind of woman who’s son you’d expect to be found in a juvenile detention center. And he is. Steve is a deceptively cherubic fifteen-year-old prone to explosive fits of anger that often escalate violently. Die and Steve can’t help but push each other’s buttons, even when they know that doing so can and will result in destruction of property, serious injury, and neighborly intervention, as one memorable encounter in this film does. They love each other, but neither has enough self-control to avoid hurting the other, which only ends up hurting themselves in the long run. Mommy is as much about a sado-masochistic relationship as it is about a maternal one. The film begins just as mother and son are reunited following his exile from a program that was meant to help him.

What is Mommy about? That’s a tricky question to answer, because it is partially about Die and Steve’s fraught dynamic, but a third character becomes significant, too — that’s Kyle (Suzanne Clement), a neighbor who has developed a difficulty speaking. (She is also a mommy.) We get the sense that Kyla’s time away from her teaching career has been pretty damn boring, which is why she’s attracted to the odd pairing across the street, even though they’re so self-destructive and prone to outrageous domestic disturbances. Kyla becomes a tutor to Steve and a pal and a confidante to Die, which might unfold fairly predictably in a story by a less ambitious filmmaker, but Dolan doles out several narrative surprises. Die and Steve can’t help but wear their hearts on their sleeves — everything they feel practically bursts out of them — but Kyla is a wild card, and we’re never entirely certain what she’s thinking, how she’s feeling, or how her relationship with these two will develop.The base story of Mommy follows Die as she struggles with how to manage her own mess of a life with the considerable needs of her son, who seemingly can’t be left alone for very long without wreaking havoc. She hates the idea of institutionalizing him, but is there any other option? His rage will only intensify as he gets older; it’s practically a given that he’ll end up in prison at some point. There are moments in Mommy where Steve is terrifying, flying off the handle at the drop of a hat, uncontrollable and capable of almost anything. And yet there are also moments in which he is astoundingly sweet and couldn’t be more likable. Because of Steve, Die can neither work nor date, so we really do have to wonder if this mother would be better off without her offspring. There are moments when the two connect beautifully and seem like the only people in the world they could possibly belong with, and moments in which we’re hoping they break free from one another and end the cycle of misery they’re caught up in. These are real relationships. You take the good with the bad, and there’s no telling which side you’ll see at any given moment.

As good as Anne Dorval is, she’s boosted by two other stellar performances (who of course have even less of a shot at Oscar nominations). Antoine-Olivier Pilon is magnetic as Steve, running the gamut of human emotions. One moment he’s a wide-eyed innocent boy, the next he’s a moody, sexually frustrated teenager, the next he’s a man whose violent outrage could turn deadly. It’s reminiscent in many ways of Jack O’Connell’s rage-in-a-cage role in Starred Up, except that Pilon is given a little more range to play with, including a standout scene in which he, Kyla, and Die sing and dance along with “On Ne Change Pas” by Celine Dion. (More on that later.) Pilon’s range, as displayed here, is pretty incredible.And then there’s Suzanne Clement. In many moments, she’s barely able to get a single word out, but she’s so perfectly expressive that she doesn’t need to. So much goes unsaid by Kyla, yet by the end of this story we feel like we know everything about her. Yet Kyla shows a very different and totally unexpected side during one tutoring session, which is a showstopper as delivered by Clement.

But back to the music. Dolan’s music choices throughout are curious; I’m not sure if it’s a cultural thing, and these songs have a different life in Canada than they’ve had in the states, or he’s deliberately chosen music from the late 90s and the early 2000s that feels played out. Most filmmakers consciously avoid songs that we associate with other movies (unless making a direct reference), or, worse, associate with a desire to gouge our eardrums out with a fork to avoid ever hearing again. But Eiffel 65′s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” is featured here, probably ironically, during an intense interaction between Kyla and Steve. That’s not too unusual, but other significant moments use Dido’s “White Flag” and Sarah Maclachlan’s “Building A Mystery” essentially as score. One beautiful sequence uses Counting Crows’ “Colorblind” (which will never not remind us of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippe gettin’ busy in Cruel Intentions, and is therefore almost unusable in cinema forever after). Mommy‘s “calm before the storm” montage is set to, of all things, Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” You could hardly find a more cliche choice.

