Dig if you will, the pictures in this week’s Screening Room:
Incarnate
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Aaron Eckhart is a conundrum, isn’t he? He’s talented enough to land any indie gem, granite-jawed and handsome enough to elevate it to mass market appeal. Think Thank You for Smoking.
And yet, for every Rabbit Hole there’s an I, Frankenstein; for every In the Company of Men, an Incarnate.
His latest – his fourth of this calendar year – sees Eckhart as the wheelchair-bound, unshaven, grimacing Dr. Seth Ember. He’s damaged, damn it!
Don’t call him an exorcist. He doesn’t exorcise demons; he evicts supernatural parasites. He has an ability. You see, when he was young, he realized, “When I was asleep I could go into the minds of the possessed.”
How did he figure this out? How often did he get drowsy in the proximity of a possessed person?
No matter – can’t you see he’s damaged?!
When a liaison to the Vatican (Catalina Sandino Moreno) – don’t even get Dr. Seth started on the church! – lures him to a case of a possessed 11-year-old, it isn’t to save the boy. Oh no.
No?
No. It must have something to do with his damage. I’ll bet director Brad Peyton (that genius behind San Andreas) will soap-opera direct some weirdly stilted, flat and extreme-close-up-laden bit of ponderousness explaining the whole thing, but you will have lost the will to live before it’s all clarified.
There is one moment – not a scene, but a single moment – in this film where I believed Peyton might, maybe, possibly do something interesting.
Nope.
Worst thing about Incarnate? It’s not the made-for-SyFy-CGI. Not the superficial storyline, not the flatly uninspired direction. (Honestly, if Peyton had directed from inside a coma the film couldn’t have looked or felt more lifeless.)
It’s not the tedious ensemble performances, not the wildly predictable series of twists. It’s Eckhart. It’s as if he’s angry at us that he took this dog.
We didn’t make you do it, Aaron. We only sat through this festering corpse of a movie because you were in it.
I believe we’re owed an apology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUVwbhc0j18
Man Down
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
Before it makes a hard left turn down Lifetime Lane, Man Down sets a decent hook. The cast is uniformly splendid, while director/co-writer Dito Montiel displays some effective understatement in the early going, establishing a confidence in the destination that he can’t quite reward.
Shia LeBeouf is outstanding as Gabriel Drummer, a Marine searching for his son in a near future ravaged by some manner of deadly outbreak. Teamed with fellow Marine and boyhood buddy Devin Roberts (Jai Courtney), Gabriel scours the terrain for any survivor who might have seen his little boy.
Slowly, Montiel weaves in the backstory, with flashbacks to bootcamp, a happy home life with wife Natalie (Kate Mara), dangerous patrols in Afghanistan and sessions with a Marine counselor (Gary Oldman) who gently pushes a shaken Gabriel to talk about “the incident.”
LeBeouf, regardless of his personal antics, can deliver the goods. Though his character’s arc isn’t presented in linear fashion, LaBeouf mines the resonant layers. Gabriel’s early naivete, hardened intensity and haunted conscience are all fleshed out, while the separate angles LaBeouf employs in intimate scenes with Mara and Oldman (both stellar) buoy all three performances.
Montiel (Fighting, Robin Williams’s final film Boulevard) again has fine intentions, but is too content to satisfy them with dated predictability. What he’s saying isn’t new, and how he’s saying it is even less so. You’ll most likely guess one major plot revelation early on, then sense the other coming with an “are we going there – yes, I guess we’re going there” type of dread.
There are interesting characters here and fine actors to inhabit them. They just need somewhere equally interesting to go.
Christine
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
There’s a moment in Christine – Antonio Campos’s clinical character study of ‘70s on-air reporter Christine Chubbuck – when a violently depressed Christine chastises her mother’s parenting. Had she been a better parent, maybe Christine would understand how the world worked.
There is such honest, bewildered frustration in that moment. With that single thought, a career-best Rebecca Hall exposes Chubbuck’s isolated, lonely, crippled soul.
We’re invited to join the stormy decline of Chubbuck’s life. An awkward, severe professional at odds with the era’s sensationalistic news trends, Chubbuck clashes with her Sarasota station’s news manager (Tracy Letts) and pines for its handsome anchor (Michael C. Hall).
