12 YEARS A SLAVE

Over the years, English director Steve McQueen has been exploring how people deal with imprisonment. His previous film, Shame, showed a man imprisoned by his own body, alternately embracing and rejecting his own impulses as they destroy him. His first film, Hunger, showed an emaciated Michael Fassbender as an IRA prisoner becoming questionably delusional fighting his imperialist wardens with an impractical, perhaps suicidal hunger strike. Unlike in Hunger the protagonist of his latest film, 12 Years A Slave, can't strike out no matter how much he wants to, and instead faces a slow and systematic damnation via his own sense of pragmatism.

The film is based on the memoir of the same name by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was drugged and kidnapped from his family before being sold into slavery in 1841. This sort of thing was fairly regular. Under the Fugitive Slave Act it was legal for bounty hunters to pursue runaway slaves into free states but many times it was easier just to grab any black man, say he was a runaway, and sell him for easy money. In this sense, Northup's story isn't that special, except for the fact that he happened to escape and be literate enough to tell his story well, and this film is all the better for recognizing how ordinary all these events were. Northup was well educated and made a nice living as a carpenter and violinist. The film seems to recreate this accurately, though it might overplay the contrast between his free life and slave life by suggesting that Northup, played in the film by  Chitwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men), didn't face any racial adversity as a free black man in Saratoga before being drugged by strangers.

When Northup wakes, he is told that he's now a runaway named Platt and is beaten within an inch of his life when he tries to assert his true identity. Early in his journey he finds himself on a ship paddling down the Mississippi, (the incessant thudding paddles suggest at the machinery of slavery as an industry). He knows that when the ship reaches its destination, he will be sold and he’s presented with the option to violently fight and face certain death or keep his head down and survive. He’s determined to do neither, but in the heat of the moment he knows that he must appear to accept his new life while searching for a way to escape.

We see that decision to be pragmatic slowly crush his spirit. After being sold to his first master, William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), he dares not reveal his identity but he looks to flash his intelligence so to be noticed. Ford probably senses that Northup isn't a runaway but is happy to have a useful slave. Any hope of being freed by Ford dies when he gifts Solomon a violin to "make the years pass more joyously." Furthermore Solomon's show of engineering skill earns him the ire of an overseer played by Paul Dano, who strings him up for hours from a tree just low enough that he might survive if he stands on his tip toes and doesn't slip in the mud. After a while his fellow slaves start to go about their business in the background. They don't speak up because there's no one to speak to, and because they would be punished for it. It's this pragmatism that literally keeps his life in danger in this scene that Northup must attempt in order to survive, one that McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley present as the central evil of slavery: the ability to force a person to accept his own suffering and ignore suffering in other people.

Things get worse when he's sold to Edwin Epps (Fassbender) who gives none of the limited regard Salomon might have enjoyed with Ford. Epps is a monster who frequently tortures his slaves under the guise of scripture when they fail to meet their quota and delights in frequently raping Patsy (newcomer Lupita Nyong'o), a female slave he professes to love but occasionally has whipped to keep his jealous wife happy. Patsy goes along with this at first because she hopes it will mean better treatment as a House Slave, and then because she has no choice. More and more Solomon must play himself down to survive, leading to a harrowing moment where, for very complex reasons he is forced to torture a fellow slave.

There's a lot of cruelty and McQueen plays it in his signature, matter of fact tone. But instead of removing us from it, the approach makes everything all the more horrifying.  Under both owners we constantly hear slaves being tortured either just out of frame or in the frame but just out of focus. He uses the images to emulate the blinders Northup and his fellow slaves must wear to survive. By showing just how casual an attitude slaves and owners have to the human suffering caused by the institution, it becomes a film of almost surrealistic horrors. Take the scene where Solomon is sold: We're in a posh, middle class home, Paul Giamatti and his perspective buyers dressed in the finest of fashion as the slaves stand around mostly in the nude, staring blankly, desplaying their teeth and muscles on demand, while Solomon is forced to play violin concertos to make it all feel more normal.

The performances are all excellent, all the principals throwing themselves into their parts with method like abandon without ever overwhelming the film, Fassbender and Nyong'o are particularly good and Ejiofor's performance avoids the Oscarbait traps of appearing overly noble.  This is a man who knows how vulnerable he is and that he's losing his soul day by day. Every attempt at defiance or escape he makes puts him in more and more danger. The fact that he does eventually manage it is so miraculous that it'll feel like Deus Ex Machina to some and in a way it is. Most people who entered slavery, either by birth or kidnapping, never escaped and the odds say that he should have died in bondage. But the reunion with his family feels hollow. We know that his only way out was, ultimately, to ignore the cries of others, knowing that to speak out could spell the end of his own tentative freedom. The real Solomon Northup spent the rest of his life working on the underground railroad, so it can't be said that pragmatism broke him, but in McQueen's film, it certainly compromises him.