The Mommy soundtrack could easily double as an album called Songs I’m Sick Of And Hope Never To Hear Again, or perhaps Now That’s What I Call Music: French-Canadian Auteur Who Grew Up In The 90s Edition. But in context, it works somehow. You have to admire Dolan’s boldness in just going for it; how many other Canadians would so shamelessly include a lip sync Celine freakin’ Dion? Mommy contains three or four moments that are practically musical numbers, and they’re absolutely indelible. I would have been perfectly content watching two hours of Xavier Dolan directing music videos for his favorite songs from adolescence, but there’s a lot more to Mommy than just visual and aural panache.Mommy eventually gets around to a climactic moment, but it’s slow-building and takes a lot of detours getting there. Its pleasures are more about watching three people interacting. The film is shot almost entirely in a very rare 1:1 aspect ratio. (That’s a square, for those who failed geometry.) It’s distracting at first; at times I desperately wanted to the screen to open up and show me more, as it is so tightly focused on these people’s faces. But that’s the point. The constrained frame forces us to watch these performances and only these performances. There’s little chance we’ll be distracted by anything in the background. Movies weren’t always as wide as they are now, so Dolan’s choice feels as much like a throwback as it does a modern millennial choice. The shots of these characters have an intimate, selfie-like quality. It’s like Instagram: The Movie.

Dolan has said that the aspect ratio wasn’t an artistic choice, but one that felt appropriate given how character-focused this drama is. Yet there are two moments in which the screen opens up for us, and I couldn’t help but notice that they were the two key moments that depict these people as free, unburdened by the constraints society and economics place on them. Being initially frustrated by the 1:1 only makes the first time the frame widens out all the more glorious. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s set to that soaring, still-good Oasis song.) And the second one, Mommy‘s emotional climax, is just devastating. (I wouldn’t want to spoil it here, but you’ll see what I mean when you see the movie.)That sums up Mommy by the end of it. The actors are so good that our sympathy sneaks up on us. Die and Steve are not people we initially expect we’ll connect with, but then, much like Kyla, we do. Life is funny that way. The people we spend time with are not necessarily the people we think we’d spend time with, or the people we’d choose to. You don’t choose your mother, and you don’t choose your son, and you sort of choose your friends, but only sort of. Life throws people together at random times, in unforeseen ways, sometimes for a limited time only. Location, circumstance, and happenstance bring people into our lives that would otherwise never be there.

If Mommy were exclusively focused on Die and Steve, then a late segment of this film wouldn’t have made it to the final cut. The friendship between Die and Kyla, two very different mothers, is equally important, and explored in a way that we don’t often see in a movie. Not many films examine the course of a friendship from beginning to end without some kind of artifice, like sex or death or a love triangle, wedging its way in to force things to come to a boil and make the “plot” happen. Mommy has dramatic moments, but ultimately it’s just about two kinds of relationships — the kind that are bonded in blood, from which we can never escape (even if we take great pains trying to), and the kind that we form by choice — and dissolve by choice, too.

If there were justice in cinema, all three of this film’s outstanding trio would be lauded for these performances, and Xavier Dolan would be recognized outside of the Foreign Film race, too. But that’s not going to happen, so if Julianne Moore finally getting her Oscar is the consolation prize, I’ll be perfectly content living in that world, too.

  *

(Throwback Thursday: A glimpse back at my reasonably short-lived days as a production assistant, and what it taught me about making movies. First published in INsite Boston in April 2006.)

Astronauts and firemen, ballerinas and princesses. These are the professions we choose as kids to conclude that all-important statement, ”When I grow up I want to be…”

Granting power and prestige, filled with excitement and adventure — is it any wonder these lives appeal to five-year olds?

What could be better?

In reality, however, very few of us end up pursuing those careers we glamorized in our youths. Most end up setting our sights on more readily available occupations — doctor, lawyer, teacher, fry cook. These are practical jobs with everyday necessity. The naïve, egocentric fantasies of our formative years give way to more imminently pressing concerns — like fiscal responsibility, familial obligation, and man’s inherent urge to give something of himself back to humanity.

