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PBlue Is the Warmest Color

Opens Fri., Nov. 22 at Harvard Exit and Sundance. Rated NC-17. 179 minutes.

Blue Is the Warmest Color is, on one hand, a three-hour lesbian love story about two Frenchwomen of different classes, partially set in the art world, with a certain amount of NC-17-rated sex. Alternate summary: This is a love story.

I prefer the latter description. Abdellatif Kechiche’s film, which won the top prize at Cannes earlier this year, is rooted in the specifics of its situation, but is universal in ways that make it belong to everybody.

Our main character is Adele, played by the splendid Adele Exarchopoulos. She begins as a high-school student and grows up during a half-dozen years, mostly involving her relationship with Emma (Lea Seydoux). Emma is a dashing figure, artsy and experienced, with upper-class parents and intellectual friends. It’s a lot to handle for Adele, who comes from humbler origins and really just wants to teach grade-school kids. As the bedroom scenes suggest, there is a strong physical connection here, but the movie is about much more than that—why any given love affair might thrive and/or founder.

None of which really indicates Blue’s gorgeous, inquisitive flow. We need those three hours to live in Adele’s world and know its contours. (Kechiche’s previous high point, The Secret of the Grain, similarly encouraged our immersion in a time and place.) Blue’s length also allows the sex scenes to take their proper role in Adele’s world: Their duration shows us how much they matter, but they don’t actually take up that much time when folded into the larger dish. And why shouldn’t a movie about a relationship include a healthy amount of sex? The rightness of the lovemaking here reminds us how many love stories are lying by not including the heavy-breathing nitty-gritty.

Blue has caught some flak since Cannes for its 52-year-old male director’s presumption to make a film about women in love. If I weren’t bored to tears by the triviality of this issue, I might point out that the movie itself (based on a recent graphic novel by Julie Maroh and on Pierre de Marivaux’s 18th-century novel La vie de Marianne) repeatedly raises the question of how difficult it is to understand another person—including a long dinner-party scene in which some pompous males spout off about the essence of womankind. Emma herself is an artist trying to capture Adele as her subject, rendering her in a series of canvases that her inexperienced model doesn’t entirely understand. “It’s me and it isn’t me,” says a puzzled Adele when she sees herself as a painting. She doesn’t know who she is yet, but her exit from the film’s strong final sequence suggests she is ready to slip the frames others have put around her—including the movie itself. Robert Horton

The Book Thief

Opens Fri., Nov. 22 at Lincoln Square and other theaters. Rated PG-13. 125 minutes.

It’s the Holocaust, so it must be Christmastime again. I had never heard of Australian writer Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel The Book Thief, nor was I aware—per the movie’s press kit—that it’s since been translated into 30 languages and sold eight million copies. That’s because I don’t have kids.

This film is also meant for children, and parents can safely drop them off for a matinee, candy money in hand, since there are no gas chambers or mass graves to give them nightmares. And though The Book Thief is a laughably trite historical exercise by adult standards, kids have to start learning about the Holocaust at some point, right? Our orphaned German heroine is Liesel (Sophie Nelisse), aged 11 when sent to live with a childless couple—kindly Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and sour Rosa (Emily Watson). It’s 1938, and you know what follows: the Nuremberg Rally, Jesse Owens at the Olympics, Kristallnacht, the roundup of the Jews, the Anschluss, and the Allied bombing raids that kill German civilians and combatants alike.

Liesel understands little of this at first because she’s illiterate, which has something to do with her dead Communist parents, which is never explained. (I thought the Reds loved books.) But Hans helps teach her to read, as does a handsome Jewish lad hiding in their basement (Ben Schnetzer), and there’s even a cute boy next door (Nico Liersch) with a crush on Liesel. Her adventures are tame; the entire movie is so tame, in fact, that I’d strip the 13 off the PG above. In one writerly flourish, the movie is given posh narration by Death himself. Not only is he British, but Death apparently went to Oxford. Don’t believe me? Steal the book. Brian Miller

The Broken Circle Breakdown

Opens Fri., Nov. 22 at Varsity.
Not rated. 110 minutes.