Grade: A-

HAYWIRE

Haywire, one of 2 films outrageously, prolific director Steven Soderbergh released in 2012, is something of a minimalist thriller. Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs (Dark City) know that their plot, about a burned spy trying to clear her name, is completely out of the manual and use it as window dressing, getting it out of the way as a efficiently and unobtrusively as possible to make way for the main event.

The main event is Gina Carano who plays Malory Kane, the burned spy. There really isn't much to her other than "spy."  The film doesn't make her into much of a person and instead features lengthy scenes of her running, jumping and beating the ever loving shit out of her enemies.

The choice to dehumanize Kane must have been at least partly practical. Carano was not hired for her minimal acting experience, but her incredible MMA fighting skills. Which explains the incredible all-star cast Soderbergh has including to support her including: Ewan McGreggor as her boss, Channig Tatum as a co-worker, Micheal Fassbender as a mystery contact, Micheal Douglas as a government official and Bill Paxton as her dad. But the dehumanization also says something interesting about female action heroes in general. There are plenty of exceptions but it seems that Hollywoods general idea of what to do with women in action movies is to write them as boys, but with more revealing costumes and less interesting personalities.

In Haywire, Kane's lack of personality is strangely the thing that makes her interesting. She reminded me of Val Kilmer in Spartan, who was also defined almost solely by his commitment to work. Late in the film, one character says that it would be a mistake to think of Kane as a woman. Indeed, it might be a little much to think of her as human. Her idea of relaxing is that she allows herself a glass of wine while she cleans her gun. If she ever had any humanity, she scarified it long ago in order to join the boys club of private sector espionage. Maybe all spies are like this to a degree, it would seem to come with the territory.

I like that the film doesn't cheat. It's as utterly dedicated to its vision of this dehumanized lifestyle as Kane is, and doesn't do anything to artificially soften her or sexualize her in any way. In fact, when the plot calls on for her to wear a dress, Kane looks unfathomably uncomfortable in it, as if it were some sort of alien concept to her. All she cares about is the fighting.

The fighting she does extremely well. Carano's skills are amazing to behold. I foresee that Carano may very well become a great action star, she certainly couldn't have a better showcase. She has a number of brutal, bone crunching fights. Each one is expertly and inventively choreographed, all achieving that tough balance of looking realistic wile remaining aesthetically beautiful. Soderbergh's laid back style lends itself well to capturing action. He doesn't try and sensationalize it with wild camera movements or overly choppy editing. Instead he respects the work that Carano and many of her co-stars put into performing all those great feats of athleticism.

Haywire is a fun, engaging 93 minutes, it delivers on the promise of seeing its star hit people very hard wile also serving up an interesting nugget about the masculation of women in action movies turning into complete dehumanization. But the idea feels vastly underexplored here. It's a rough sketch of a film begging to be filled in.

Grade: B+

Note: Haywire is currently streaming on Netflix Instant

PROMETHEUS

On the top of a waterfall there is a man. Well, not quite a man. He’s twelve feet tall, with skin like marble and muscular beyond belief. Above him, hovering in fog, is an ill defined disk like shape. The man-thing gives it an offering, and then as if the disk where retaliating against him, the man-thing disintegrates. Watching the scene, one gets the feeling that this offering and rejection is a common ritual. That the man-thing knew full well what was going to happen.  Not unreasonable considering the titular myth. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t know that he was about to be chosen for death. Why does God sometimes choose to reject his creatures? Why does a father strike a son, and why does the son still love him after?

After that opening scene, the film jumps forward an unknown number of millennium to the year 2089 where two archeologists, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), have discovered a series of cave paintings from all over the world that seem to suggest the possibility that life on Earth really began out there. They head out on an expedition to a small, incredibly distant moon the paintings point too. On it they they find a series of roads leading to a kind of dome. Inside the dome they find a room full with a colossal statue of a human head surrounded by hundreds of metal “vases.” As must happen in films like this, one of the vases is opened, witch contributes to a series of terrifying occurrences I dare not reveal.

Ridley Scott's Prometheus functions as a sort-of prequel to his first sci-fi film Alien, which spawned three sequels and by the time the franchise was spun off into the Alien vs. Predator films, the thing was as run into the ground as a franchise can get. It seems that part of Scott's agenda is to rescue the franchise he started. He does a respectable job of it too, with so many prequels (Terminator: Salvation, the most recent version of The Thing) that try ever so hard to connect the dots, it’s great to see that Prometheus mostly tries to be, not just it’s own film, but a deeper and more relevant film than any of it’s predecessors. Not that it doesn’t resemble them at all, it has a lot of the same structure as Alien, and some similar story beats play out, themes are repeated, and some of the repetitions are more welcome than others. For instance, you’ll never believe that the giant corporation has an agenda–yet a fifth time!

