Melancholia marks the last of a long hangover of reviews I had planned to cycle through before awards season, but here are a few more observations from holiday moviegoing:
Coriolanus is not the first Shakespeare play many would choose to direct, and Lord knows why Ralph Fiennes thought it made a good directorial debut... or for that matter, a great leading role. Morose, self-centered and self-pitying, Coriolanus does not make for an especially sympathetic role in a grim, dismal thing of a play. This is one of Shakespeare's later works, a war tragedy full of regrets and the pointlessness of killing, and Fiennes gives it an update (and slashed a good bit of the play to get it) to fit wartime Bosnia. Point taken, but the film is more of a cudgel than an entertainment. Fiennes, too, is a very internalized actor, and isn't well served by parts full of similar inner turmoil - his work is too inward and closed off. That said, it's a shame that Gerard Butler's sharply honed performance as the main rival to Coriolanus gets lost in the shuffle, and that Vanessa Redgrave, as always these days, delivers her usual fine work. Oversold as a potantial Oscar contender, this film probably fizzles in the art houses.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is a fine followup to the first, though overshadowed by BBC's modern gloss with Benedict Cumberbatch as a latter Day Sherlock. Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law reprise their curious, are they or aren't they relationship as Holmes and Watson, though Law is somehow even less present than the original. Downey inhabits the nervous tics and five moves ahead smarts of Holmes, but he's capable of better, and more. Director Guy Ritchie efficiently dispatches the non-working role of Rachel McAdams and replaces her with Noomi Rapace, but Rapace can't break the boysroom mentality Ritchie favors any better than McAdams did. Better scripted, with a more satisfying finish, Gamer of Shadows suggests that this tentpole can spin out further sequels, even if the underlying sentiments - Holmes as a bewildering lower class pugilist, the creepy mix of gay overtones and omnipresent homophobia - don't really work.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo could have been a dismal, creepy disaster, but David Fincher really digs in to find the heart of the material, producing a film every bit as satisfying as the first Swedish films were. Rooney Mara is shot for shot every bit as appealing and quirky as Noomi Rapace was as Lisbeth Salander, while Daniel Craig brings steely grace and good looks to Miki Blomkvist. Craig also shows no signs of abandoning his willingness to gratuitously strip, making Fincher's occasionally letchy camera work equally exploitive (and Craig, thankfully, is briefs, not boxers). Fincher does demonstrate the difference a lot of extra money can make - this film is visually richer, more dense, and fluid. While much of the casting is fine (who else could put Julian Sands essentially into a cameo?), Stellan Skarsgaard (the lone Swede in a major role, natch) really shines as Martin Vanger. The minor changes to the storyline don't affect much, and Fincher seems likely to do similarly sure work on the next two, a real sign that Fincher's matured considerably since grim exercises like Se7en. Mara, however, is probably more likely to win her Oscar for The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest. As it should be.
Ryan Gosling made waves through the fall in two films (Drive, The Ides of March), neither of which seemed to live up to their hype. Drive put an arty glosss on a story that looked a whole heck of a lot like a low budget Transporter, and while the supporting players offered some zip, Gosling's grim stoicism and guttural muttering does not a performance make. Gosling is similarly mumbly in Ides, playing a campaign manager gradually disillusioned by the dirty business of politics behind the scenes. Or at least, he should be, since this adapted play has nothing good to say about the process. However appealing Gosling's good looks, he's too enamored of a Brando-like Method of shuffling and mumbling his way through emotional parts, too full of tics and lacking enough resonance with genuine feeling. George Clooney does some nice work as the Obama-like, say anything candidate, but otherwise Ides is a familiar brew of Hollywood's distaste for political showmanship. And that's really just an arty way to say "cynical."
That's it for a while on the film reviews, methinks (except probably The Iron Lady or some such), now on to recapping the past year, and thinking about Awards season. Oscars here we come!
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