And then there are those of us who decide to make movies.Filmmakers are grownups who still want to make a living blasting off to the moon, delighting the masses in a frilly pink tutu. (But maybe without the intense training and sacrifice that comes with actually chasing down such coveted pursuits.) Early on we discover that the real world, with its 9-5/Monday-Friday/lather-rinse-repeat routine, is no place for us, so we pilfer a few extra years of make-believe and extend those juvenile daydreams to include special effects, bombastic soundtracks, and hootenannies with the stars. Pity the fool who trades fire engines for stock options; we’re the kids who never outgrew the desire to be princesses.

But there’s a rude awakening in store for dreamers awaiting a super-sized movie life. Sooner or later, every slumber must submit to a blaring alarm.

Though we like to pretend that it’s confidential, Hollywood wants the general public to be aware of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into its product, the behind-the-scenes drama that often trumps what we pay to see on screen. They know as well as we do: it’s all part of the show, the magic of movies. So recently, I went undercover to unveil what they don’t want us to see. Something that’s been kept off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush… until now.

My wakeup call sounded loud and clear on my first day as production assistant on an independent film:

Eyes open, sleepyhead, and leave those dreams behind.For the uninitiated, a PA is known throughout the industry as the lowliest position on a film crew, and possibly the planet. It’s a crash course in everything that sucks about moviemaking, an experience that will not only crush your dreams but also back up over them twice just to make sure they’re good and smooshy. The day rate seems sufficient until you realize that you’re logging 75 hours a week, so your paycheck breaks down to less than minimum wage hourly; the job itself embraces the least enviable aspects of careers such as mailman, secretary, chauffeur, housekeeper, and pizza delivery guy. (Please note that five-year olds seldom yearn to be any of these.) Which brings me back to that dirty, filthy, naughty little secret Hollywood truly doesn’t want you to know:

It’s boring.

Sure, only a child would imagine filmmaking to be as easy, breezy, beautiful as it looks on TV. I spent my whole life bracing for a bumpy ride. As a PA, I certainly didn’t expect red carpets rolled out for me, never indulged in fantasies of the director pulling me aside to say, “Hey, you seem pretty bright, why don’t you take a turn this time?” I went in expecting the worst, prepared to hate PAing spectacularly — with violins screeching violently, bolts of lightning reflected in my bloodshot eye. I ended up just hating it the normal way… sitting in traffic for six hours, in the rain, at rush hour, on my way to set, and on my way back, and then to set again because someone forgot to mention they needed those copies on buff-colored paper. (“What the hell is the color ‘buff’?” you’re asking. I asked, too — and no one had a satisfactory answer.) It turns out the entertainment industry is just the real world with a vengeance; I work longer hours for less pay than anyone I know with a “real” job, and have yet to behold the teensiest poof! of movie magic.

What a crock.While the rest of the world looks to filmmakers for escapism, there’s no escape for us. As children, we watched our cinematic counterparts defy the daily grind through danger and mystery, and promised ourselves that we would, too. Unable to actually live inside a movie, we pursued the next best thing — a life on the cinematic sidelines. But there’s a price to pay for every fantasy we hold onto. Rent in the bubble I live in is not cheap, and with expenses like car insurance, clothing, and Special Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVDs released right after I bought the single-disc version, I can no longer afford it without seriously working. Like so many heroes and heroines before me, I wake to discover that my would-be adventures were only just a dream all along. And so begins my worst nightmare.

It’s strange and disappointing to be so close to everything I dreamed of, but nowhere near the reasons I pursued it. To struggle in vain as the Technicolor world I envisioned is sapped of sparkle, becoming a little more like drab Kansas every day. Perhaps most frustrating of all is that I know everyone faces this — the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers, the fry cooks. Probably even the astronauts and princesses. I went so far to evade the trappings of a normal life, and now my growing pains couldn’t be more universal.Still, sometimes I walk on set and realize that, although it’s nothing like what I imagined, I am exactly where I set out to be. I’ve adjusted to the grueling schedule, the thankless tasks. I’ve made friends with coworkers who are as tired and stressed out as I am. I’ve started to see moviemaking as a collaborative process, one that I’m a part of. Now and then something interesting happens, like the day they were short on high school kids and put me in two scenes as an extra. (After a couple hours of standing around, I discovered that that, too, is boring.) The rest of the time, I get through the day like I always have: daydreaming of a life less ordinary.

Roughly a year after graduating from cinema school, exactly a year after I began this column, I’m finally on the inside of this industry. And, if you look deep enough in the background, I’m also inside a movie.