Chubbuck’s professional frustrations and personal isolation come to a head simultaneously. Thanks to Hall’s meticulous performance, what we can see is that the emotionally brittle, deeply depressed Chubbuck hasn’t the resilience to contend with it.
Hall’s body language, her gait, her facial expressions and her speech amplify her character’s growing turmoil. It’s a creeping darkness that grows to be almost unbearable before bursting into an eye-of-the-storm calm that’s even eerier for its realism.
Though Craig Shilowich’s screenplay leans too heavily on frustrated spinsterisms as a handy excuse for Chubbuck’s behavior, and Campos’s direction intentionally keeps Christine at arm’s length, Hall’s harrowing turn guarantees that Christine Chubbuck makes an impression.
Campos’s disturbing 2012 horror Simon Killer remained intentionally distant as well – a provocative approach that suited the mystery of the titular sociopath. Here, though, it feels too chilly, almost heartless.
That seems inappropriate, because neither Chubbuck nor those she left behind were heartless. In fact, one of the great successes in Hall’s performance is her ability to personify Chubbuck’s amazingly off-putting, alienating behavior while simultaneously pointing out that most of us are only a few social misjudgments away from pariah status ourselves.
Inevitably, the film feels like a 110-minute prelude to Chubbuck’s infamous on-air suicide, and that’s where Campos and Shilowich’s weaknesses show. What was at the heart of Chubbuck’s final display – institutional sexism, unending loneliness, mental illness, professional integrity, irony?
The filmmakers showed a great deal while exploring very little, but thanks to a performance likely to be remembered come awards season, Rebecca Hall makes sure Chubbuck’s struggle resonates.
The Eagle Huntress
by Cat McAlpine, MaddWolf.com
The documentary opens on a man standing on a snowy ridge. With him are three animals: a horse, a goat, and an eagle. The man sacrifices the goat, sets the eagle free, and then slowly trots into the distance on the back of his horse. Cut to a school classroom, where we find 13 year old Aisholpan in braids.
Director Otto Bell deftly handles his Mongolian setting with equal care to the rich history, steeped in tradition and the modern life that the people now lead. He never patronizes the culture – a nasty habit of film makers delving into a new setting. Nomads, how quaint! Traditional regalia, how mystic! Instead, Bell simply shows life as it is today, a culmination of everything that came before.
Aisholpan is a young girl who boards at school during the week, and goes home on the weekends. She likes giggling with her friends, helping her dad with the family livestock, and wants to be an eagle hunter. A woman has never been an eagle hunter before, let alone a girl, but this doesn’t seem to phase Aisholpan.
There are, however, many old men who have quite a few grievances with a woman becoming an eagle hunter. “Who would make the tea?” “Women are too weak,” and “She’ll have to get married eventually.”
It’s a great use of the “talking heads” trope of documentaries. A series of men sitting in a tent, talking about how women can’t and shouldn’t hunt. Meanwhile, Aisholpan is doing just that.
Bell produces a film with a clear narrative and story arc, but the tale never stops feeling organic. The style of the film seems to shift seemlessly with need. Distant contemplative shots are evenly mixed with tight close-ups. Sometimes an eagle’s eye view shows off the vast landscapes. Sometimes the camera is literally strapped to an eagle. This ever-changing style, fluid to capture each moment at its best, suits the world Aisholpan lives in.
One of the best shots of the film is not a beautiful snowy mountain or a dramatic slow motion shot of an eagle in flight. It’s Aisholpan herself, having just fed her eaglet bloody, raw meat, now painting her sister’s nails a shade of purple. The eaglet sits beside them, on a stump, while the two girls chatter away. Aisholpan’s world is not just about dualities, but multitudes. Her desire to become an eagle huntress is not just an affront to the men who uphold the noble sport today, but all the generations that came before them.
Aisholpan never seems too threatened by the grumblings of old men, though. In fact she hardly raises the matter. She simply wants to be an eagle hunter like her father, and her father’s father. Because her father and grandfather support her, she imagines few other obstacles. The most inspiring bit is, becoming an eagle hunter is not Aisholpan’s highest aspiration, it’s just what she wants to do right now. When she grows up, she wants to be a doctor.
And I’m sure she’ll be a great one.
