Sunshine, lollipops, and Alzheimer's

A couple of movie reviews:
(Image via RottenTomatoes)

Sunshine: This is Danny Boyle's latest movie, coming out in France a few months before in America. The studios are trying to get it into Oscar and awards contention, I think, by putting it in September. I wouldn't hold my breath, Fox Searchlight.

OK, first, the concept seems really lame, especially if you remember The Core, which produced among my favorite movie trailers of all time ("How do we fix it?" "We can't." "What if we could?").

How similar are they in concept? The Core: core of earth has stopped spinning. Diverse oddball crew has to drive a bomb into it to restart it. Save mankind. All that jazz. Sunshine: Sun has stopped shining brightly. Diverse oddball crew has to drive bomb into it to restart it. Save mankind. Etc.

Yet, while the concepts are the same, the actual movies are vastly different pieces of work. For The Core, the core of the earth is a mulligan, a plot device, a piece of scenery for whatever rescue mission. Sunshine is really about the sun. Its characters, the humans, are the plot device, revolving around the fiery, petulant, god-like, screen-blinding sun. The movie kind of wearily ports the luggage of sci-fi visual stunners like 2001, but that means we get some amazing Danny Boyle moments of image mastery. We rarely feel the power of a flaring white screen quite like we do during this movie. So many "important" movies play in varying shades of dark and darker that we forget the oomph a fade-to-white can bring in a shadowy theater.

We get the ragtag crew (the closest thing to a protagonist we get is Cillian Murphy's wide-eyed, bomb-tending physicist) with all its requisite types: the sensitive female, the hothead male (Chris Evans, trying to gain serious acting cred I guess... still can't not think of him as Jake from Not Another Teen Movie), the overworked engineer, the snotty first officer, the dutiful captain, etc. Probably worth noting is the international makeup of the crew: Malaysian Michelle Yeoh as the biologist in charge of the oxygen-producing garden, Japanese Hiroyuki Sanada as the honor-bound captain, New Zealand Maori Cliff Curtis as the increasingly sun-obsessed psych officer stand out.

Still, despite good performances, these guys never transcend their prescribed roles, because as mentioned above, they aren't supposed to. The movie doesn't try to break the mold as, say, 28 Days Later tried to bust up the zombie-movie genre. Boyle plays the thrill-ride for all he can (a crucial decision, things start to go wrong, problems layer on top of problems, tempers flare!), just to the point in the movie's last act, where the genre's silliness takes the film off the rails into an eye-rolling "climax."

OK, mild spoiler (not really... cuz it ain't ruining nothin'): the film devolves into a "slasher" last act, which many will believe was tacked on for appealing to a teen audience expecting a thrill, but despite its total unbelievability, I find the mistake of its inclusion to be telling. Boyle needed that extra shot of lunacy, to hammer home his point that the characters barely matter and the bright god-like sun which dominates the movie can drive us out of our minds and out of our humanity. The massive power is dehumanizing and debilitating to those who dare stand before it. The ending is not incongruent with its opening.

Inelegant? Jarring? Eye-rolling? You bet. But in the end, Boyle doesn't care.

From my criticisms, you may think the movie is not worth seeing. But I emphatically encourage it. Boyle is a craftsman; he makes movies. To feel one's cynical heart race at a seemingly ludicrous amassing of errors makes one appreciate the skill of the filmmaker, and honestly, the first two-thirds of the movie are about as enjoyable as sci-fi movies get. You'll thrill, you'll chill, you'll roll your eyes! But in the end, when you leave the theater, I think you'll find you're better off for having taken the voyage.

Away From Her:
Uh, short synopsis. I called this "that depressing Canadian Alzheimer's movie," and I suppose from an oversimplified angle, that's what it is. The only misleading word there is "depressing," because it doesn't really depress the viewer in the way that, say, Brian's Song or any number of CBS Hallmark Sunday night movies do.

