Mama's Got the Stuff

The opening of “Mama” is intriguing.  A car, its driver’s door open, is parked haphazardly in front of a well-kept suburban home where a little girl is choosing a toy — one for an ever so slightly younger child — to bring with her to school.  A gunshot is heard, but the child, Victoria, does not recognize it as that.  She has no foreboding.  We have.

(c) 2012, Toma 78/DeMilo Production Co.

Something is amiss.  Over these scenes we hear a radio report of financial failures, fraud, and murder.  That’s when we meet the totally stressed out father of the child.  He bundles his two daughters into the car and drives off, too fast, onto icy roads around the mountain and into the woods.  Without telling you something quite startling that occurs, I’ll move on and just say that each step in this story is fraught with dread.  From a wild ride then walk through the winter woods, two little girls cling to each other in an empty cabin, without an inkling of what’s going on.

The children in this film have been remarkably well cast.  In the opening scenes, Morgan McGarry is intelligently precious as young Victoria, wrapping her arms around baby sister Lilly, played by Sierra and Maya Dawe with the simplicity of the small children they are.  When the scene advances to five years later, Miss McGarry grows into the lovely Megan Charpentier as Victoria.  The baby-faced Isabelle Nélisse is an apt choice for Lilly, with the same drooping apple cheeks as the Dawes.  When we meet the girls again after five years alone in the woods, I wonder if young Victoria had been somehow computerized, so similar are the two different girls playing the child.  Miss Nélisse’s Lilly is terrifying in her feral nature, and Miss Charpentier’s Victoria heartbreaking as she struggles back to civilization.

Uncle Lucas, Annabel, Lilly and Victoria in MAMA.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jeffrey and then Lucas (the Daddy of the girls and then his brother Luke), does straightforward work, but the rollercoaster is ridden by Jessica Chastain as Lucas’ Goth rocker girlfriend Annabel, an unwilling maternal figure who warms to the role when they win custody of the children.  After the girls are discovered in the woods, they are treated by Dr. Dreyfuss (a solid performance by Daniel Kash), a doctor with as much imagination as academic knowledge.  The adults are very fine in this film, and Chastain continues to build her repertoire of characters, each one different from the last.  But it’s the children who are riveting.

Mama is good, but not great.  At times the underscoring was more obvious than ominous, though it never diminished the excellent work by director of photography Antonio Riestra.  Director Andrés Muschietti wrote the striking script with his sister Barbara Muschietti and Neil Cross.  There is no room for ambiguity in their story.  From the first ten minutes (not to mention the trailers and advertising) the ghost is corporeal.  Generally I find that less fun than the ambiguity of Robert Wise’s classic film The Haunting, but the influence of executive producer Guillermo del Toro was apparent in the stunning visualization of “Mama.”  More importantly, while Shirley Jackson’s heroine in The Haunting thought she sought death with a family of sorts, the anti-heroine of Mama sought family and life after death. 

The goal of a ghost story is to startle the audience, who should be overcome with shivers, shrieks, gasps, and screams. And some times that gasp could be in wonder at the utterly surprising scenes this film reveals.  Not your usual ghost story, Mama is sophisticated, visually polished, and worth your time if you like a good ghost story creatively visualized.  

~ Molly Matera, signing off.  Not likely to sleep well....

A Creaky Heiress

My friend Matthew said it best after a torturous first act: “Creaky, isn’t it?”  The play The Heiress is as rusty as the Tin Man, and that’s not just because it takes place (allegedly) in 1850.  The more I think about what went wrong and what went reasonably well in this production of The Heiress, the more it seems I must take the director Moisés Kaufman to task. 

By the end of the second act we were admiring of the play’s structure, in which the daughter becomes her father.  It unfortunately takes a long time for this production to get there.  The play (as well as the Oscar-winning screenplay based on it back in 1949, and a Burt Lancaster film I’m fond of, Trapeze) was written by the husband and wife playwriting team of Ruth and Augustus Goetz, and based on the 1880 novel Washington Square by Henry James.  Not a bad pedigree.  

