Christian Bale

THE PALE BLUE EYE: Gothic and so-so, except for a great Harry Melling

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Photo caption: Harry Melling in THE PALE BLUE EYE. Courtesy of Netflix.

The Pale Blue Eye stars Christian Bale as a detective pulled out of retirement to solve a murder mystery at West Point in 1830. He enlists a cadet as his assistant – none other than Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling), in his one unsuccessful year at the Military Academy. Except for Harry Melling, The Pale Blue Eye is not great.

As the two keep peeling the onion, the bodies and more weirdness keep piling up, including a distractingly incredible dive into the occult. Just when the whodunit is seemingly wrapped up, there’s one more twisty Big Reveal. The whodunit is far from thrilling, and the final twist isn’t enough to pay off.

The fine director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Hostiles) frames the whole thing in a Gothic horror patina, but that’s not enough to keep the story interesting. Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s story is a slog.

Christian Bale ably plays his character with world-weariness and just the right hint of slyness. Two of the world’s greatest screen actors, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Timothy Spall, are embarrassingly wasted in underwritten roles. Toby Jones and Gillian Anderson don’t fare much better.

Harry Melling goes big as Edgar Allen Poe, reveling in a southern accent (Poe grew up in Virginia) and the florid 18th century speech. His Poe has the confidence, perhaps from narcissism, that belies his unpopularity with peers, and his lack of accomplishment. And. of course, Melling embues his Poe with a discernible creepiness. This isn’t a big deal IMO, but Melling is made up to look just like a young Poe would have looked, before the mustache and the dissolution.

As a kid, Melling broke through as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter franchise, which he needed to finish in a fat suit because he had slimmed down so much. In the last year or so, Melling has produced some great work in The Queen’s Gambit, Please Baby Please and The Tragedy of Macbeth. Before that, he was the best element of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He is now one of cinema’s great scene-stealers.

The Pale Blue Eye is streaming on Netflix.

VICE: like Macbeth, only funny

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Christian Bale in VICE

Vice is the comic biopic of Dick Cheney by writer-director Adam McKay (The Big Short).  Cheney is played by a physically transformed and unrecognizable Christian Bale.

McKay’s take is that Cheney’s driving motivation and genius is the accumulation and exercise of power – to whatever end and by whatever means.  McKay also sees Cheney as a mediocre slacker molded and fueled by Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams), whose own ambitions were limited in the 1960s by her gender.  So, this is a tale of ruthless grasping along the lines of Macbeth or House of Cards, only mostly non-fiction.

McKay drops in the horrifying real impacts of Cheney’s exercise of power, but this is mostly a very funny movie.  Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s mentor in power-grabbing, and George W. Bush, Cheney’s stooge, are played for laughs in very broad performances by Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell.  McKay also tosses in a funny faux ending and has Dick and Lynne, in bed for the night, erupt in Shakespearean dialogue.  Jesse Plemons plays a fictional Everyman narrator.

Bale’s performance is extraordinary, and goes well beyond the impeccable impersonation, down to every Cheney mannerism – stoneface, sneer and grunt.  Adams is excellent as his Lady Macbeth.  So is the rest of the fine cast, especially Alsion Pil as lesbian daughter Mary, Tyler Perry as Colin Powell and Shea Whigham as Lynne Cheney’s probably murderous father.

Vice is pretty good history, biography from a sharp point of view and a damn entertaining movie.

THE BIG SHORT: we laugh and then we get mad

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Steve Carell (right) in THE BIG SHORT
Steve Carell (right) in THE BIG SHORT

It’s history.  Now we all know that the subprime mortgage scam blew up in 2007 and brought global banking to its knees by September 2008.  The supremely entertaining The Big Short takes us back to before the financial collapse, when only a few quirky smarty pants saw it coming.  Director Adam McKay personalizes the crisis into an irreverent character driven drama with both whodunit and ticking bomb elements.  It all adds up to an exciting, funny and anger-provoking experience.

The Big Short follows the parallel stories of the not-so-merry few who discovered the worthlessness of securities comprised of bad subprime loans. There’s a San Jose doctor-turned-fund manager (Christian Bale), a renegade Wall Street hedge fund manager (Steve Carell) and a couple of boy wonder investors in Boulder, Colorado.  It’s a very unlikely bunch of prospective heroes.  Bale’s doctor is so socially impervious that he seems to belong somewhere on the autism spectrum.  Carell’s trader attends anger management group therapy, which is not helping him a damn bit.  And the Boulder kids – well this IS their first rodeo.

