historical

LBJ: a Cliff Notes portrait of LBJ, traced through three relationships

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Woody Harrelson in LBJ

Woody Harrelson captures the essence of Lyndon B. Johnson in Rob Reiner’s LBJ.  The best thing about this movie is the main character – probably the most complex and self-contradictory in American history.

LBJ was amazingly talented, aspirational, mean, charming, vulgar and surprisingly needy. LBJ was so masterful and tough and powerful, yet extremely thin-skinned for a politician.  His eternal grasping seems rooted in personal desperation.  LBJ had the need to dominate others and get everything he wants all of the time, and still needed to be loved (which is impossible when you are running over everyone else).

With all of his personal flaws, no American Presidents (except maybe Lincoln and FDR) have been able to roll up a record of legislative accomplishments in two short years to match the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start.  Yes, this was a guy who was able to end legal racial segregation and systemic repression of voting rights and to bring medical security to the elderly and the poor.  (And then be capable of an equally huge policy mistake – the escalation of the Vietnam War.)

How do you tell the story of a larger-than-life character in only 90 minutes?  LBJ focuses on an eight-year period of LBJ’s career.  We first see him in 1956 as Senate Majority Leader, at his most energetic, masterful and powerful.  We then see him in his period of frustration and weakness as Vice-President.  The JFK assassination makes him President, and the film concludes after the enactment of Civil Rights Act in June 1964.

LBJ shows us the many sides of LBJ by tracing three of his personal relationships:

  • Georgia Senator Richard Russell (Richard Jenkins), the leader of Southern segregationists and one of LBJ’s most important mentors.  LBJ rose to power with Russell’s guidance and loyalty, but LBJ, to find his own place in history, needed to destroy everything Russell stood for.
  • Lady Bird Johnson (a superb Jennifer Jason Leigh), the only person who could handle the vulnerable, needy, whiny, disconsolate LBJ.
  • LBJ’s nemesis Robert F. Kennedy (Michael Stahl-David). Because RFK was a martyr, the public tends to forget about his nasty and “ruthless” side, which did exist.  LBJ and RFK took an instant dislike to each other in the early 1950s, a situation which built into a profound and fundamental mutual hatred.
  • Bill Pullman plays Senator Ralph Yarborough, a very minor character in history, but one who serves here as a composite for liberal politicians and for those bullied by LBJ.

The highlights of LBJ are found in that fateful week in November 1963.  At Dallas’ Love Field, it’s clear that JFK’s star power has eclipsed the weakened and resentful LBJ even in Texas.  Then we see LBJ just after the assassination, taking command and plunging into action, taking command and knowing exactly what to do when everyone else was paralyzed by shock.

The history in LBJ is very sound.  I’ve read and re-read the over three thousand pages of Robert Caro’s four-volume biography of Johnson.  Much of LBJ’s dialogue is word-for-word historically correct; I’ve even heard the real LBJ himself utter these words on phone calls that he taped himself.

Woody Harrelson is excellent, capturing both the human tornado and the vulnerable sides of LBJ.  The fine actors Randy Quaid, Rip Torn, Michael Gambon, James Cromwell, Liev Schreiber and Tom Wilkinson have all had their cracks at playing LBJ on the screen.  Woody is significantly better than all of those guys, but I still prefer Bryan Cranston’s LBJ in All the Way.

Yes, it’s a Cliff Notes version, but LBJ, with its top rate performances by Woody Harrelson and Jennifer Jason Leigh, is a fine historical introduction and pretty entertaining, too.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Woody Harrelson in LBJ

MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE: American history’s greatest mystery with the excitement sucked out

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Liam Neeson in MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE

In the sagging docudrama Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, Liam Neeson plays the title character – the man at the center of modern American history’s most compelling mystery. The Washington Post source known as Deep Throat was responsible for keeping the Watergate scandal alive until it dethroned Richard Nixon from the presidency. Deep Throat’s identity remained secret for thirty years. It turned out to be Mark Felt, the number two official at the FBI.