The scenic design by Derek McLane created a performance space that can be appreciated from the steeply raked mezzanine as well as the orchestra, and it’s gorgeous as well as functional. The tastefully appointed living room of the Washington Square townhouse was lush, and atmospherically lit by David Lander with a discreet sound design by Leon Rothenberg.  Albert Wolsky’s costumes are period, and the actors wear them with grace and naturalness.  In fact one of the problems of the production may be the naturalistic style in which it’s played, when it’s clearly a creaky old melodrama.  Mr. Kaufman staged the play well, but his direction of his actors and the styles of the play were questionable.

In the first act, Jessica Chastain played Catherine Sloper, in an early scene with her Aunt Penniman (the stalwart Judith Ivey), as a shy but sweet and fairly normal young woman.  For the rest of the first act, she played her as Temple Grandin.   Her voice was more in line with her intentions in the second act, but I felt she has vocal work to do to return to the theatre — while not grating on film, her voice is unnatural onstage.  On the other hand, Ms. Chastain’s physical choices made sense.  She could show grace in a practiced if old-fashioned movement like a deep curtsy; she was appropriately less than graceful in her shyness and bouncing about, and later despair.  But whenever she spoke, I wanted to just read the script and cut her out of it. Where Ms. Chastain’s Catherine ends up in the second act is fabulous, but where did that woman come from?  Intellectually she came from the images of her held by the most important men in her life, her father and Morris Townsend.  But I didn’t see that progression in her, I just know it because the play’s structure showed me.  

David Strathairn, whom I will see do anything, struck me as more of the decade before World War I than the decade before the Civil War, and was a rather soft variation on Dr. Austin Sloper.  He was well mannered while insensitive.  His daughter has minimal social skills because he hasn’t many.  He only knows how to be polite — his kindness is restricted to his medical practice. 

Judith Ivey is (Aunt) Lavinia Penniman.  Dr. Sloper’s widowed sister, married for many years to a Reverend, is an absurd romantic with a practical streak, and Ms. Ivey’s portrayal is an utter delight.  It is she, rather than Catherine, that Mr. Townsend romances so very well, and her scenes with Morris are a pleasure — she knows what he’s doing but enjoys him too much to be concerned.  After all, every man has some flaw.  The audience would know neither Catherine nor Austin Sloper were it not for Lavinia’s incessant chatter that annoys them enough for them to show us their true colors.

My favorite performance is a tie between Ms. Ivey and Caitlin O’Connell, who played the doctor’s other sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Almond.  We meet “Aunt” Liz at the same time as we meet her daughter — Catherine’s cousin — Marian Almond (played with a warm and lively manner by Molly Camp), who is engaged to marry Arthur Townsend (a dull fellow well played by Kieran Campion).  Ms. O’Connell’s Liz is warm, clever, practical, yet still shares some of her giggly sister Lavinia’s everlasting hope.  

The Almonds bring along Arthur’s cousin several times removed, Morris Townsend, just back from Europe where he learned to love fine things.  The Sloper house is fine in itself and filled with beautiful things, consumable and not.  This handsome young man was played by Dan Stevens, who sounded like good casting for the role.  However, he had better chemistry with Ms. Ivey than with Ms. Chastain, so at no time could the audience feel this was a romance thwarted.  We always knew Dr. Sloper was right about that fellow.  While Mr. Stevens’ work on Downton Abbey lead us to believe he could handle old-fashioned, formal language, Morris Townsend’s words sounded stiff.  

Virginia Kull did good work as Maria, the Slopers’ loyal maid, with true affection for the members of the household she serves.  We didn’t see Ben Livingston, we just heard him as the voice of the coachman from across the square; yet we appreciated his fine work as we heard his despair when his needs were not met.  