If there really are bluegrass bands in Belgium, their stories are unlikely to be as eventful as this one. And the ups and downs of any given marriage are unlikely to be as tuneful as the saga of Didier and Elise. What they achieve and endure over a half-dozen years is packed with romance, music, and tragedy—as if distilled from a dozen Appalachian folk songs. There’s something both melodramatic and archetypical about this unwieldy tearjerker, which originated as a musical stage show co-written by and also starring Johan Heldenbergh as Didier.

The movie begins with a pure, frontal Carter Family blast of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” This isn’t realism, but something heightened by the music, like a church service. Here I’ll note that Heldenbergh does his own singing, most of the band is real, and the astonishing Veerle Baetens lends her real voice to Elise’s singing, too. An impetuous tattoo artist, Elise falls instantly for the calm, ursine Didier, moves to his farm (he’s a Flemish “kuu-boy”), and soon joins his band. Baetens has sung in Belgian stage roles, and obviously studied hard to get that Partonesque twang in her voice. This is a band you would pay to see on tour.

Director Felix van Groeningen has given a strenuously elliptical edit to the originally straightforward stage tale, also freighting it with camera effects. This can be jarring, as cheerful campfire sing-alongs give way to teary hospital scenes years later; then we loop back to how Elise and Didier first met, the subsequent birth of a child, an ambulance speeding ominously through the rain, etc. As the movie wears on none too subtlely, the music darkens from giddy love songs to aching ballads. The effect is a bit like Once, if that musical couple had stayed together for the long, difficult business of maintaining a marriage. And while Elise and Didier have a close emotional harmony on stage, he’s a bit of an atheist crank. She in turn has a dark kind of faith, a belief that God takes away as much as He grants. “It was too wonderful to be true,” says Elise of their early marriage. “Life isn’t that generous. It betrays you.”

That bleak assessment keeps Broken Circle from being just another contrived, jolly songfest for the holidays. Its cliches have been weirdly and sometimes compellingly translated—and mistranslated—into another culture. Why are these Belgians so drawn to the doleful spirituals and hymns of Appalachia? Both are small regions accustomed to hardship, squeezed by history, ghost-haunted and sad. And in response, what can you do but sing? Brian Miller

Delivery Man

Opens Fri., Nov. 22 at Kirkland Parkplace and other theaters. Rated PG-13. 
103 Minutes.

Could someone please come and save Vince Vaughn’s career from itself? There was a time when he could glide into a movie and rip it up, either as a comic blabbermouth or an edgily unpredictable straight actor. He still talks a lot in movies, but like Nicolas Cage, he’s let go of the scary originality and been absorbed into a tame industry that burps out the likes of Fred Claus and The Dilemma. Case in point: Delivery Man, a comedy of the heartwarming variety, in which Vaughn labors hard to etch a few signature moments around a farfetched sitcom plot.

Said plot comes from writer/director Ken Scott, remaking his 2011 French-Canadian film Starbuck (seen here in April). Vaughn plays an irresponsible schlub, David Wozniak, who drives the truck for his family’s butcher shop. Somehow—and this part remains fuzzy and forced throughout the story—David has gotten 80 grand in debt with some loan sharks. His distant past is about to catch up with him, too: In his 20s, he was a frequent donor at a fertility clinic, and now 142 or so of his biological offspring are suing the clinic to find out the donor’s identity. This setup is rife with easy solutions to the central problem, all of which are ignored as David enlists his buddy (funny Chris Pratt) as his legal representative and tries to keep his estranged and pregnant girlfriend (Cobie Smulders, from How I Met Your Mother) from learning the truth about his potency. The movie’s failure to ignite is especially annoying because it blithely ignores the authentic issues of uncertain parentage while pretending to address them. Yeesh.