It may not be a good movie. It may not be a successful movie. And my contribution to it is about as minimal as they come. But if I squint at my current life, I can kind of almost see it as something like what I always wanted.

*

In its most extreme realizations, the American dream means being the best. Foxcatcher is about three men who already are the best, and want to be better.

It is the based-on-a-true-story story of Mark and Dave Schultz, Olympic champions from the mid-80s, who are fixing to return to the ring in 1988, with a little help from the very wealthy John du Pont. John first lures Mark into his staid privileged world, promising glory and admiration (and a little cocaine), but it’s possible that he only does so to bait Mark’s brother. At some point, Mark and John’s curious relationship goes sour, and Mark feels betrayed by his actual brother as well as the father-like figure of John du Pont. (John seems to be playing friend, brother, father, and mentor roles simultaneously… and possibly another role as well? It’s hard to ignore the film’s total lack of sexuality.)

Dave and Mark are already Olympic gold medal winners. John du Pont is heir to one of the great “old money” fortunes in America. They’ve already achieved the dream other Americans long for. Still, they want more. Mark (Channing Tatum) claims he wants to be the best wrestler in the world — an itch which you’d think an Olympic gold medal might have scratched already — and John (Steve Carell) wants to soak up that glory through osmosis, by sponsoring Mark and his brother as wrestlers. Though both brothers are formidable, older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo) has accumulated the majority of the fame, at least in Mark’s eyes. So Mark wants to be even better. He wants more championship titles, more gold medals — just as the du Ponts want more pointless trophies to put in their pointless trophy room. In Bennett Miller’s America, too much is never enough.But what’s the point? Who really cares who funded a gold medalist? Does that fairy dust ever really rub off on the sponsor? And at a certain point, after you’ve already won a gold medal, isn’t enough enough? Mark wants to prove that he’s his own man, to crawl out from under his brother’s shadow — but the problem is that he’s trying to do it by wrestling, the very thing Dave is famous for. A smarter guy would have picked another sport, or another platform entirely. Mark’s wrestling skills will eventually fade, one way or another, and what then? You can’t move out of your brother’s shadow if you’re following his every motion.

As for John du Pont? We’re left to guess somewhat at the life he led before Mark Schultz met him, but it’s easy to see that John feels emasculated by his cold, controlling mother (Vanessa Redgrave). We can guess that he didn’t get a lot of opportunities to roughhouse with other boys as a youth, which might be why wrestling in particular appeals to him. The du Pont family has strength in their bank accounts, but John is a tiny, bird-like man (with a bird-like beak for a nose, and a probably-not-coincidental obsession with ornithology). He’s not a strong man in any sense of the word, which might be what attracts him toward a hulk of a man like Mark Schultz. He’s a leech.

Foxcatcher doesn’t give us much insight into any of these characters’ interior lives, but the easiest to understand, by far, is Dave. Dave is a simple family man and that’s what he cares about — wrestling is something he’s good at, something he can make money doing, but it’s all about his family. John has only his chilly mother, not far from death, and a mountain of money awaiting him. Mark has even less — no friends to speak of, no love interest, and no money until John enters the picture. These men chase after being the best because without such a pursuit, they are nothing at all. Foxcatcher unfolds in a sad, bleak little universe where getting better only means getting progressively worse.Wrestling and collecting weapons are John’s hobbies, his way of playing at being a tough guy, but it is an actual killing that ultimately undoes the bond between these three men. America loves violence. It was founded on it (as John reminds us, showing off his Revolutionary War-era home). Men like to watch other men wrestle each other. They like tanks and guns. They especially like tanks with guns attached to them. Foxcatcher may not connect all the dots on how America’s obsession with military and violent sports lines up with the murder that unfolds in this story, but it does give us the dots, and says: make of these what you will. It has an almost ambivalent attitude toward its thematic content, so you can easily leave the theater asking questions like, “Why?” and “So what?”

Miller quite obviously has the American dream on his mind, perhaps even more than the actual facts about these three real-life men. The real story is fascinating, but you’ll find only stray slivers of it here. What we do learn is that John is obsessed with military weapons, which he collects like the trophies his mother has devoted an entire room in the estate to. John has never fought in a war, but he’s content to acquire the accoutrement, the same way he’s content to collect wrestling medals he has only bankrolled, while other “real” men put the physical sweat into earning them. Merely owning symbols of powerful and masculininty makes John du Pont feel like a man.