Dee Nelson brought hope onto the stage then left it behind as Morris’ widowed sister, Mrs. Montgomery.  Her affection for her brother is not blind, and while she starts the scene with anticipation of a good match for him, she sees the bleaker future when she meets Catherine.  

This scene in particular makes Dr. Sloper seem much crueler than Mr. Strathairn plays him.  Clearly Mr. Strathairn sees Dr. Sloper as a man who cannot be less than honest, although he is unfailingly polite.  What he sees as flaws in his daughter are the shields she has created to protect herself from his cold gaze.  

The problems of this production are fourfold. 

1. The play creaks with stiff language despite a solid structure.  Melodrama doesn’t play awfully well in this century, especially when more than half the cast are playing it naturalistically.
2. Dr. Sloper was rather too soft.
3. Ms. Chastain ‘s choices, while consistent, seemed to imply that Catherine Sloper’s personality issues were mental instead of emotional, so her transformation in the second act did not follow.
4. There was no chemistry between Ms. Chastain’s Catherine Sloper and Mr. Stevens’ Morris Townsend.  There can be no heartbreak — for Catherine alone, of course — without love.

This The Heiress had far more laughs and chuckles than I would have expected.  I enjoyed several performances and recognized the quality of the play, but wondered what the production with Cherry Jones several years ago might have looked like.

~ Molly Matera, signing off and sighing in disappointment.

Debt Paid

“The Debt” is an unglamorous thriller that’s not about car chases or gunfights, or unlikely leaps from one building to another.  There are guns, there’s a van, and there’s an attempt to escape from East Berlin, but “The Debt” goes deeper into its characters, imprisoning the four main characters inside an East Berlin apartment and inside their own tortured lives. 

The prey:  In the winter of 1965-66, three Mossad agents are under cover in East Berlin to extract a Nazi war criminal, the “Surgeon of Birkenau,” and return him to Israel for trial.  The Nazi doctor is now “Dr. Bernhardt,” a kindly old obstetrician with a practice in East Berlin.  Jesper Christensen gives a chilling performance as the Nazi monster who can appear benevolent, charming, and lethal inside seconds. 

Jesper Christensen as the Surgeon of Birkenau

 The searchers:

• Stephan Gold (played by Marton Csokas in 1966, then Tom Wilkinson in 1997), to put it very simply, wants revenge and glory.  He is a political animal, and an angry one.  His rage is barely contained in his younger days, and well-directed by experience as he ages.  Stephan’s furious piano playing in the East Berlin apartment was particularly frightening.  Csokas is the only one of the primary actors with whom I’m unfamiliar, and while I cannot yet pronounce his name, I won’t forget it. 
• David Peretz (Sam Worthington in 1966, Ciaran Hinds in 1997) wants justice, and he wants it publicly:  The world must know.  His sole purpose is the mission.  He seems to live on despair as if he was doomed from birth just for surviving. Worthington’s face is bland, childlike, often immobile.  David keeps a mask in place as long as he can.  Only two things break through his discipline — the Surgeon of Birkenau and Rachel Singer. 
• Rachel Singer (Jessica Chastain in 1966, Helen Mirren in 1997) may just want to be worthy of having survived.  She had been a translator, and the East Berlin mission is her first time in the field.  She is determined, but not yet as hardened as Stephan and not as fiercely stoic as David.  Soon after the mission, her life revolves around keeping the truth of the mission a secret, perhaps to protect herself, Stephan, and David as much as daughter Sara.

Chastain, Csokas, Worthington as Rachel, Stephan, and David in 1966.

The film goes back and forth between the mission in 1965-66 and its aftermath thirty years later.  The symmetries between Tom Wilkinson and Martin Csokas as Stephan as well as Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain as Rachel are remarkable. 