Think about it – this was one of the most compelling people in America for thirty years. Deep Throat was clearly one of a handful of men so well-positioned at the center of government power that we would know him, but no one could finger him. The intrigue was brilliantly captured in All the President’s Men, in which Hal Holbrook played Deep Throat.

In Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, Neeson plays Felt as a stolid, principled and crafty bureaucratic survivor. Somehow the character just isn’t that personally interesting. The story attempts to flesh him out with a troubled wife (Diane Lane, always superb, even in this thankless role) and a runaway hippie daughter.

As we watch Mark Felt, it gradually becomes apparent that this is a one-note character in a one-note movie. The leaden, pseudo-dramatic soundtrack doesn’t help. Mark Felt also fumbles the chance to get some spark out of Watergate icons John Dean, John Erlichman and John Mitchell. The real-life mystery is so much more interesting than this movie. The movie may be irresistible to Watergate buffs like me, but probably should be resisted.

Mark Felt was directed by Peter Landesman, who recently made the near-masterpiece Parkland. Parkland explores the JFK assassination from the viewpoints of the secondary participants. Mark Felt, however, is not a work of directorial mastery.

Marton Csokas is excellent as weak-willed and overmatched FBI Director L. Patrick Gray.  Nixon handpicked Gray to be his stooge only to leave Gray, as henchman John Erlichman indelibly described, to “twist slowly, slowly in the wind”.

In Loving, Csokas, with pitiless, piercing eyes, was remarkably effective as the Virginia sheriff dead set on enforcing Virginia’s racist statute in the most personally intrusive way. Too often, actors seem to be impersonating Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night when they play racist Southern sheriffs, but Csokas brought originality to that performance.  Here Csokas is able to portray a man of ability and ambition, but not spine.

The great but personally turbulent actor Tom Sizemore showcases his talent once again in the film’s most showy role, a bitter and cynic relic of the FBI’s most sordid skullduggery.  Sizemore brings a magnetic cocktail of menace and humor to the role. Besides Diane Lane, the always welcome Bruce Greenwood and Eddie Marsan show up in minor roles.

Perhaps needless to say, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House has made my list of Longest Movie Title.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE LOST CITY OF Z – the historical adventure epic revived

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Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z photo courtesy of SFFILM
Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z
photo courtesy of SFFILM

In auteur James Gray’s sweeping turn of the 20th Century epic The Lost City of Z, a stiff-upper-lip type British military officer becomes the first European to probe into the deepest heart of unmapped Amazonia. Finding his way through the lush jungles, braving encounters with sometimes cannibalistic indigenous warriors, he becomes obsessed with finding the lost city of an ancient civilization. I know this sounds like Indiana Jones, but it’s based on the real life of Percy Fawcett as chronicled in the recent book Lost City of Z by David Grann.

The Lost City of Z opens tomorrow in Bay Area theaters. I saw The Lost City of Z at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) at a screening with director James Gray. I’ll be sharing some snippets from Gray’s Q & A on Sunday.

The Lost City of Z begins with an Edwardian stag hunt through the verdant Irish countryside, complete with horses spilling riders. This scene is gorgeous, but its point is to introduce the young British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) as a man of unusual resourcefulness, talent and, above all, drive. Despite his abilities, he has been chaffing at the unattractive assignments that have precluded his career advancement. In the snobby Edwardian military, he has been in disfavor because his dissolute father had stained the family name. One of Fawcett’s commanders says, “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors”.

That yearning to earn the recognition that he believes he merits – and to attain the accomplishments of a Great Man – is the core of this character-driven movie. Fawcett resists yet another assignment away from the career-making action, a mapping expedition designed to have a minor diplomatic payoff. But it takes him on a spectacular Amazon exploration that brings him celebrity – and backing for more high-profile expeditions. Fawcett was surfing the zeitgeist in the age of his contemporaries Roald Amundsen (South Pole), Robert Peary (North Pole) and Howard Carter (King Tut).

In that first expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced that he can find the magnificent city of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon, a city he calls Z (which is pronounced as the British “Zed”). The Lost City of Z takes us through two more Amazonian expeditions, sandwiched around Fawcett’s WW I service in the hellish Battle of the Somme.
That final expedition ends mysteriously – and not well.

