The Promise (2017)

Score: 3 / 5

Mikael, an Armenian apothecary in idyllic foothills of the Ottoman Empire, knows he could be doing more. Betrothing himself to the daughter of a local wealthy man, he uses the sizable dowry to travel to Constantinople and attend medical school. There, enchanted by city life and the multicultural pleasures at every turn, he meets Ana, a dancer and mentor to his young cousins, with whom Mikael is living. Charming and vivacious, Ana is also Armenian but had been raised in Paris, and she is romantically involved with an American reporter named Chris. Set in the beautiful, bustling city during and after World War I, this film follows these three lovers through their toils of the heart. It's such a shame that their romantic triangle was broken up by the Armenian Genocide.

Perhaps that's too harsh. The Promise is, in retrospect, one of the very few films about the tragic holocaust, and as such it deserves more praise. The events it depicts are still denied by some, and the Turkish government still refuses to call it a genocide, even though the word was coined in 1943 to describe the horrors inflicted on the Armenian people, among others. The film effectively dramatizes the hows and wheres and whos of the mass killings, and succeeds in involving us emotionally with the fear and chaos felt by the Armenians.

Where the film falters, however, is in the whys. It seems to intentionally avoid delving into the cultural factors and social atmosphere, content to rather hint and suggest, making the events feel like a natural byproduct of living in close quarters with other cultures and ethnic groups. While that may be historically debatable, I would have been far more interested in seeing a modern dramatization of motivations, conflicts, and real-life consequences than in episodic slices of fictional life.

Actually, I think my problem with the film is a similar problem I have with historical fiction that attempts to take on iconic moments in history. In essence: The Promise does not take inspiration from the ilk of Schindler's List or Zero Dark Thirty, but rather from Titanic or Colonia (to use a recent example). Rather than focusing on the epic journey of a person or a people through hell to their fate, or using history as the main narrative frame on which the drama may be hung, The Promise relies on the predictably soapy drama to push the story while the riveting history becomes little more than set dressing. While the latter can be done well (just look at Titanic), those examples are few and far between, and are only accomplished when the drama is expertly written, paced carefully, and envisioned with honesty and novelty. This one doesn't have those benefits.

I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the picture. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (The Others, The Twilight Saga, The Road, Blue Jasmine) knows exactly what he's doing and allows the pulsing color and light of his images to capture our attention. The cast does its best with the material, and our leads turn out solid work; Christian Bale seems distinctly out of place, but he's only occasionally on screen here. Of course, I'd watch Oscar Isaac do literally anything, and personal favorite Shohreh Aghdashloo makes any movie for me.  Director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda, Reservation Road) obviously means well, though he utterly fails to balance the film and its narrative swings from clumsy to simple like a leaden pendulum. A film eponymously promising great things deserved far better.

IMDb: The Promise

Elle (2016)

Score: 4.5 / 5

On my wall of alphabetically listed DVDs, smack-dab between Ella Enchanted and Emma, you will find this little French gem. A more far-removed film, however, could hardly be placed here, as the titular protagonist is nearly polar opposite to her fairytale counterparts. While the feminist elements of each film will certainly provoke spirited debate, that's not the primary difference with Elle: this movie is unrelentingly horrific.

We might expect as much from director Paul Verhoeven, whose Basic Instinct still riles up many a cinephile contemplating images of women in film. To only slightly less extent, his presentation of this film nevertheless centers on the limits of a woman's body and spirit faced with brutal violence. Yet for all its cruelty, Elle doesn't seem to harbor the same ill will toward womanhood and female sexuality as Basic Instinct. Indeed, we might fairly say that the 1992 noir flick was an erotic thriller; Elle is anything but that, as the narrative starts, continues, and ends with rape.

Michele, assertive head of a video game company, seems to have few healthy relationships. Her workplace underlings hate her and lust after her. Her business partner Anna is her closest friend, but their relationship is ambiguously erotic, and Michele is secretly sleeping with Anna's husband. Michele chastises her son for his lackluster career and for submitting to his manipulative and probably unfaithful girlfriend. Michele's ex-husband is still friendly, but his new wife is subject to Michele's fierce criticism. Michele flirts with her devout Catholic neighbor's husband. And Michele resents her narcissistic mother and her affairs with younger men. Finally, Michele hardly benefits socially from her parentage, as her father was a notorious mass-murderer who involved Michele in his crimes.