Vaughn is a natural fit for the man-child character, and he’s an established master at the art of conversational backpedaling. He has at least one classic line reading: “Congratulations, darling,” which comes at the end of a long pause, delivered in a superbly Vaughnian deadpan. And there’s the irony of Delivery Man: Vince Vaughn actually is a guy who can deliver, as Swingers spectacularly proved at the beginning of his career. Gus Van Sant was not wrong to cast Vaughn in the Psycho remake, either. Let’s set that dangerous person loose again. Robert Horton

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Opens Fri., Nov. 22 at Cinerama and 
other theaters. Rated PG-13. 146 minutes.

The second chapter of this saga still hasn’t figured out how to reconcile being a big-budget spectacle of violence while criticizing big-budget spectacles of violence. But Catching Fire is an improvement over last year’s quadrilogy opener, even if designed and executed as a placeholder (complete with a cliffhanger ending) rather than a full-blooded story on its own.

In the first installment we met the tragically named Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), who triumphed in the annual Hunger Games staged by an evil dictator (Donald Sutherland) and his media-savvy minions. Katniss had to kill her competitors in the Games, save for Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), with whom she feigned a love interest in order to survive. The two victors, plus their drunky mentor Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), are now paraded around in a Soviet-style pacification of the downtrodden audience; then the pair is inevitably sucked back into another round of the Games.

Despite the 146-minute movie’s lopsided structure, it manages to sustain some momentum—in no small part thanks to Lawrence’s complete commitment to this pulpy material. And director Francis (I Am Legend) Lawrence’s style is an upgrade over the previous film’s phony camera jitters. We also get a new supporting cast with some surprisingly top-shelf talent: Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Games designer; Jeffrey Wright and Jena Malone as former Games victors; and newcomer/sure-thing breakout star Sam Claflin as a potential third romantic possibility for Katniss. (Liam Hemsworth is around again as her small-town beau, once again sidelined from the real action.)

Catching Fire uncorks a few genuinely exciting revelations in its final minutes, which aren’t quite enough to cover the absence of an actual climax for this story. But after years of the Twilight movies, we should be prepared for that: The real goal here is a DVD box set, ready for power-watching marathons. (The final book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, Mockingjay, will be split into two films released in 2014 and ’15, so next time expect even more water-treading.) I still don’t understand why we never see anybody in the movie actually watching the Hunger Games on TV, given their place in this society’s culture. But the franchise has to be careful with that—criticizing the audience for its taste for mindless distraction is probably not the wisest path to blockbuster success. Robert Horton

PNebraska

Opens Fri., Nov. 22 at Guild 45th.
Rated R. 115 minutes.

How many of us open those e-mails from disinherited Nigerian princes or the “You May Already Be a Winner!” sweepstakes letters that once clogged our parents’ mailboxes? That such a missive launches our elderly hero on a foolish quest to claim $1 million in Nebraska gives the movie a vintage quality. Woody (Bruce Dern) is plainly deluded, like Don Quixote; and there’s the possibility that this cotton-haired, ex-alcoholic Montana geezer is also senile. His son David (Will Forte) becomes the enabler/Sancho Panza figure on their trek to Nebraska, where Woody expects to get his prize.

There is a lifetime of regret and bad parenting to reveal in Nebraska, one reason Alexander Payne sat on the script for a decade. Given the obvious parallels to his 2002 About Schmidt, the wait was a good idea. Yet Nebraska is a gentler, more comic road movie, and more forgiving of its hero. Jack Nicholson’s insurance executive was then a successful bastard; Dern’s car mechanic is now an unsuccessful bastard. And Nebraska comes with a more left-field pedigree than About

Schmidt, based on a novel by Louis Begley: It’s the first produced screenplay from Bob Nelson, a mainstay on KING TV’s Almost Live! comedy show during the ’90s. Nelson based it partly on his family upbringing in the Great Plains, where those big skies and vast fields make a man small. Self-importance is ridiculous against such scale, yet Payne finds plenty of bulging egos to lance. Everyone must be leveled, but softly, to meet the horizon.