No one knows for sure what happened to Fawcett. In The Lost City of Z, Gray leads us toward the most likely conclusion, the one embraced by Grann’s book. If you’re interested in the decades of speculation about Fawcett’s fate, there’s a good outline on Percy Fawcett’s Wikipedia page.

Fawcett comes with his own Victorian upper class prejudices, but he has the capacity to set those aside for a post-Darwin open-mindedness. Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are independent of Fawcett; Gray shows them living their lives in a world that Fawcett has found, not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s quest. Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film.

As Percy Fawcett, with his oft-manic obsession and fame-seeking that color his scientific curiosity and his old-fashioned Dudley Do-Right values, Charlie Hunnam gives a tremendous, perhaps carer breakthrough, performance. He’s been a promising actor in Sons of Anarchy and the overlooked thriller Deadfall) (and such a good actor that I never dreamed that he’s really British). Hunnam will next star as the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise.

Robert Pattinson is unexpectedly perfect as Fawcett’s travel buddy Henry Costin. With his Twilight dreaminess hidden behind a Smith Brothers beard, Pattinson projects a lean manliness. It’s probably his best performance.

Sienna Miller shines as Fawcett’s proto-feminist wife Nina. I first noticed Miller (and Daniel Craig) in the underrated neo-noir thriller 2004 Layer Cake. Now Miller is still only 35 years old and has delivered other fine recent performances in Foxcatcher, American Sniper and (in an especially delicious role) High-Rise.

Director James Gray (The Yard, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) is a favorite of cinephiles and of other filmmakers, but regular audiences don’t turn out for his movies. That may change with The Lost City of Z, a remarkably beautiful film that Gray shot, bucking the trend to digital, in 35 mm. The jungle scenes were filmed in a national park in Columbia. The cinemeatographer is the Oscar-nominated Darius Khondji. Khondji shot The Immigrant for Gray and has been the DP of choice for David Fincher (Se7en) Alan Parker (Evita), Michael Haneke (Amour), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris). Along with the stag hunt and the voyages up and down the jungle rivers, there is also a breathtakingly beautiful ballroom scene and a gaspingly surreal nighttime discovery of a rubber plantation’s opera house deep in the jungle.

There have been other Lost Expedition movies, most famously Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z shares an obsession, a quest and a mysterious tragic end with those films, but it stands apart with its exploration of the motivation of a real life character and the authenticity of Gray’s depiction of the indigenous people.

Movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. With The Lost City of Z, James Gray loses both the racism and the irony, and brings us brings a straight-ahead exploration tale.

The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a beautiful and thoughtful film. The Lost City of Z is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Also see my notes from the director James Gray’s Q & A at the San Francisco International Film Festival.[And here are some completely random tidbits. There’s a cameo by Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero. The closing credits recognize the “animal weath coordinator” and the “data wrangler”.]

DUNKIRK: personal, spectacular and thrilling

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Fionn Whitehead in DUNKIRK

In Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan has written and directed a gripping historical thriller, somehow both personal and vast.  It’s a remarkable achievement of both storytelling and filmmaking.  Nolan chooses to tell us the story through the lenses of a few minor participants without losing any of the epic sweep of the event.

Dunkirk is the story of one of World War II’s most pivotal events.  It’s May, 1940 – over a year before Hitler invaded Russia and over a year-and-a-half before the US entered the war. German forces have swept across Europe and now control the entire continent.  It’s very thinkable that Germany will invade Britain.  Germany is winning, and it’s more plausible than not that Germany will win the war.

The Germans have trapped a British/French army of 400,000 on a beach in France, certain to be captured or annihilated.  The British navy has the capacity to evacuate 40,000 of them in the best case.  But the best case can’t be operationalized because, when the British load 800 soldiers on a destroyer, German bombers and submarines sink it.  So the British resort to a desperate measure by enlisting 700 small civilian boats – fishing boats, pleasure craft, trawlers, ferries and tugs – to cross the English Channel and pick up the soldiers from an active battle zone.  Amazingly, it worked and 340,000 of the troops were rescued, saving them to deter a German invasion of Britain.