Despite all this, Michele is hardly the kind of woman to whom things happen; she actively does, though her actions are usually less than kind. After the opening scene, when she is raped by an intruder wearing a mask, she immediately cleans the mess and resumes her life without telling anyone. Suspecting all the men in her life, Michele begins hunting the man who violated her. She seems unconcerned about her troubled relationships and her cruelty toward even the people closest to her. She subverts and challenges our expectations at every turn, never playing a victim and instead actively using sex, violence, and sadism to assert her independence and transcend her surroundings.

A gripping, haunting odyssey into the heart of a woman, Elle is a brilliant film. It's also anything but easy. Endlessly complex, totally unpredictable, it presents us with a figure we're supposed to identify with, and then leaves us breathlessly wondering if she was the hero or the antihero. Did we just witness a sociopath's rape-revenge story? Is it fair to question her mental health after what has happened to her? Should we applaud her resolve, commend her intelligence? Should we condemn her sadistic fantasies, her emotional violence? Similarly, we might feel ambivalent about the film itself: Are the rape scenes excessive? What does it do to the audience to see a raped woman actively engaging in rape sex scenarios with her rapist? Are we supposed to know where the consent is, where the line of abuse is crossed? None of these are easily answered in the film's context. Then again, what is the film's context? Is it a dark drama, a psychological thriller, a psychosexual horror flick, a disturbing romance? Is it fair to the woman character's perspective to label her experience as something negative at all? I just don't know.

The film is problematic, there is no question of that. But, as we saw in Gone Girl and Basic Instinct and in many other films, there is always more to be said. Praise and condemnation are easy to shout out but harder to apply, and that's where Verhoeven succeeds here. Because that's life, isn't it? Messy and confused, twisted and dark, life doesn't play by the rules. Isabelle Huppert plays into that as our protagonist, refusing to be categorized as a villain or victim in a film whose premise would normally beg for those archetypes. It's a dazzling work, and one that deserves a lot of discussion afterward. Don't watch it alone or before bed; you'll do yourself a disservice in avoiding its challenges.

IMDb: Elle

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Score: 2 / 5

Perfectly titled, this shell of a movie is indeed inhabited by a ghost. It's a beautiful shell, to be sure, ornate and visually inventive. Whereas the titular "ghost" suggests a living human spirit with memories and feeling, one that lives inside the human brain of a robotic body, the ghost of the film is unfortunately quite dead.

Another vision of the future in which humans and technology combine in unholy fusion, Ghost in the Shell feels as though the sum of its parts is of less value than its individual components. Following Major Mira Killian, a cyborg with a robotic body and human brain, we descend deep into this new culture of people augmented with machines a populace of artifice and distraction. She has been created to be a counter-terrorist agent, and it doesn't take long for her to recognize her dissatisfaction; "glitches" show her memories of a past life, presumably of when she was human, and she begins to suspect that her superiors harbor dark designs.

It's a tired tale, a rote crime thriller with lots of action. The figure we suspect to be the primary antagonist becomes the catalyst for Killian's awakening, a shady assassination spree is revealed as corporate backstabbing, and a dazzling vision of the future ultimately dissolves into blind violence and laughable predictability. Heavily cliched plot points and flat characterizations render the film watchable but mind-numbing. I found myself hopelessly distracted, wanting to care about the people on screen but far more engaged with the holograms and digital screens in the background. Impressive visual invention can only do so much, and after the first half hour or so, this Ghost dissipates into thin air.

I couldn't help thinking, while viewing, that other films have done it all before, and better. As much as Ghost wants to be dark, poetic, and edgy, it ends up feeling cheap and familiar. It might have worked as a noir piece; Blade Runner certainly did, and it handled its own philosophy with grander style and considerable grace. Ghost doesn't even try to mine its considerable thematic weight, beyond a gimmicky few scenes of Killian looking for and finding her birth mother. Even those moments ring hollow, as Scarlett Johansson -- despite her talents carrying the film against all odds -- is more than a little too white to relate to her "mother", Kaori Momoi. I don't want to dive into the whitewashing controversy, especially considering that Killian's body was literally constructed, except to say that the central emotional journey of our protagonist just doesn't work due to the casting.

As I say, Blade Runner or even The Matrix both handle similar material better. Unlike this film, those each balance the melancholia and spectacle, capitalizing on their characters and themes with style and intelligence. Ghost wants to be eerie but settles for iffy. Its glossy exterior belies an empty void. The mystery it promises is no more mysterious than its first half-hour. What is unmistakably intended to be a cult favorite is lost in big-budget excess, and the sweet, tied-up ending seems determined to churn out a sequel. The only thing that kept me engaged past the halfway mark was Juliette Binoche as Dr Ouelet, who exhibits the film's only character development in one particularly lovely scene. Other than that, I was left wondering what the shell these filmmakers were doing.