For a while.

Until it doesn’t.

John du Pont is an overgrown boy, not a man, and when a spoiled child doesn’t get his way? Watch out.

Channing Tatum is solid as Mark, but Mark isn’t a terribly deep or interesting individual, and we have to wonder why this twentysomething is hanging out with a much older skeezy rich dude all the time. Sure, du Pont’s financial support is a factor, but we rarely see Mark socializing with anybody else, and never once does he display any interest in women or sex of any kind. And the dude looks like Channing Tatum. Yes, Channing Tatum with cauliflower ear, but still Channing Tatum. The homosexual undercurrent is never explicitly suggested by this film, but it’s impossible not to wonder about. (Discuss.) Mark Schultz’s book about these events probably gives us more insight into what’s going on here, but in terms of this film, it’s hard to say for sure.

Steve Carell is noticeably unshowy, despite that fake schnoz, underplaying his character to such a degree that the character is frequently lifeless and ultimately soulless. Mark Ruffalo rounds out the cast as Dave, exactly the sort of guy you’d expect to shrug off a gold medal. The kind of guy who has to write “Pick Up Kids” in black marker on his hands just to remember this daily errand. The kind of guy who doesn’t get that the Very Rich need to be treated like they’re Very Special. He’s the film’s simplest character, but Ruffalo plays him expertly, the only character here we really get to know.

This trio will undoubtedly all be a part of the awards conversation, though Carell has the best chance at a nomination (and even a win) — if audiences don’t find him too understated and removed to warm up to. (Then again, the Academy loves a big, fake nose — just ask Nicole Kidman.)

Bennett Miller’s original cut of the film was more than four hours long, which might have been brilliant or excruciating. At two hours and fifteen minutes, it feels too long. Foxcatcher begins slowly, in Miller’s well-composed but unhurried shots. It’s like a fly on the wall who has ceased buzzing. It feels like all the juiciest interactions have been cut out of the film, leaving competent but not utterly compelling scenes.

Foxcatcher is interesting almost in spite of itself. It may only be an interesting film because America is an interesting place. Bring your own magnifying glass to examine the subtext, because Bennett Miller doesn’t do it for us. Steve Carell’s John du Pont is a sad, worthless, empty black hole of a person, and Carell plays him that way. We want nothing to do with him. Then again, according to this film, neither did anyone else who got to know him. It’s hard to tell if we’re meant to think that extreme privilege made him this way, or if it’s just where this human cipher happened to land in the cosmic lottery — but either way, just looking at him is depressing.

Foxcatcher isn’t such a troubling movie because we’re invested in what happens in the characters, or because what happens is much darker than we’d see in any other movie, but because it’s so hopeless. There’s nothing we especially want for any of these characters, except maybe that they all go very far away from each other and never speak again.

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Much has been made of the weak Best Actress race this year. The Best Actor field is filled to the brim with potential nominees, enough to fill ten slots with worthy performances from 2014.

The Best Actress race? Not so much.

The obvious frontrunner is Julianne Moore in Still Alice. Beyond that, there are not really any leading female performances that have set the screen on fire. (Some of my own favorites are lesser-known foreign actresses with virtually no shot at grabbing the Academy’s attention.) With four more slots to fill, obviously four more women will receive nominations, and these women — who very well might be Felicity Jones, Rosamund Pike, and Amy Adams — are certainly deserving of acclaim. Still, it’s a shame that there haven’t been enough dynamic female-driven roles to make this category feel like a real race.

At this point, Moore’s strongest competitor is likely Reese Witherspoon, a previous Best Actress winner (for Walk The Line) who sounds off a gamut of emotional frequencies in her latest cinematic endeavor — she sobs, she screams, she despairs, and she also perseveres in the face of hardships offered up by the Pacific Crest Trail, facing possible starvation and dehydration and other perils of nature as well as potential threats from her fellow man. It’s the kind of role that seems destined to capture the Academy’s attention, aided by the fact it’s based on a true story. (Oscar just loves that.) In short, the film lets Witherspoon go Wild… a journey that took her subject from California to Washington on foot, and may take the woman who plays her up to the podium to collect another Oscar.