Nolan shows us every conceivable peril faced by the rescuers and the rescued, from aerial bombardment to submarine attack. He starts us following a couple of ordinary infantrymen (Fionn Whiteheand and Aneurin Barnard). When they find a wounded man on the beach, they look at each other wordlessly, toss him on a stretcher take off at the full run for a waiting naval vessel; it’s not spelled out, but they aren’t being selfless – they are trying to jump the line to the ship and get evacuated before hundreds of thousands of other men. They learn that getting off the beach isn’t that easy. Soon, Nolan weaves in a determined civilian heading his tiny boat across the English Channel (the great actor Mark Rylance) and the RAF fighter pilots (the commander played by Tom Hardy) who try to protect the beaches and the evacuation vessels. It’s a race against time for each of the characters as they navigate hazard after hazard, and the experience throbs with intensity

Dunkirk is very historically accurate, although the story has been compressed to a couple of days, and the actual evacuation took over a week. Nolan jumbles his timelines, and sometimes we are jarred by moving from daytime in one story thread to nighttime in another. But the threads eventually converge.

In particular, the depiction of aerial warfare is extraordinary, including what it must have been like inside a cockpit that is hit by enemy fire. Dunkirk contains probably the best ever movie shot of a plane ditching in the ocean. We see what it must have been like to be on a ship sunk by submarine torpedo (hint: much less romantic than Titanic‘s sinking). The Germans employed a Stuka dive bomber, which was outfitted with sirens to terrify its victims on the ground or sea; Dunkirk actually replicates the scream of the Stuka’s sirens very convincingly.

Rylance is superb and the rest of the cast does very well, including Cillian Murphy as a shell-shocked soldier and Kenneth Branagh as an embattled naval commander.

Near the end of Dunkirk, a fighter plane runs out of fuel and glides across the beachfront in one of the most beautiful series of shots in recent cinema.

Dunkirk is that rare breed – a white knuckler with relateable characters and historical integrity. It’s one of the very best films of 2017.

BEN-GURION, EPILOGUE: in his own words, Israel’s founding leader reflects

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Ben-Gurion, Epilogue

In Ben-Gurion, Epilogue, footage from a recently discovered video interview allows us to hear from Israel’s founding leader in his own words. In 1968, David Ben-Gurion was 82 years old and had been retired from public office for five years. Living on a remote kibbutz in the Negev Desert, he still had a lot to say.

Ben-Gurion was interviewed for seven hours over several days, but the video was lost until recently. First the images were found, which triggered a search for the sound. The result is Ben-Gurion, Epilogue, with the seven hours distilled down to one hour. Director Yariv Moser gets out of the way and lets Ben-Gurion speak for himself. The result is an important document of 20th Century history.

Not a guy who naturally “holds forth”, Ben-Gurion is prodded into revealing his inside view of his controversial acceptance of German reparations.  We also get his take on the Zionist movement (not exactly what you’d expect) and, of course the Big Question: land for peace.  There are also telling insights into his marriage.

You can find a separate 24-minute “making of” documentary on YouTube.

Ben-Gurion, Epilogue will screen at the SFJFF:

  • Cinearts (Palo Alto), Sunday, July 23 Noon
  • Castro (San Francisco), Saturday, July 29 1:45 PM
  • Albany Twin (Albany), Sunday, July 30 Noon.

The SFJFF runs from July 20 through August 6 at theaters in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, San Rafael and Oakland. You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

DVD/Stream of the Week: HACKSAW RIDGE – unimaginable bravery disconnected from acts of violence

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Andrew Garfield in HACKSAW RIDGE
Andrew Garfield in HACKSAW RIDGE

My video pick for Memorial Day Week is Mel Gibson’s powerful Hacksaw Ridge.  Just before the 2017 Oscars, The Wife and I finally got around to watching Hacksaw Ridge, which had been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Before you see this movie, you need to know that it’s a true story – otherwise you wouldn’t believe it. It’s the story of American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss who single-handedly rescued 75 fellow soldiers at the Battle of Okinawa and became the first Conscientious Objector in American history to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Hacksaw Ridge shows Doss (Andrew Garfield) growing up in rural Virginia as a devout Seventh Day Adventist.  After Pearl Harbor, Doss feels compelled to serve his country but, as a religious pacifist, he can’t sign up for combat.  So he enlists as a conscientious objector to become a combat medic.  He’s thrown into a combat unit for training and endures bullying from both his officers and his fellow troops.