IMDb: Ghost in the Shell

Anesthesia (2015)

Score: 2.5 / 5

The thing about ensemble dramas is that we love them. Even when they're not great, we get pulled in by the talent and hope the movie works too. Tim Blake Nelson tries again here to be the writer and director of a sprawling film highlighting the interconnected nature of human life, and this time he assembles the cast to make it worth a watch. It's just too bad his work doesn't provide a better foundation for them.

It would seem that Anesthesia might concern a feeling of numbness in modern life, a sort of artificial coping mechanism to deal with the pains of our existence. To some extent, Nelson's film does explore those ideas. We have a philosophy professor (Sam Waterston) preparing for retirement and contemplating his life's work as he aims for purpose- or intent-driven behaviors and one of his students (Kristen Stewart) who harms herself. We have an alcoholic housewife (Gretchen Mol) and mother of two trying to be the picture-perfect school mom, though her husband (Corey Stoll) is having an affair somewhere in town. We have an intelligent but failed writer (Nelson himself) and his children who are all fighting different addictions while his wife confronts cancer. It's a messy ensemble, and the actors fir their parts perfectly, performing with conviction and passion.

But though they're all trying to anesthetize themselves, Nelson does the exact opposite for us, plucking our heartstrings with wild abandon and forcing us to feel every little sting. Uncomfortably funny but comically sad, the whole enterprise feels underbaked. Contrived at best, the plot feels like Crash but cheaper and simpler and with a thesaurus. Waxing philosophic at every turn, the film meanders with a nihilistic goal, as its various themes of coming of age, addiction, fatality, depression, purpose, fidelity, and of course DEATH get pounded into our ears. Waterston carries the real weight here along with Stewart, as they deliver lengthy, complex monologues about the pains and purposes of life.

While I ordinarily like this heavy, heady stuff, here there is so little dramatic meat to feast on that the monologues feel gimmicky and cruel, a cerebral venture without focus. It tries so hard to make us empathize with its characters, but ultimately the film doesn't let us know much about the characters beyond their spotlight moments of revelation. They quickly become archetypes, caricatures of experimental teens, troubled spouses, struggling addicts, and none of them stick in your mind once the credits start rolling. One character refers to an "echo chamber", and that is an unfortunate but apt description of this film.

IMDb: Anesthesia

Jackie (2016)

Score: 4.5 / 5

We'll not see another like her, and we'll not see many biopics like Jackie. Unconventional in the best possible way, the film launches us headfirst into the hidden life of the icon who was no less unconventional in winning the hearts of Americans. This is not your typical tale, it's told atypically, and it plays a fine line between ravishing tragedy and devastating glory.

Exploring the time immediately following the assassination of her husband in 1963, Jackie reels us in by splashing us into different scenes of her life. Director Pablo Larrain leads us on a nonlinear journey to the heart of our hero as she balances politics and society and motherhood and widowhood and religion and style and formality and grief. He doesn't want us to see a great Greek tragedy about a dynasty in free fall and the horrors of family drama. He doesn't even want us to view the film as a history text documenting the trials and tribulations of the "woman behind the man." He shows us a woman. Sure, she happens to be grieving. Sure, she happens to be the most famous woman in the country. But we see her celebrating life, caring for her children, concerned for her legacy, brandishing her wit, unlacing her sorrow (behind closed doors, of course), and generally being a person. We see her building her own strength, refusing to let men run her life and her image, demanding a place in history as more than the wife of a murdered president while also lovingly facilitating his own memorial. Her search for meaning and fight for survival are inspiring.

And it works best because of Natalie Portman. Her indelibly nuanced performance aches with passion and intelligence. Her affected speech, commanding presence, and subtle movement work combine in a mesmerizing, chameleonic display of excellent acting craft. Thankfully, her director is smart enough to let her take charge, and he seems to follow her lead willingly. Though using an unusually complex narrative structure -- less a biopic than a character study -- Larrain handles his art as a master, gracefully implementing visual invention and stylistic grace in tandem with the story. It may take several viewings to appreciate the set decoration, costumes, music, screenplay, and performances (especially those by Peter Sarsgaard and John Hurt in his final film role), but by no means do those excellent and abundant elements distract from the real drama pouring out of the screen.

I only wish I had seen this before Oscar night. I had thought it was Oscar-bait, a vehicle for Portman that would surely flirt with sentimental exploitation if not wed it and bed it in one sad mess. I was wrong. This isn't just an awards movie. It's high art, great cinema, and novel storytelling.

IMDb: Jackie