The older Stephan is as well written and acted as the younger — an angry young man grown up, ambitious, arrogant, manipulative, not one to deny himself the objects of his lust or to restrain his fury.  Mirren’s Rachel is Chastain grown much stronger after thirty years of building a persona for the world to see.  Accustomed to being in the public eye, only David can force Rachel to reflect.  Worthington’s David is less clear, and Ciaran Hinds as David thirty years later seems to be out of sync with the other actors.  He has enormous sad eyes, but his character’s actions speak much louder than his words.  The character David travels far in his quest for redemption, leaving Rachel to follow his path to its end.  I know this, yet it seems to me David was more effective offscreen than either Worthington or Hinds were onscreen.  In the 1997 story, David reappears like a revenant, unfulfilled in his mission for the world to know the truth, both about the Surgeon of Birkenau, and about 1966.

Excellent lighting helps to differentiate the locations and times of the film:  1966 East Berlin was dingy, wet and cold.  More rain entered the apartment than light.  Once back in Israel, Tel Aviv was bright, wide open, hot with a fresh wind.  The film makes powerful use of repetition in small details of scenes; in its lighting design ranging from grays to blacks to bright whites; in sudden changes from what we’d seen before and therefore anticipated. 

Helen Mirren as Rachel in 1997.

“The Debt” is based on an Israeli film, “Ha-Hov” written by Assaf Bernstein and Ido Rosenblum, directed by the former. 

Matthew Vaughn & Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan have crafted a screenplay for “The Debt” that is taut and disturbing.  Director John Madden does a fabulous job, filling the film with strained nerves, gasps, sharp turns, yet still providing food for thought.  Thomas Newman’s score adds to the suspense, as does Alexander Berner’s editing and Ben Davis’ cinematography.  Excellent fight choreography by Peter Pedrero presents very real people sweating, grunting, panting with the extraordinary effort to kill, capture, or just survive. 

“The Debt” has many white-knuckle scenes which do not dissipate like mist after the movie ends.  This is an intelligent thriller, its violence intimate and terrifying, its humanity sadly fragile.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, but not shutting off the light.  The world is far too scary for that.

The Tree of Life is not your typical summer movie

The advertisements for Terrence Malick’s new film,“The Tree of Life,” smacked of “Art” with a capital “A,” which is not encouragement for me to see a film.  In the past, I’ve felt there was something amiss if I didn’t enjoy “Art” films, that messages that the filmmaker had put out there in plain sight went right over my head.  So it was with some apprehension that I joined a small audience for a late afternoon showing.  Everyone was quiet — it felt respectful, like the hush of people who were chatting a moment ago, but now they’re in church.  Throughout the film’s 139 minutes, we were all careful about making noise with our popcorn or slurping our soda.  When it was over, I sat watching the credits, but before the door closed on a departing woman I heard her say, “What was that?  I mean it was beautiful, but what was it?”  Not a wayward response, but probably not Mr. Malick’s ideal.

Terrence Malick wrote and directed “The Tree of Life,” which is more beautiful than I can comprehend.  It not only gives us a family, a truthful, flawed, confused, questing family, living in the 1950s and 1960s south; it goes beyond human history into the birth of the universe.  To ask questions, to ask why, apparently requires Mr. Malick to go back to the beginning of time, and show us where the world came from, how life started, how we got here.  Although I may not understand why, I’m rather glad, since what Mr. Malick has given us is an extraordinary combination of images, light and dark, movement and sound, to which he added ordinary yet interesting human beings.  The history of the world, the history of a family.  All presumably to answer whispered questions of faith. 

Laramie Eppler, Jessica Chastain, and Hunter McCracken.  (c) 2011 Fox Searchlight/Merie Wallace

In the opening we meet Jessica Chastain playing Mrs. O’Brien as she receives a telegram at the front door of her upscale suburban house.  We are immediately aware someone has died and something inside Mrs. O’Brien has therefore broken.  She telephones someone, it is Brad Pitt as Mr. O’Brien, and he too breaks down, differently.  In an entirely separate time and place of glittering tall buildings we see Sean Penn.  I had no idea who he was.  I had no idea who started whispering.  Sometimes I thought it was Mrs. O’Brien, who seemed to be the person of faith.  Other times I assumed it was one of the three O’Brien sons.  The whispering goes on throughout the film, starting with wondering: Since the son of the O’Briens has always been in the hands of God, why is that son dead?  The whispering voice tells us that it is his brother who has died at the age of 19.  We gradually realize which of these three boys died young and brought about this contemplation, but nothing is free in this film.

