Remember those cheering Facebook posts “Osama bin Gotten”? Here’s the much more intellectual, interesting movie version. We know how this ends. The question is how it was accomplished.
Chastain (who also stars in Mama, see below) is a CIA agent trying to discover bin Laden’s hiding place. Everyone, including rival operative Ehle and a bunch of shadowy men, feel the leader is holed up in a cave somewhere. Chastain has other hunches that must be substantiated. She turns to torturer Clarke to glean information from a prisoner, hoping to end years of false leads.
This historical retelling is being called director Kathryn Bigelow’s great follow-up to The Hurt Locker. I disagree. Her Oscar-winning film had plot, character and theme, comedy and a razor-sharp sense of timing. Zero Dark Thirty is fragmented. The opening sequence is a cliche radio play about 9/11. The first 20 minutes is all shaky camera work and an alphabet soup of military acronyms and Arab names. Also, we know how this ends; Bigelow chooses to tell the events in thrilling real-time. She never, however, shows bin Laden’s life or insight into his conviction, so the puzzle is still incomplete.
What is fascinating here is Chastain, trying to remain determined, stomaching the torture to reach her aim. She and Ehle are rare women in a men’s world. Chastain’s understated discomfort earned her an Oscar nomination in a film with some early minor stumbles.
Mama is another first-time director being produced by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), who seems obsessed with new works that imitate his style. Also, del Toro apparently likes stories about motherhood. He started with The Orphanage by a newbie Juan Antonio Bayona (see his second film, The Impossible, below). He then produced the lackluster remake Don’t be Afraid of the Dark.
Mama apes that second film quite a bit but manages some small improvements. The story is still truncated, more style than sense or substance, and it still has some plot holes.
Coster-Waldau’s brother went missing with his two daughters five years before. The daughters have turned up in an abandoned house in the woods, having miraculously survived. Now uncle Coster-Waldau and rocker girlfriend Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, see above) are raising the girls, who are wild and crazy. Also, a maternal, evil ghost seems to follow the kids around.
Primarily, we go to films like these to be scared, and Mama mostly delivers. The characters and acting are better than most horror thrillers. The mood and style are wonderfully creepy.
However, this horror still possesses certain things that don’t add up. Even after it explains its supernatural rules, Mama breaks them. Survivors are left with a story that’s impossible to explain.
In short, if del Toro is going to mother these things to fruition, he should follow the example of The Orphanage, which had more time and care involved.
Besides your devouring my obsessive ramblings, my fellow cinephiles should always also read Roger Ebert. Here’s one of my favorite quotes: “The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone.”
The Impossible is a perfect example of this. It tells of an English family vacationing in Thailand when the famous 2004 tsunami struck, tearing the family apart for days. The father (McGregor) saves the two youngest children. The mom (an amazing, Oscar-nominated Naomi Watts) is swept into the water and wreckage with her oldest son, Holland. Most of this movie is about mother and son, how Watts bravely fights to reunite the family, and how catastrophe makes Holland grow up quickly.
This is only the second full-length film by Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona. (His first was also brilliant: The Orphanage.) Here, Bayona shows us the unexpected devastation, the wall of water, the dangerous debris whirling within.
The story is based on a real Spanish family, but it’s been Anglicized – probably to help sell it to Americans. Perhaps a small complaint is that even the native people, the 283,000 who died, are relegated to the background.
However, Bayona and Watts help us focus on the hearts of one family in the middle of the disaster. This specificity brings events home to audiences who may not remember that over a quarter of a million people died in that water.