Doss and his unit are ordered into the Battle of Okinawa. They must climb a 350-foot cliff on cargo netting,   The Americans can carry up radios, bazookas, machine guns and flamethrowers but not anything heavier than that.   The Japanese are not contesting the climb up because they have set up a killing field on the ridge-top, which they have fortified with concrete pill-boxes.  The Japanese have also constructed a network of tunnels, in which they can wait out the US naval artillery bombardments.

It’s a blood bath.  Historically, this was an extraordinarily brutal battle – even by War in the Pacific standards.  And so director Mel Gibson, who never shies away from violence, graphically depicts that violence.  Of course, being Mel, he can’t resist a few completely gratuitous moments, including a hara-kiri and the very cool-looking slo-mo ejection of casings from an automatic weapon.  But, generally, the movie violence is proportionate to the real-life violence.

Nevertheless, the real focus is on the bravery of the US troops, of which Doss’ is extraordinary.  Their and his courage to climb the cliff a SECOND time – after learning what it is like on top –  is unimaginable.

Andrew Garfield is superb as Doss, playing him with a goofy and infectious grin, whose niceness and sweetness masks formidable strong will.  I’ve never see him as Spider-Man, but Garfield’s work in Red Riding, The Social Network, 99 Homes and now Hacksaw Ridge has been very impressive.

There isn’t a bad, or even mediocre performance in Hacksaw Ridge.  You can’t tell that Aussies Teresa Palmer, Hugo Weaving and Rachel Griffiths (Brenda in Six Feet Under) aren’t from Blue Ridge Virginia.  Sam Worthington and Vince Vaughn are especially good as Doss’ commanders.

I’ve been a fan of Hugo Weaving since he so compellingly played a blind man in the 1991 Proof (also our first look at a very young Russell Crowe). Since then, Weaving has earned iconic roles in the Matrix movies and V for Vendetta and is usually the most interesting performer in big budget movies.  Here Weaving plays Doss’ father, not just as the mean drunk who terrorizes his family, but as a vet still reeling from the PTSD of his own WWI combat experience.

Hacksaw Ridge deservedly won Oscars for both film editing and sound mixing. Gibson’s directing is excellent, as is the work of cinematographer Simon Duggan (who shot Baz Luhrman’s otherwise dreadful but great-looking The Great Gatsby).

Make sure that you watch through the epilogue and closing credits to see and hear the real life folks portrayed in the film.

You can rent Hacksaw Ridge on DVD from Netflix and Redbox or stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play and DirecTV.

[SPOILER ALERT: I have also read on the Internet about something that is NOT in the movie. Reportedly, when Doss was being evacuated by stretcher after being wounded by the grenade, he ROLLED OFF the stretcher when he passed another wounded soldier and demanded that the stretcher bearers take the other guy. Doss then CRAWLED the final 300 yards to the cargo netting to rescue himself. Again reportedly, Mel Gibson kept this out of the movie because he thought the audience just couldn’t be expected to believe that it really happened.]

DVD/Stream of the Week: HIDDEN FIGURES – Woman Power, Black Power, Brain Power

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Taraji P. Henson in HIDDEN FIGURES
Taraji P. Henson in HIDDEN FIGURES

Hidden Figures tells the hitherto generally unknown story of some African-American women whose math wizardry was key to the success of the US space program in the early 1960s. It’s pretty rare that someone can make a historical movie about something I had never heard of, but here we are. The screenplay is based on real events, and we see the images of the real thee women at the end of the movie. It’s a good story.

I had forgotten that engineers used to do even the complicated calculations by hand. Indeed, lots of aeronautical engineering calculations were needed to send the first NASA astronauts into space, and this was before the government used mainframe computers, let alone handheld calculators. So the answer was to have, for every room of (all male) engineers, a room full of women with the job title of “Computer” to do and check the math problems.