About Dern. A contemporary of Nicholson, he had his career zenith during the ’70s, which so informed Payne’s early taste. Dern’s been chasing this script for 10 years, and was rewarded with the Best Actor prize at Cannes this spring. At 77, this is his last trip to the fair, his Oscar shot, and he knows it. For Woody, too, his triumphant return to Hawthorne—en route to the sweepstakes office in Lincoln, Nebraska—is his last hurrah. Supposedly a prospective millionaire in his old hometown, he’s a big shot at last, grander than his bullying old business partner Ed (Stacy Keach). If the locals mistakenly gush over Woody’s good fortune, and if his own family, the Grants, come begging for riches, he enjoys the acclaim. He’s somebody, not just an old coot who can’t even drive anymore. Given this role with very few lines, Dern marvelously conveys a shy, stubborn pride, a sense of grubby vindication against a lifetime of scorn and defeat.

Stuck in a dead-end job, recently dumped by his girlfriend, David both does and doesn’t understand this. “What’s the harm in letting him have his little fantasy?” he asks his mother, who staunchly opposes the trip. David sees a father/son opportunity to bond—and the same brief escape from Billings (filmed to look as ugly as it is). Saturday Night Live pegged Forte as a comic actor, but like Dern he knows this is a rare opportunity, and he seizes it with the same quiet conviction. Something like George Clooney’s lawyer in The Descendants, David is a guy who learns the value of listening.

There is a danger here that Nebraska, shot in black-and-white, with its shuffling old hero, could get sticky with pathos. But neither Payne nor Nelson believes that suffering confers nobility. Passing by Mount Rushmore, Woody scoffs, “It’s just a bunch of rocks.” His family is full of buffoons, as gleefully noted by Woody’s wife, the movie’s salty truth-teller. Kate (June Squibb) cheerfully defames the dead, ridicules Woody’s lottery dreams, and gives zero fucks about offending anyone. And yet she’s quietly loyal to her husband, with or without his million.

With its mix of delusion, decency, and dunces, Nebraska is a little slow for my taste but enormously rewarding in the end, one of the year’s best films. Perhaps more than any other American director, Payne understands the power of silence. There’s a moment when the humiliated Woody reclaims his sweepstakes letter from a bar full of yokels that’s as sad as anything I’ve seen at the movies. Then their mocking laughter slides into an awkward hush, and they feel ashamed. Woody takes the letter and heads out the door. His journey isn’t over yet. Brian Miller

Torn

Opens Fri., Nov. 22 at Sundance Cinemas.
Not rated. 80 minutes.

A very modern problem lies at the heart of Torn. An explosion in a suburban California mall has killed 10 people, including a handful of teens. First reported as a ruptured gas main, the incident is soon revealed to be a bombing. And the stage is set for a 21st-century whodunit that attempts to reveal the destructive nature of a common American prejudice.

The catalyst in Jeremiah Birnbaum’s debut feature is an angry young man, but there’s little effort here to explore his character. Rather, this is a story about the fallout of the terrorist attack—the way it affects two families and their archetypical sons. Until the blast, Lea (Dendrie Taylor) was a single mother, divorced from her devoutly evangelical ex, raising a heavy-metal-loving outsider son. Having also lost their son Walter in the bombing, Pakistani immigrants Maryam and Ali (Mahnoor Baloch and Faran Tahir) are immediately brought under FBI scrutiny after it emerges that Walter attended a controversial mosque.

The situation lends itself to stereotype. “I’ve got a bomb and a Pakistani kid, so I’m sure you can appreciate where I’m going to have to go with this,”says the hard-nosed FBI agent. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that law enforcement isn’t the concern here. Torn isn’t a procedural after all. Instead, Birnbaum focuses on the plight of the two mothers, who become friends as their families are isolated and then torn apart by speculation while the single eyewitness lies in a coma. From there, Torn becomes appropriately complex; no one, including the mothers, knows what to think or whom to blame. It could have ended there, and Birnbaum would have succeeded in making his audience think. Unfortunately it doesn’t; the director, like his film’s accusers, is blinded by the lust for answers. Mark Baumgarten

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