Wild is based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed, which I read recently in anticipation of the film. It is not one of those tales of a person up against the great odds of nature, as you might expect. Strayed faced some elemental obstacles, but nothing so extreme that it’s worth making a movie about. This isn’t Into The Wild or All Is Lost or 127 Hours. Cheryl Strayed may have walked 1,100 miles in too-small boots, but the journey Wild depicts is her inner journey. She does not get lost in the woods — she is lost when the story begins, and her trek across the west coast is to find herself. That may sound maudlin, and perhaps at times it borders on that, but it’s a true and inspiring story, at once very specific and universal.

Wild begins with Cheryl on the trail and then flashes back to reveal what drove her there, as does the book. The failure of her marriage, a flirtation with heroin, and primarily, her mother’s battle with cancer. As in the book, these flashbacks are often more vivid than what we learn of her time on the trail. Strayed is a woman hiking alone across almost the entire length of California and the entire length of Oregon. Not many women do this on their own. It makes sense that the movie version somewhat skimps on Strayed’s “alone time,” and instead looks to her interactions with fellow hikers and flashbacks to provide the most compelling narrative. Those looking for an adventure film may be disappointed, but having read the book, I knew what I was in for — a story about losing and then finding oneself.

Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is a poignant read. Her prose is forthright and honest. She isn’t a terribly subtle writer, as she easily spells out her epiphanies and the themes she bumps up against, but the story is incredibly moving and, at times, invigorating. I’ll say the same for the movie, which was adapted by Nick Hornsby — who is primarily known as a novelist, and I must say, a surprising choice to adapt this story. There are moments in his script where the dialogue is too on-the-nose, where something left unsaid might have been better than what was on the page. Cheryl spends a lot of time muttering to herself, which isn’t always necessary. (Though I imagine she really did this to keep herself company.) The movie uses all kinds of tricks to get around the supposed lack of chatter we’d find in a one-woman story like Wild — quotes from famous authors, inner monologue voice-over, voices from the past in voice-over, Cheryl talking to herself, and a bit of narration from the book (though not as much as expected). Most of this works, though in a story about finding peace amidst the majesty of nature, there is an awful lot of talking.

Wild is quite faithful to the book, and thus to the actual events of Strayed’s hike. A few side characters are cut, and a few stops along the way go unmentioned, but the film manages to cram in more encounters than I thought it would. (I was initially dismayed that the Three Young Bucks had been excised, since they were some of Strayed’s most memorable companions, but luckily they appear at a later point in the story.) It is especially deft in the way it handles Strayed’s flashbacks, which never feel jammed in for the sake of exposition. The film doesn’t flinch at the less savory aspects of Cheryl’s life: the many anonymous sex partners she had while still married to her doting husband Paul, an abortion, heroin injections. (An upsetting sequence involving the execution of a horse is necessarily toned down for the screen.)

Witherspoon’s take on Strayed is a bit surlier than the prose of the book, but that mostly works, and perhaps makes it clearer that Cheryl needs this hike to get away from the waste of a woman she’s become. The real centerpiece of Wild (both the movie and book) is Strayed’s mother Bobbi, lovingly and strikingly captured by the book and wonderfully recreated in the film by Laura Dern. With only a handful of relatively short scenes, Laura Dern creates a whole character we feel like we know instantly, a figure so maternal, so flawed but so optimistic, that we can easily see how her absence might rip a hole in a person. At this point, Laura Dern is one of the most fabulous actresses around, and Bobbi’s smallish but significant role is fantastically written. Dern could elevate almost any material, and Bobbi the character alone elevates this story — the credit for which ultimately probably goes to Bobbi the woman, Strayed’s actual mother. But we can also credit Strayed and Hornsby as writers, and especially Laura Dern, for bringing her to life in the movie. Witherspoon gets the job done, but Dern should absolutely get an Oscar nomination for this.

The rest of Wild is a worthy venture, too. The film is surprisingly impressionistic, with striking editing that gives us glimpses of memories before we know what they mean exactly. (Unless we’ve read the book.) The subliminal cues create a sense of Strayed’s inner damage, the wounds she’s hiking to heal. Cheryl’s physical body takes on bruises and cuts as she makes her way northward, but inside she’s healing all the while.

The film is well-directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who made last year’s Dallas Buyers Club, the visual style of which transcended the limits of the screenplay, which is akin to what’s happening here. It’s impossible to know what I’d have thought of Wild had I not had such a deep connection to Strayed’s journey thanks to my enjoyment of the memoir. I knew already what every step of Cheryl’s journey had in store, and also what thematic significance each moment would have for her. The fun, for me, was in seeing how these elements were rearranged and executed in the film version.

