Reviews

There's nothing I like better than a good dystopic and this pic has its dystopia down pat. Set in a near future that has seen the death of the world's children and a pandemic of infertility the film moves deliberately forward to the inevitable great hope, about which I'll say no more, across a sad grayscape of loss and despair and survivor's guilt and survivor's humor.

I was so happy to see Michael Caine's jolly little performance here because, while he's always an asset (except in movies such as Bewitched which appear to render assets an impossibility), I was beginning to wonder if he still had any life, any vibrancy left in him after seeing him in some of his recent, more quiet roles.

I was also extremely impressed (and relieved -- because I always want very much to like the movie I'm watching, after all) by the fact that this film, while out of necessity relying on certain conventions of the action and science fiction genres manages, when some of its protagonists are "on the run" to avoid devolving into the usual chase/fight/wisecrack scenes as too many potentially good films do (The Island, for example, which peaked early and went south fast.), but instead shifts gears during the fugitve segment to resolve the pursuit by way of a (correctly) dreary sequence of urban combat on a near-documentary level of reality suffused with the sense of a clumsy, desperately stumbling struggle to live and maybe live better.

I'd like to tell you why I liked the ending, but I don't like spoilers when they can be avoided, but I will say that I like both types endings to pictures with dystopian settings. I like a hopeful dystopia if it's accomplished correctly, without hypersentimentality because such a work causes me to think: Yes, that's us, it's bad, but somehow we'll always make it because of the potential that's inside each and every one of us. And I like a hopeless dystopia, if it's accomplished correctly and without excessive heavy-handedness because such a work makes me think: Yep. That's us. We've screwed things up to the point where everything we do to try to make things better can only screw them up more and sooner or later we'll be the death of us.

Anyway, I liked this film because it made me think: That's us.

You know, I might have sorta liked this movie if it had been made ten or twenty years ago and if the actor who did the voice-over hadn't overdone his voice-overing to the point where he sounded like an aging Agnes Moorhead hysterically reprising her role in the classic radio play Sorry, Wrong Number.

I can't tell you why this movie should have been made a long time ago without "spoiling" the ending. Suffice to say that while maybe it hasn't exactly "been done", the concept, the modes of thought, behind the plot and surprise ending have been so much in the cultural ether for the last two decades or so that there is no surprise. There's only disappointment and disgust.

I'm tired of horror movies that turn out to be mere unpleasantness and sadness rather than true horror.

Last night, I watched The Interpreter, primarily because I wanted to see if Sydney Pollack still had it and in my humble opinion, he does. I don't see too much film-making like this these days. For one thing, it's slow, but in a good way. Too many suspense films speed by at such an absurd rate that there's never any time for a mood to be built or characters to be known. Here, we get to know the characters intimately and are gradually drawn into the complex and compelling and relevant plot. Speaking of relevance, there is, here, a "message", but it's delivered organically by way of carefully structured storytelling and character development, not with a bullhorn and fireworks. Speaking of characters, I love the understated performances in this film by Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. I love also the moments in this film, such as when Penn's character in a country-western bar unplugs the jukebox to stop the noise of some country-pop crap then restarts it in order to play Lyle Lovett's wonderful "If I Had a Boat" then goes to a pay phone and calls his own house just to hear his wife's voice on the answering machine.

Also, while I have nothing against fast, action-adventure-cartoon-type violence when it's done just right. The violence in this film isn't exciting. It's just as it should be considering the subject matter. It's sad and desolate and when a man speaks his last words to the child-soldier who has just shot him and when a bus is bombed or a desperate man is betrayed and murdered you feel it, the final moments of human lives; a being being taken away. There's room for sentiment in such films and it doesn't have to be sap as it so often is.

I don't follow entertainment news much these days (much as I'd love to) because such stories and reviews and even trailers (which I also used to love watching) give away far too much of the story (which I'm trying here not to do) so I don't know how this film was received, but I hope it did well and if it didn't, I hope audiences come to discover and love it gradually so that there might be more films like it.