The Polar Express

"The Polar Express" certainly starts out with a great deal of ambition while trying to make sure it presses all the right notes required of a Christmas movie. There's a calm, mystical score by Alan Silvesti, the usual composer of director Robert Zemeckis, and quite impressive visual effects. There's a poem (as all stories about Christmas must have) of a young boy who is starting to lose faith in Santa. He picks up an encyclopedia to discover that the North Pole is, contrary to all the stories he's been told, "devoid of all life." (Oh, knowledge -- how cruel you are.) The epiphany of this boy's awareness of Santa is where things start to spoil. The score becomes overly repetitive, and the "is-it-real-or-is-it-not" animation begins to make some of the characters looks like aliens. Fairly soon, it becomes evident that the only thing devoid of life in this film is the film itself.

Trains in the movies are usually magical things. One would think that would be the case here, in a movie that features some sort of ghost-hobo and flying reindeer. It's true that things certainly look quite magical in "The Polar Express." After all, an actual train shows up in front of the house of young "Hero Boy." (Yes, that's what he's credited as.) Our young boy is performed by...Tom Hanks? Yes, not only does Hanks, who has shown us that he can play a man dying of AIDS and a man with a mental disability and everything else, play the train conductor (the central adult character) and practically every adult male role in the film, but also "Hero Boy." Why Zemeckis and crew didn't simply have Daryl Sabara (who voiced the character) provide the motion-capture is something I just don't understand. Anyway, Hero Boy gets on the train to the North Pole because why wouldn't he? If we are to believe that a train can show up (and go to) such a place, then we must believe that Hero Boy would get on that train. (Seriously, what a terrible name for a character.) Hero Boy (argh, it sounds so stupid) meets a group of children, one of whom, Hero Girl (who wrote this?), seems to have a crush on him. Another one, a know-it-all (I suppose I should mention that that's the character's name, as well) is not only performed but also voiced by an adult, which just adds to the misery of hearing a child say the words "wise guy." Then we are witness to two not-so-competent (or safe) train engineers whose annoying attributes make Jingle and Jangle, the humorless elf duo of "The Year Without a Santa Claus," look like amateurs in the realm of humor and efficiency. These are several of the attempts at humor that I can't imagine even children laughing at.

This movie isn't all bad. Hanks does do a mostly sufficient job as most of these characters, even though he hams it up so often. "The Polar Express" looks and feels quite wondrous and even frightening, like the graveyard of forgotten toys. One of them even appears to come to life and wants to attack the young boy. "The Polar Express" turns ten years old this year, and the scenes like that have aged well. So no one would deny that Zemeckis, who started his computer animation trilogy with "The Polar Express," is a master of visual storytelling. But his best movies, like "Back to the Future," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," and "Forrest Gump," focus more on character than visuals. Here, the opposite is true. Its only focus is on visuals, with every sequence trying to top itself, to the point where a giant star on a giant Christmas tree nearly crashes through the skull of one of Santa's elves. And for some reason, 45 minutes into the movie, it embraces its chaotic train ride energy and suddenly becomes a musical. You know how they say you know you've seen a good musical when you leave the theater and the songs are stuck in your head? I can't even imagine the ones who worked on the productions of these dismal songs to have them stuck in theirs upon leaving the studio.

The song that Haley Joel Osment-lookalike sings fortunately finishes, and our characters finally make it to the North Pole, which oddly enough does seem devoid of life (in the figurative, sarcastic sense) but (of course) is inhabited by an army of elves all dressed in red, crawling over each other to shower their adoration on their fascist of a master. The characters (who might just be representing the most annoying portrayal of children in any movie) finally meet Santa Claus (who is also played by Tom Hanks), and then the movie still goes on for another 15 minutes. No exciting train scene can save this film. Ten years later, "The Polar Express" is, for some reason, considered a holiday classic. Call me Ebeneezer, but this movie is crap.

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The Theory of Everything

"O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer time."

-W.H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"

In the beginning, the camera immediately shifts from Hawking in a wheelchair to Hawking on a bike. He is a "strange" and "clever" fellow, with crooked glasses and in an intense quest to solve equations and get the girl. These early scenes feature Eddie Reddmayne being calmly lectured and encouraged by his professor, played by David Thewlis, who issues homework assignments that might send students to the hospital. And yet this professor is quite impressed with Hawking, despite the latter's submitting assignments on scraps of wrinkled papers. It is remarkable that such a character falls for a girl whose interest in Medieval poetry of the Iberian peninsula might seem antithetical to his obsession with physics; surely, her belief in God is in opposition to his purely logical mind. But fall in love they do. This is a love story, and while not the best of the year, it works best when seen through that prism. When seen through the prism of the standard biographical film, as the filmmakers and distributors wish us to do, "The Theory of Everything" doesn't shine so much.

As mentioned, it's quite remarkable that these two fall in love. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr reminded us, religion uses the language of poetry far more than science does. Hawking, upon bringing her home to his family for a Sunday meal, describes to her his requirement to refrain from religious thought when conducting science, but is met with a firm reply: "Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists." He has met his match. Beyond that, the girl, Jane Wilde (played by Felicity Jones), is rather attractive, while Hawking (with all due respect not only to him but also Reddmayne, who used to model) has a nice smile but a very awkward (yet witty and obviously brilliant) persona. They go to the ball, and there's a majestic dance scene (with no dancing from our two characters), lit perfectly by cinematographer Benoit Delhomme. In the first third of the film, though, despite its pretty figurative and literal fireworks, "The Theory of Everything" seems to be a somewhat bland biographical motion picture, providing not much else. It's like "A Beautiful Mind" but slightly more boring. But of course it will be nominated for Best Picture -- it's the type of movie that makes the Academy salivate.