Hidden Figures’ heroines, including an authentic math prodigy and pioneer in computer programming, are perfectly played by Taraji P. Henson, Olivia Spencer and Janelle Monae (fresh from another acting triumph this fall in Moonlight). Remember that these women had to overcome the automatic sexism of the Mad Men era. On top of that, they were black women working in still-segregated Virginia. And, just to make things even more difficult, they were working for engineers, too!

The entire cast is excellent, especially Mahershala Ali (hunky and compelling yet again), Kevin Costner and Jim Parsons as a particular officious and sexist foil.

We see one of the first massive, room-filling but delicate IBM mainframe computers. That, calling people “computers” and the use of the programming language FORTRAN all drew chuckles from the Silicon Valley audience at my screening.

Hidden Figures does an especially fine job in depicting the tension during John Glenn’s communications blackout. Glenn’s space capsule had a problem with the heat shield. When it re-entered the atmosphere, there was a period of a few minutes when Glenn’s communications went dead. During this time (and I remember it well), everyone on the planet was watching on TV and no one knew whether the craft and Glenn were being consumed by a fireball or on the way to a successful splashdown. Those moments were unbearable.

Hidden Figures is eminently watchable, but not a perfect movie. There are some obviously over-dramatized and over-simplified segments. I thought I heard a character – in this movie about math whizzes – refer to “an altitude of 116 miles per hour” (which should be either an altitude of 116 miles or a velocity of 116 miles per hour). And John Glenn has hair even though, in real life, he was balding at the time (perform a Google Image search for “john glenn mercury 7” if you want to see for yourself).

But those flaws don’t detract from the core story, which is compelling. The audience at my screening burst into applause, which doesn’t happen that often. Hidden Figures is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE FOUNDER – moneygrubbing visionary

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Michael Keaton in THE FOUNDER
Michael Keaton in THE FOUNDER

In the enjoyably addictive The Founder, Michael Keaton brings alive Ray Kroc, the man who created the global corporate superpower that is McDonald’s. It’s both a vivid portrait of a particular change-maker and a cold-eyed study of exactly what capitalism really rewards.

Speaking of capitalism, it’s hard to imagine a truer believer than Ray Kroc, not even Willy Loman. When we meet Kroc, he is grinding through small town America selling milkshake mixers none too successfully. Each night he retires to yet another dingy motel for heavy doses and Early Times bourbon and a motivational speaker on his portable record player.

Then Kroc stumbles across the McDonald brothers Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac (John Carroll Lynch). In their Riverside, California, hamburger stand, the McDonald brothers invented the industrialization of food service, their achievement being “fast food” as we know it today. One the most fascinating sequences in The Founder is a flashback of the McDonald brothers designing the most efficient fast food kitchen possible with chalk on a tennis court. The brothers are passionate about their business, equally devoted to their product and their customers.

Kroc falls in love. Having driven through every town in the country as a traveling salesman, he can appreciate the untapped market. He persuades the brothers to let him take over franchising McDonald’s restaurants. It turns out that that the 50ish Kroc is well-equipped for the job because he’s driven, absolutely ruthless and always on the verge of desperation. He HAS to succeed. Kroc is hungry, perpetually hungry, and learns to identify potential franchisees who are not complacent investors, but are who are also driven enough to accept his discipline and run each franchise by the numbers. Egotistical as he is, Kroc is also smart enough to adopt a brilliant idea from someone else – the key to making McDonald’s his.

John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman in THE FOUNDER
John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman in THE FOUNDER

Dick McDonald is a humorless detail freak with brilliant ideas; Mac is the conflict-avoidant, supportive brother, always unruffling Dick’s feathers and keeping their options alive. Both are proud and true to their values. The McDonald brothers are authentic American business geniuses, but are they too principled to fight off a double cross by Kroc?

In much of the movie, Dick is on phone with Mac listening to Dick’s side of the conversations. Both Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch are superb, but Lynch’s performance is Oscar-worthy. There’s a “handshake” scene where WE know and MAC knows that he is going to get screwed, and Lynch’s eyes in those few seconds are heartbreaking.