The O’Brien family’s story is touching, powerfully written, performed and photographed.  The evocation of 1950s suburban Texas is lulling as a summer breeze — you can smell the dusty streets, the dew, you marvel at how simple and pretty everything was.  And then the trucks spraying DDT drive through the idyllic neighborhood, and children play in it.  Appearances can be deceiving.  The O’Briens are typical and appear happy, but there is dissension, there are moments of fear, moments of hatred, moments of withdrawal.  On the other hand, there were moments when I felt I had to work too hard to understand what was going on, when we were, where we were, who we were.  Scenes of family life — contentment and discord — are mixed with whispered biblical references, simple scenes of nature contrasted with the grandeur of spiral swirls of stained glass. 

Brad Pitt does gorgeous work as Mr. O’Brien, the dad.  This is a strong and sensitive performance of a disappointed man — from a young man marveling at the birth of his son, aging as he tries to teach his children, tries to excel, tries to meet his own expectations, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.  His own crises come, bringing harsh impact to his family, yet still he keeps our sympathy.  Hunter McCracken was intense and heartbreakingly real as young Jack in the throes of adolescence.  We felt his pain, we were furious with him, we loved him.  Jessica Chastain is a revelation as Mrs. O’Brien, living this woman’s life from early joys through years of conflict to tragedy.  The two younger sons were played sweetly by Laramie Eppler as the middle son, R.L., always benevolent, patient with his elder brother, as if he understood the displacement his birth caused even while a young child; Tye Sheridan played the youngest son Steve with a gentleness, fragility on some occasions, exuberance in others.  All three boys were totally believable — as was the toddler playing the young Jack discovering, when R.L. is born, a world in which he is no longer its center.  Fiona Shaw drops in a few times as “Grandmother” — whose mother she is was unclear, but I’d guess she was Mr. O’Brien’s mother.  Mr. Malick’s direction of the children in particular was marvelous, the several young boys who played the three O’Brien sons, as well as Jack’s friends in the neighborhood.  The scenes of those difficult years, of Jack’s rebellion, Jack’s uncertainty, Jack’s hating of what he was doing despite the need to do it, these were revelatory scenes of coming of age.  I believe Sean Penn as the grown-up eldest son, Jack, performed a function of tying the film together from beginning to end, but I freely admit I did not understand the ending, the where, the when, the how, who’s dead, who’s alive.  I just didn’t know for certain.  I don’t necessarily need to know to enjoy the film, but I expect that will be a frustration for many. 

The cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki is a triumph — it is compelling, moving, beautiful, and finally edited with respect and rhythm by the five-man editing team credited:  Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, and Mark Yoshikawa.  Additionally, the scoring by Alexandre Desplat was sometimes glorious, sometimes sweet, always right on.

Don’t have a coffee before you go, don’t have a drink.  Just go into the darkness and accept whatever comes.  And don’t ask me what happens at the end.  I don’t know what Mr. Malick wanted me to hear, to see, to feel.  No matter — I may have missed many of his points, but I was thoroughly involved in and intrigued by the lives of the O’Briens, as well as the creation of the world, which was terrifying and exhilarating.  Visually transcendent and augmented with deep work done by Brad Pitt and Hunter McCracken and the happy introduction (at least to me) of the radiant Jessica Chastain, this film is well worth your time.  I’m glad I listened to my friends and went to see it despite my forebodings that it might be Art.  Which, by the way, it is.

~ Molly Matera, signing off …. In case you wondered, this is not your typical summer movie….