The story concerns a husband, Grant, (Gordon Pinsent) and a wife, Fiona, (Julie Christie) in their early sixties who suddenly find themselves facing a foreign problem: Fiona is "losing her mind" as she so eloquently puts it while searching for the word for "wine." Alzheimer's starts eating away at her mind, and they make the decision to put her into a care facility. One requirement of the care facility is that Grant must leave his wife at Meadowlake for thirty days without seeing her, a tall order for a man who has spent the last twenty years alone in a spacious house with his wife.

Here's where things get complicated, and where the film takes its turn for the truly searing. We learn that Grant's past with his wife is not as perfect as the opening "tender" moments would have us believe. When Grant returns to visit his wife, Fiona has fallen hard for a companion at the home, barely remembering his face. Her reaction ("You certainly are persistent, aren't you?") is heartbreaking and the anguish on Pinsent's face is alien. Is she just fooling with him? Is she just instigating a little tryst with another resident to get back at her husband's earlier improprieties? What is Grant to do but keep coming back every day to visit? "I never wanted to be away from her."

Let me get my minor criticisms out of the way first. The dialogue occasionally takes on a preachy, soliloquizing tone that no one would ever use in real life, the kind one only finds in moralizing movies. The pacing is slow, even for a small movie of 1:40 length. If you dislike films with long close-up shots of people "coming to terms" with devastating realities, uh... go watch this instead. But seriously, if you were going to make a parody of "art movies" that critics love but the rest of us find inscrutable, it might look a little something like this.

That said, this is almost as perfectly a constructed "small art movie" as you could possibly want. The script -- loyal to, yet expanding from, a short story by Alice Munro called "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" -- rings true with the stilted conversation of reservation and the subtle cracks that we hide beneath the simplest language. Two marvelous actors, Gorden Pinsent (whose work I don't know) and Julie Christie (whose work I do), put in finesse performances like you wouldn't believe. They don't have to chew up the scenery or dress in period garb (I'm lookin' at you, Forest Whitaker) to produce jarring emotion. The direction, too, gets out of the way and lets the actors do the work they were meant to do.

Certainly, I should make special note of Sarah Polley, the actress who adapted the short story to screenplay and directed the film. A quirky actress, but now, demonstrably, a talented and reserved director. You'd never think that this quiet, perceptive film about aging, loss, memory, and love would come from a woman in her twenties.

A few short notes about things I loved...

Flashbacks: Most of the time, flashbacks are predicated by a fade-out, a sign of the times, whatever. But in this film, they cut seamlessly back and forth from present to near-present, to a grainy past in Kodachrome, all floating around a haunting, crackling, smiling eighteen-year-old Christie. In the way that a true Alzheimer's patient would lose her mind and lose her way, so do we too lose ourselves in the sometimes-repeated, sometimes-evocative images that we can't quite place.

Disease-movie-syndrome: The movie deftly avoids being "about a disease." It's not maudlin or cloying, doesn't play the disease for "crying moments." The Notebook, this ain't. Rather, just as a good horror film eschews the big scare for the overall feeling of dread, Polley wants to see things in the long term. So we get Grant's black pickup truck cruising back and forth over familiar terrain, the long ruts of cross-country ski lanes, the signposts of time passing; all letting us know that time will erode us but that it also flattens the beds of rivers and bends the boughs of trees. This is where that pacing I mentioned earlier wins back what it loses in occasional plodding. The movie isn't as depressing as you'd think it would be, because we feel the gradualness of it, the long goodbye still anchored by the deepest of human emotions. As Christie comments in the movie, the love of youth is too demanding, a "liability." That slow gentleness just holds us close and refuses to let go.

Olympia Dukakis: Yeah, that's right. This ol' broad comes at you with a feisty but deeply human performance in a smaller role that will stick in your mind as much as the two principals (who as previously mentioned, are outstanding)

All right, that's all I've got. If you get a chance, see both these movies. High quality.