Archive | Film Matters

There may be no American actor who suffers as exquisitely as Jennifer Connelly does. From her turn as a rich-girl addict in “Requiem for a Dream” (2000) to her spate of tortured-wife roles (most recently in last year’s “Noah”), she’s Hollywood’s reigning queen of the Set Jaw, the Palpable Gulp, and, oh yes, the Evocative Single Tear. Heck, she’s even won an Academy Award for this. So it’s compelling to watch her turn her skill on its head in “Aloft,” in which she plays a healer who sorely lacks a bedside manner. Alas, it’s not compelling enough to sustain our interest for the full ninety-five minutes of this unredemptively grim drama. Put bluntly, I’m not sure anything is.

Connelly stars as Nana, the working-class single mother of falcon-loving little toughie Ivan (Zen McGrath) and sweet-tempered Gully (Winta McGrath; yes, they’re brothers in real life), who’s dying of an unnamed illness. In an effort to save his life, the three, along with Ivan’s pet falcon, trek to mysterious faith healer Newman (opera singer William Shimell) – though Nana suspects he’s a charlatan. As it turns out, he’s a boozing lecher and the real deal, and he teaches her that she channels “the gift” as well. But due to an unfortunate accident for which Nana blames Ivan but could just as easily blame herself, the family fractures anyway. Fast-forward two decades, and a grown Ivan (Cillian Murphy) is a professional falconer and certifiably grim husband and father now completely estranged from his mother, a world-renowned mystic. When a French documentarian (Mélanie Laurent) with ambiguous motives pays him a surprise visit, he joins her quest to track down his notoriously elusive mum in the Arctic Circle. Continue Reading →

“Tomorrowland” may be the first Disney film that’s difficult to encapsulate. I didn’t understand its premise until thirty minutes in, and I’m still not sure I totally get it. The irony is that it boasts the best trailer I’ve seen in years: As George Clooney rasps, “What if there’s a secret place where nothing is impossible?” a girl in a gray, industrial room picks up a button, instantly transports into a golden world of shimmering wheat fields and spiraling glass buildings, and then transports back without the slightest explanation. But while I wish all this intrigue led somewhere fantastic, as Gertrude Stein was wont to say, “There’s no there.”

In this era in which doom and gloom rule the box office, applause is still in order for the very existence of a utopian film – which, make no mistake, “Tomorrowland” is. It opens as scientist Frank Walker (Clooney) argues with an off-screen Casey (the girl in the trailer, played by Britt Robertson). “This is a story about the future, and the future can be scary,” he is intoning when she suggests he try a more upbeat approach. Cut to Frank as a kid (Thomas Robertson, whose resemblance to a young Clooney is uncanny) at 1964’s New York World’s Fair, where he is trying to make his fuel-powered jetpack work. Though he doesn’t pull that off, Athena, a freckle-faced, bright-eyed girl his age, slips him a pin that briefly sends him to that mysterious world of glass, wheat, and apparently gluten-tolerant denizens. It’s a glimpse that Frank, now a curmudgeonly hermit who is “100 percent positive” the world is ending within months, claims destroyed his life since it gave him false hope. Imagine a “Wizard of Oz” in which Dorothy is unceremoniously shuttled back to Kansas within the first five minutes, and you see where he’s coming from. Continue Reading →