Wild has moments of tremendous beauty and grace. Cheryl travels through extreme arid heat in the desert, through chilling snow, through sopping-wet rain, but the emotional terrain she covers is even more fraught with peril. The movie is more about this than it is about a woman alone against the elements. Its most memorable scenes are about the ways people interact, the little hurts and the little kindnesses that accumulate in our memories along the way.

It’s strange, the moments we remember most. Things that don’t seem important in the moment might be what lingers most heavily in our minds in years to come. Wild comes off like that — you’re more likely to recall the stray fragments of the film that stick with you than the story as a whole, the little moments Wild gets just right. There are enough of them that make it worth the journey.

*

If you live in or around Hollywood, you’re likely to see open-top buses filled with tourists, taking a tour of your home like it’s Disneyland. I happen to live near a lot of the attractions on these tours — places that are pretty ordinary to me, but can still be sold as part of the Tinseltown mythos. The lookie-loos in these buses and vans want to see where the stars live — or, stranger still, used to live — because, as legend has it, such figures are larger than life, gods amongst men, living out their fabulous, unimaginable lives on a plane of existence we mere mortals can only dream of.

The truth is a far cry from that — and if you live here, you know it. But you’ll still see those buses full of people, their eyes glancing briefly at you, just in case you might be a celebrity, and then darting quickly away when they realize you’re just another person. Like animals in cages at a zoo, we don’t pay much mind to these tourists invading our natural habitat — which is not, in fact, our natural habitat, but an enclosure built up to vaguely resemble our former way of life. Our unnatural habitat. In Los Angeles, it’s a constant reminder that people are fascinated by our way of life here, even if that way of life loses its luster to those who actually live here. At some point, even glitz and glamor begin to look ordinary. I look at those tourists sometimes and try to remember what it’s like to be just thrilled by all this.

David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars is a lot like those “star tours,” except in addition to showing you gaudy homes, celeb hotspots, and a glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous, it will also show you incest, prescription drug abuse, the ghosts of multiple children, self-immolation, and at least one dead pet.

Welcome to Hollywood, folks!

Maps To The Stars begins, as most cliche Hollywood stories do, with a young woman stepping off a bus in Los Angeles. But if you think you’ve seen this one before, think again. Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) wears long black gloves to cover the burns on her arms. A less severe burn marks her face. Agatha requests a limo driven by Jerome (Robert Pattinson), who is — you guessed it! — an aspiring actor and screenwriter. Agatha, on the other hand, has not come to Los Angeles to make it as an actress. She’s come to make amends.

But first, she’s come to meet her Twitter buddy, Carrie Fisher (no, really, it’s Carrie Fisher), who helps her get a job as personal assistant (AKA “chore whore”) to an aging actress named Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore). Havana is desperately, desperately, desperately attempting to procure a role in the remake of a film her mother, Hollywood legend Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon), won a Golden Globe in. Clarice was later killed in a fire, which makes Havana’s meeting with burn victim Agatha feel predestined. And maybe it is! Around the time Agatha arrives in the City of Angels, Havana begins having visions of her dead mother — in the bath, in bed with her during a threesome — and let’s just say mommy isn’t playing nice. Havana is not the only celebrity who’s seeing things — child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) has visions of a recently deceased teen girl who was a major fan of his. (She’s not such a fan in the afterlife, though.)

Are these real ghosts? Or just figments of these warped celebrity imaginations? Maps To The Stars isn’t so interested in a plausible explanation, but seems to suggest that celebrity minds are already so fragile, and damaged, and used to lying to themselves, that adding visions of the dead on top of all tht is hardly a stretch. Its vision of Los Angeles is of a bizarre, interconnected world where there are many coincidences but no accidents. Benjie’s father Stafford (John Cusack) is a loopy self-help guru who treats Havana for the sexual abuse she (supposedly) suffered as a young child (in sessions that come off more like child rape fantasies than therapy). Benjie and Havana also have the same manager, Genie (Dawn Greenhalgh), though Benjie’s career is really run by his steely mother Christina (Olivia Williams).