As far as I can tell, The Founder is very historically accurate. Thanks to screenwriter Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler) and director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side), we also meet some other historical characters – Harry Sonneborn, Fred Turner, June Martino and Joan Smith Kroc – and appreciate their contributions to the McDonald’s business.

The Founder’s Ray Kroc is shitty to his wife (Laura Dern), shitty to his partners and, basically, shitty to his core. But we HAVE to keep watching him. Do we root for him because only HE can build this empire? We Americans have a heritage of empire building. And the idea of someone building something so big and so successful with only his smarts, persistence and opportunism is irresistible to us.

This is a good movie. I’ll even watch The Founder again. And I’ll have fries with that. You can watch it on DVD from Netflix and Redbox or stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

https://youtu.be/KH3b6bs8llA

THE LOST CITY OF Z: the historical adventure epic revived

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Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z photo courtesy of SFFILM
Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z
photo courtesy of SFFILM

In auteur James Gray’s sweeping turn of the 20th Century epic The Lost City of Z, a stiff-upper-lip type British military officer becomes the first European to probe into the deepest heart of unmapped Amazonia. Finding his way through the lush jungles, braving encounters with sometimes cannibalistic indigenous warriors, he becomes obsessed with finding the lost city of an ancient civilization. I know this sounds like Indiana Jones, but it’s based on the real life of Percy Fawcett as chronicled in the recent book Lost City of Z by David Grann.

The Lost City of Z opens tomorrow in Bay Area theaters. I saw The Lost City of Z at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) at a screening with director James Gray. I’ll be sharing some snippets from Gray’s Q & A on Sunday.

The Lost City of Z begins with an Edwardian stag hunt through the verdant Irish countryside, complete with horses spilling riders. This scene is gorgeous, but its point is to introduce the young British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) as a man of unusual resourcefulness, talent and, above all, drive. Despite his abilities, he has been chaffing at the unattractive assignments that have precluded his career advancement. In the snobby Edwardian military, he has been in disfavor because his dissolute father had stained the family name. One of Fawcett’s commanders says, “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors”.

That yearning to earn the recognition that he believes he merits – and to attain the accomplishments of a Great Man – is the core of this character-driven movie. Fawcett resists yet another assignment away from the career-making action, a mapping expedition designed to have a minor diplomatic payoff. But it takes him on a spectacular Amazon exploration that brings him celebrity – and backing for more high-profile expeditions. Fawcett was surfing the zeitgeist in the age of his contemporaries Roald Amundsen (South Pole), Robert Peary (North Pole) and Howard Carter (King Tut).

In that first expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced that he can find the magnificent city of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon, a city he calls Z (which is pronounced as the British “Zed”). The Lost City of Z takes us through two more Amazonian expeditions, sandwiched around Fawcett’s WW I service in the hellish Battle of the Somme.
That final expedition ends mysteriously – and not well.

No one knows for sure what happened to Fawcett. In The Lost City of Z, Gray leads us toward the most likely conclusion, the one embraced by Grann’s book. If you’re interested in the decades of speculation about Fawcett’s fate, there’s a good outline on Percy Fawcett’s Wikipedia page.

Fawcett comes with his own Victorian upper class prejudices, but he has the capacity to set those aside for a post-Darwin open-mindedness. Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are independent of Fawcett; Gray shows them living their lives in a world that Fawcett has found, not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s quest. Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film.

As Percy Fawcett, with his oft-manic obsession and fame-seeking that color his scientific curiosity and his old-fashioned Dudley Do-Right values, Charlie Hunnam gives a tremendous, perhaps carer breakthrough, performance. He’s been a promising actor in Sons of Anarchy and the overlooked thriller Deadfall) (and such a good actor that I never dreamed that he’s really British).  Hunnam will next star as the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise.

Robert Pattinson is unexpectedly perfect as Fawcett’s travel buddy Henry Costin. With his Twilight dreaminess hidden behind a Smith Brothers beard, Pattinson projects a lean manliness. It’s probably his best performance.