Hawking trips, just as he develops an idea for the beginning of the universe, and is taken to the hospital. He is diagnosed with motor neuron disease (a.k.a Lou Gehrig's disease) and is expected to live only two more years. His thoughts won't change, but no one will know what they are. He begins to limp, quite noticeably, and in no time he has a cane. Soon after that, he has to crawl up and down the stairs. He is continually told that he has only two years left. This is where the acting gets quite challenging for Reddmayne. Not only does he have to portray a real-life figure, one who is known around much of the world, but also one who starts shy yet articulate but is forced to have his physical abilities stripped from him. He has to convey a lot of emotions -- jealousy, ambition, lust, love -- with few words. Reddmayne gave us some pretty good acting in "My Weekend with Marilyn" and "Les Miserables," but here he is exceptional. You will remember his performance, but forget virtually everything else about the movie.

Why? For one, it tries to compensate by having innovative visual effects -- the fire sequence sparking his epiphany that "black holes are not, in fact, black at all" looks nice, but then the film doesn't give us much more. This is an intriguing story, no doubt, and I think human beings, for the most part, will forever be drawn to these types of fighter stories. "The little one has done it!" as one character exclaims. Hawking isn't simply a brilliant scientist, but a devoted father and husband, even able to chase around his young children in his electronic wheelchair. In spite of all his troubles, he perseveres, continuing to write and even retain his boyish grin, if only to annoy his wife, who is growing frustrated with worrying about him, as he refuses to see specialists regarding his choking spells. His father (Simon McBurney) joins in the prodding. Stephen eventually concedes. 

There's a powerful moment where Jayne orders Hawking's doctor to do an emergency operation because "Stephen must live." She is warned that Stephen might not survive the journey. "He will," she insists. Indeed, he barely does. He has to talk with a computerized voice (an American one, to the surprise of his wife), but he actually seems to be trying to make the best of it, quoting Clark Gable's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and shouting "exterminate" while playing with his children. And he still likes reading copies of "Penthouse."  

I liked "The Theory of Everything," and yet I was underwhelmed by it. I wanted something a bit more audacious and creative, not a check-the-box style safe movie from Hollywood to try and gain some awards. As I mentioned, Reddmayne is incredible; the movie itself is forgettable.        

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Gone Girl

An Irish prince leaves his perfect wife at their perfect home. How perfect is his life? So much that on the night he fell in love with his wife, there was a storm of sugar surrounding them. There aren't many cinematographers better than Jeff Bronenweth, and his camera makes that scene, in particular, hauntingly beautiful. His excellent cinematography lights a dark, dark world, as is often the case in the movies of David Fincher, the Prince of Darkness. When the man comes home, his wife is gone. His perfect world is turned upside down.

The man in our movie is Nick Dunne, played by Ben Affleck. He goes to a bar to drink with the bartender, who incidentally is his sister (Carrie Coon). Why is he drinking? Why not--it's his fifth year wedding anniversary. The bar is under the name of his wife, played by Rosamund Pike in her best performance. Pike's debut was as a Bond girl in "Die Another Day" a little more than a decade ago, but she hasn't really been given a chance to prove herself since. Here, however, she really shines, in a performance that will (or at least should) get her an Oscar nomination. Her character, Amy, is, in the first half of the movie a "complicated" woman, a "nagging shrew" whom no one particularly likes. But that would be too simple. In the second half, it's an entirely different story for her. I cannot elaborate, but I am permitted to say my opinion of the twist, which is this: While it did provide Pike with an opportunity to demonstrate her talent, it also produced some eyeball-rolling. In the history of dumb movie twists, this might be one of the dumbest.

But back to our couple. Nick is remarkably calm considering his wife has just disappeared. While it can only be natural to side with him as an audience member, the evidence is clearly piling up against him in the movie, and an objective detective (Kim Dickens) continually grills him. Our story bounces back and forth so that we see just how bad Nick and Amy were at marriage; it's as if it could have been titled "Scenes from a Marriage About to Turn Mysterious and Violent." The wife is increasingly frightened by her husband, and perhaps vice versa.

There are a lot of compelling moments here about cable media's obsession with scandal, dangerous "Fatal Attraction"-style marriages, and other human flaws. But one cannot help but feel that these would all be so much more interesting to think about while reading the novel. It seems almost inevitable to think unfavorably about a film adaption if one has seen the original material beforehand, but I haven't read "Gone Girl," and yet I know I would have had a better experience reading it than watching the movie. Yet probably the most interesting ideas (in the novel or the movie) are the gender issues. Despite the fact that improvements for women have been one of the most impressive gains in the rights revolutions we've seen over the past century, we still live in an unfortunate era where women are not only underrepresented but shockingly mistreated (to say the very least). Here, we have a story where women are not only capable of such disturbing violence, but they are also the most interesting characters. Well done, Fincher and company.

Fincher's directing is commendable as always, but his storytelling is a bit weak. Frankly, I often have this reaction when watching many of his films. Other than "Se7en," I can't think of an instance where I was totally amazed at his filmmaking. But he has, at least, gotten quality performances from his players, especially Pike and Affleck. Affleck, who won Oscars for writing "Good Will Hunting" and producing "Argo," has shown us arguably his best performance, and Pike, as mentioned, has never been better. The actors in smaller roles--Dickens, Tyler Perry as Affleck's attorney and Neil Patrick Harris as a rich man who has been obsessing over Amy for years--likewise are quite enjoyable to watch. But while the actors are sufficient and mostly have been given satisfying words from screenwriter Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the novel), this is ultimately a mediocre film. After an incredible climax, it goes on for another unwelcomed twenty minutes. It's certainly intriguing but, like most Fincher movies, forgettable.

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