But where the film succeeds is in what it’s trying to do different. It’s interesting that the crew member most like the original films protagonist is Vickers (Charlize Theron), who’s basically one of the film’s villain’s. She's a company overseer for Wayland Corporation, the company that funded the expedition. She’s cold and by the book like Ripley and despite her puppet master role, she’s ultimately more frightened of what they might find than anyone else. The real story on the acting front is Michael Fassbender as David the android. There have always been robots in the Alien franchise, but David may go down as the most memorable. He’s played initially as a sort of Pinocchio (in one scene, he bleaches his hair to look more like his hero T.E. Lawrence), but as the film goes on his innocence seems more and more plastered on. Apart from the interesting character arc, Fassbender creates a character whose every movement is fascinating. Even watching him play basketball is somewhat hypnotic. Idris Elba is a lot of fun as the ship’s captain and even though the crew is a little too big to develop everyone well (I counted 10 crew members), even the monster food roles are well cast. They’re all good at what they're doing, but they don’t all need to be there. The film gets away with this a little because the ideas being wrestled with are so big.
 
As you can guess from the opening sequence, there is a lot of God stuff in this film. Pretty much every character has some sort of opinion or relationship that comments on the Creator-Creation relationship that the film is exploring. Shaw wears a cross, despite the fact that her discoveries would probably invalidate the vast majority of religions, but she still chooses to believe. Someone comments that the difference between God creating man and man creating an android like David is that man created David “just because he could.” And near the end, one character is reviled to have some father issues that seem ever so relevant to the theme of a passive God turning malevolent. Scott’s vision of spirituality is as complex and terrifying as any the monsters in the film.

As for the monsters, it should be noted that the creature from the original franchise doesn't show up here (for the best, too much baggage I think), what replaces them is perhaps not as immediately iconic, but interesting. Anyone who loved the franchise for its sexually charged, body horror imagery will not be disappointed by the snake monsters, the final shot, or the most disturbing surgery I’ve ever seen on film. It’s not as scary as the original Alien, but that’s a very high bar. The film gets close at times, but the film’s tension is undermined by some of those minor characters.

The film has a lot going on, I know that not all of it works, but it’s complex enough that I’m going to have to watch it a few times before I’m sure of what does and what doesn’t. The fact that it’s a film that I want to see several times says a lot in this age of disposable blockbusters. Scott is trying to make his version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and is totally not getting there, but the results are fascinating to watch and will serve as some great nightmare fuel.

Grade: B+

SHAME

Brandon isn't an average joe. He's got a good job, financial means, etc. But he also has a problem with self-control. He is on a daily, sometimes hourly basis overwhelmed with lust. He is a sex addict. When he can, he hires prostitutes. If there isn't enough time, he watches pornography, often at work. As it often is with addicts, when he get's an urge, nothing else matters. He's good at picking up women, but will probably never be close to one. Brandon is played by Michael Fassbender and is the subject of the new film Shame by Irish director Steve McQueen.

There is one woman who does want to be close to him, his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). After Brandon ignores a series of her calls, Sissy comes to stay with him. He can't exactly kick out his sister but her presence is inconvenient given his lifestyle. They act out at each other and engage in a kind of emotional combat. For instance, she starts to take an interest in Brandon's married boss. Brandon wants nothing to do with her, perhaps out of fear. She just needs to have someone, anyone in her life.

Since Fassbender's breakout role in McQueen's previous film Hunger, he's been seen as the second coming of Daniel Day-Lewis and he does everything to bolster that claim here. His performance is both raw and restrained. He is able to suggest deep pain without displaying any visible pyrotechnics. Mulligan is equally good. She displays an amazing fragility that is at times hard to watch. Particularly in a scene where she delivers an unbearably downbeat rendition of "New York, New York." McQueen's camera refuses to cut until long after the audience looks away. Shame is a very detached film, but intentionally so. After all Brandon is a detached man, almost hermetically sealed. It might have been a better film if it where less self-consciously aloof than it's main character, but it would also have been even harder to watch. Also it can be debated whether or not the end is over the top or not.

There's no way around it. Shame is not for the faint of heart. It's one of the more depressing films I've seen in a long time. It is a portrait of two people who have led, will continue to lead, very painful and lonely lives. Those who choose to endure it will not find a hopeful message at the end. There is no redemption here. It is a portrait of two souls cast into Hell and Hell is a cold place.

Grade: B