The real star here is Adam McKay, whose previous work has been in low-brow comedies, most notably the Ron Burgundy movies.  Remember, this is the story of guys in front of their computers figuring out the current and future values of other people’s home mortgages.  McKay has turned this into an edge-of-your-seat thriller.  That is remarkable.

McKay’s first challenge is helping us understand all the financial gobbledygook.  McKay immediately breaks the Fourth Wall, with an opportunistic Wall Street banker (Ryan Gosling) opening the movie by speaking directly to the camera and explaining how home mortgages are securitized – and it turns out that we can understand it, after all.  Throughout the film, McKay keeps interrupting the action with very funny cameos, so unexpected personalities can explain various financial instruments.  I’m not going to reveal them, because much of the fun is the delightful surprise.  But I will say that no one has ever explained something complicated with more clarity than a pop star, an economist and a crowd in a casino when they combine to illuminate us about the “synthetic CDO”.

As cynical and iconoclastic as they are, none of our heroes can imagine the breadth of the corruption and the scale of the impending financial meltdown.  As Carell’s character digs deeper, he unearths the incentives for the bankers, insurers, rating agencies and mortgage retailers to lie and cheat and defraud – all built into the system.  Carell’s face is filled with a combination of disgust and terror as he connects the dots.  The Big Short opens with the Mark Twain quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  No truer words…

Carell and Bale are brilliant in The Big Short; both performances are awards-worthy.  Gosling, Brad Pitt and Melissa Leo are all also excellent, as is Adepero Oduye (12 Years a Slave). I especially loved Jeremy Strong’s performance as Carell’s hyper intense right hand man. Strong has a particular gift for being memorable in historical dramas: Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Selma and as Lee Harvey Oswald in the overlooked Parkland.

Now we know that these guys were right when everyone else – including ALL the figures of authority – were saying that they were wrong.  It’s an amazing story to watch.

 

The Dark Knight Rises: Unfortunately, over 2 hours when Catwoman is not on the screen

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Well, there’s 2 hours and 44 minutes that I’ll never get back. First, the good news about The Dark Knight Rises.  Anne Hathaway excels as the best Catwoman ever, and the banter between her and Batman crackles.  There are some exceptional CGI effects of Manhattan’s partial destruction. There’s a cool personal hovercraft, the Bat, and an equally cool combo motorcycle/cannon, the Batpod.

Unfortunately, that’s all the good stuff in director Christopher Nolan’s newest chapter of the Batman saga.  The problem is the screenplay, dotted with the corniest of dialogue and laden with pretentious Batman mythology.  When Catwoman tells him “you don’t owe these people any more! You’ve given them everything!”, Batman solemnly replies, “Not everything. Not yet.”

The plot simply exists to transition from action set piece to action set piece.  There are too many times, when a good guy is in peril, that another good guy pops up utterly randomly and just in the nick of time – too many even for a comic book movie.

With her bright wit and lithe sexiness, Hathaway fares far better than her colleagues.   Christian Bale continues his odd husky growl as Batman.   As the villain, an uber buffed Tom Hardy glowers from behind a fearsome mask.  The hackneyed screenplay wastes the rest of the extremely talented cast:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman.  We barely glimpse Liam Neeson.  The captivating Juno Temple is apparently dropped into the story just enough to set her up for the sequel with Gordon-Levitt.

I saw The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX, which worked well for the long shots of NYC and made the fight scenes more chaotic.

DVD of the Week: The Fighter

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Here’s you chance to see the Oscar-winning performance by Christian Bale and Melissa Leo in The Fighter. Mark Wahlberg stars as a boxer trying to succeed despite his crack addict brother (Bale) and his powerful, trashy mom (Leo).  As one would expect, Bale nails the flashier role of the addict, deluding himself about both past glories and his importance to his family. Leo is almost unrecognized under her teased hair, and is accompanied by a hilarious Greek Chorus of adult daughters, each trashier than the last.

The boxing scenes are very well done, and Wahlberg matches Sylvester Stallone and Hilary Swank in making us believe that he is, indeed, a boxer. See my list of 10 Best Boxing Movies.  It’s also on my list of Best Movies of 2010.

The Fighter

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The Fighter is an excellent drama, starring Mark Wahlberg as a boxer trying to succeed despite his crack addict brother (Christian Bale) and his powerful, trashy mom (Melissa Leo).   As one would expect, Bale nails the flashier role of the addict, deluding himself about both past glories and his importance to his family.  Leo is almost unrecognized under her teased hair, and is accompanied by a hilarious Greek Chorus of adult daughters, each trashier than the last.

The boxing scenes are very well done, and Wahlberg matches Stallone and Swank in making us believe that he is, indeed, a boxer. See my list of 10 Best Boxing Movies.