Sienna Miller shines as Fawcett’s proto-feminist wife Nina. I first noticed Miller (and Daniel Craig) in the underrated neo-noir thriller 2004 Layer Cake. Now Miller is still only 35 years old and has delivered other fine recent performances in Foxcatcher, American Sniper and (in an especially delicious role) High-Rise.

Director James Gray (The Yard, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) is a favorite of cinephiles and of other filmmakers, but regular audiences don’t turn out for his movies. That may change with The Lost City of Z, a remarkably beautiful film that Gray shot, bucking the trend to digital, in 35 mm. The jungle scenes were filmed in a national park in Columbia. The cinemeatographer is the Oscar-nominated Darius Khondji. Khondji shot The Immigrant for Gray and has been the DP of choice for David Fincher (Se7en) Alan Parker (Evita), Michael Haneke (Amour), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris). Along with the stag hunt and the voyages up and down the jungle rivers, there is also a breathtakingly beautiful ballroom scene and a gaspingly surreal nighttime discovery of a rubber plantation’s opera house deep in the jungle.

There have been other Lost Expedition movies, most famously Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z shares an obsession, a quest and a mysterious tragic end with those films, but it stands apart with its exploration of the motivation of a real life character and the authenticity of Gray’s depiction of the indigenous people.

Movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. With The Lost City of Z, James Gray loses both the racism and the irony, and brings us brings a straight-ahead exploration tale.

The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a beautiful and thoughtful film.

[And here are some completely random tidbits. There’s a cameo by Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero. The closing credits recognize the “animal weath coordinator” and the “data wrangler”.]

DVD/Stream of the Week: LOVING – the love story that made history

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LOVING Credit: Ben Rothstein/Focus Features
Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton in LOVING. Credit: Ben Rothstein/Focus Features

The landmark 1967 US Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia overturned state laws that banned interracial marriage. Loving is the story of the real couple behind that ruling, and it’s a satisfying love story of two modest people who would rather not have been forced to make history.

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton convincingly bring the lead characters to life. As the more vibrant character, Negga is especially winning. Edgerton is just as good as he plays the stolid and far less demonstrative husband.

Marton Csokas, with his pitiless, piercing eyes, is remarkably effective as the Virginia sheriff dead set on enforcing Virginia’s racist statute in the most personally intrusive way. Too often, actors seem to be impersonating Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night when they play racist Southern sheriffs, but Csokas brings some originality to his performance.

Loving is directed by one of my favorites, Jeff Nichols of Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud (which he calls his “Arkansas Trilogy”). Nichols specializes in leisurely paced dramas that evoke their settings in the rural South. Nichols’ languid style works well in telling stories that have moments of shock and violence. However, there is no dramatic courtroom face off or thrilling high point as we watch these people live their workaday lives, so Loving drags a bit in places. Nevertheless, Nichols does an excellent job of depicting the ongoing dread of racist terror that these people lived under.

Michael Shannon, who owes his career breakthrough to Nichols’ Shotgun Stories and stars in his Take Shelter and Mud, shows up in a sparkling cameo as a LIFE magazine photographer. If you perform a Google image search for “Richard Mildred Loving”, you’ll find the real LIFE photos, which make it clear that Nichols went to great lengths to make the characters and the settings look very, very much like the Lovings and their environment. I don’t need “lookalikes” in a historical movie, but the makeup and wardrobe on Edgerton and Negga (and especially Richard Loving’s mother) are remarkably close to the real people. And the scenes at the drag race and on the Loving’s sofa are recreated in almost chilling accuracy.

I studied Loving v. Virginia, along with other major civil rights and individual rights cases, in law school in the mid-1970s . Then, the idea that a government could outlaw a marriage between people of different races (and even the word “anti-miscegenation”) already seemed ridiculously obsolete and perversely quaint. But I hadn’t realized that the ruling in Loving v Virginia was only 8 years old at the time I studied it. California had such a law, too, which wasn’t repealed until 1948, and I have a friend whose Filipino and Mexican-American parents were kept from marrying by that statute.

History is made by real people. Loving is both good history and a watchable personal story. You can watch on DVD from Netflix and Redbox or stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.