Despite constantly sunny skies, there’s a foreboding sense of doom hanging over these characters’ heads from the very beginning, as if all of these people were poisoned by prosperity and fame long ago and are only now getting around to actually expiring from it. Benjie and Havana both grew up privileged, both began acting at a young age, and now are both insufferable narcissists. Benjie may still be a young teenager, but he’s also just 90 days out of rehab and is paranoid that his younger co-star (a mere moppet) is stealing scenes. Meanwhile, Havana pops just about every kind of pill there is and rejoices when a personal catastrophe strikes the younger actress who got the part she wanted. At her very lowest point, she lays bare her insecurity in a sickening seduction that has her asking Jerome if she has better skin than a burn victim. This is not the behavior of a happy person. Maps To The Stars is both a very funny satire of celebrity as well as a seriously fucked up tragedy. As in many of Cronenberg’s films, the real world feels “off” somehow — even for Los Angeles. It’s not quite as bizarre as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, though the two films not surprisingly have plenty in common. It’s also not technically set in a post-apocalyptic time like Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, but it has a similar surreal quality that mixes nicely with the heightened reality of celebrity life. It is rather akin in tone to Cronenberg’s last film, Cosmopolis, which had Robert Pattinson riding around in the back of a limo instead of driving one. Cosmopolis, like Maps To The Stars, was about the gross and sometimes homicidal extremes that soulless rich people will sink to just to feel alive. (Sarah Gadon also returns from Cosmopolis, and after her recent appearance in Enemy, I’m starting to wonder if she has any interest in movies that take place in our actual reality.)

Maps To The Stars is the twisted nightmare version of sightseeing in Los Angeles, and like those star tours, it’s obsessed with the mythos of celebrity and ultimately quite critical of this city and this industry. David Cronenberg has been making movies for a long time, so it’s possible that he has an axe to grind with the kinds of people you find in this business, but it’s equally likely that he’s just having a laugh at our expense. Virtually every character in Maps To The Stars is ludicrously despicable, and that’s before some of them start killing people. We’re meant to laugh at the shallow words that come out of their mouths, we’re meant to pity them (but not sympathize).  None of these characters seems too closely based on a real person, but Benjie is the right age to display a foul Bieber-like ‘tude that instantly renders him a teenage monster — though we also sense that he’s had little choice in the matter, due to a disturbed childhood and some seriously freaky parents. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that Julianne Moore, in her Golden Globe nominated performance, was playing an overgrown Lindsay Lohan — maybe just because she looks so much like Lindsay Lohan — although by the end, even Lilo would look at her and say, “What a raging bitch!” It’s a credit to Moore that the character comes off as sympathetic as she does, before she takes a turn for the truly vile. (I would wager that that turn takes place in a brilliant gross-out sequence set in the bathroom.)

By the end, so many gruesome things happen to these people that Maps To The Stars becomes impossible to take too seriously as a tragedy. We feel a little sorry for them, but mostly these people have brought it on themselves. Nearly everyone in this story is a vulgar freak; the ones that aren’t might not be merely because we haven’t gotten to know them well enough. It’s hard to imagine that Cronenberg and screenwriter Bruce Wagner think they’re delivering an accurate representation of Los Angeles — it’s too extreme to take seriously — and yet it does play right into the stereotypical view of Hollywood so many people have. I’m a little uncomfortable with the way Maps To The Stars demonizes each and every corner of Los Angeles, without displaying a single corner worthy of redemption. I’m in on the joke, but will everybody else be? Or will this just serve as more fuel for the fire of L.A. haters? Personally, I happen to think Maps To The Stars is a satire of the way people think about Los Angeles than the city itself. There’s some truth in here, but it’s also a shallow, tourist’s point-of-view, one that scratches just barely below the surface and finds nothing but a void underneath. The movie’s title suggests a tour of Hollywood life, and the response is a movie that throws ugliness and depravity back in our faces.

You want to see celebrities? We’ll give you celebrities! Cronenberg seems to say. But then he won’t let us look away. We have to live in the grimy cannibalistic black hole these famous people do, and I’m not sure this is meant to reflect a real place so much as it is meant to mirror our fascination with gawking at the most shallow of celebrities. Stars would be nothing without their adoring fans, and that’s us. We’re their enablers. We’re the ones who allowed them to become such vicious monsters. Maps To The Stars just may be our punishment for that.

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