Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

Opens Fri., Aug. 23 at Guild 45th.
Not rated. 105 minutes.

There are many things to admire about Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, from its controlled mood to its fine cast to its folkie-fiddle musical score. A great deal of care, and a lot of affection for movie history, went into this low-key Sundance success. So why am I unconvinced? Maybe everything’s just a little too right, a little too calculated in writer-director David Lowery’s neo-Western-noir. This movie always knows exactly what it’s doing, and that gets a little suffocating.

The ingenious opening reels introduce us to a desperate couple, Ruth (Rooney Mara) and Bob (Casey Affleck). Their criminal history is mostly left offscreen, but we witness a showdown with Texas cops that results in Bob taking the blame for a shot fired by the pregnant Ruth. Bob is hustled off to the pokey and four years pass, but the bullet remains lodged in the storyline: Small-town policeman Patrick (Ben Foster), the very officer wounded by Ruth’s gun, is now hanging around her and the baby. Patrick is a nice man, clearly lovestruck, and he’s probably better for her than callow Bob—but such niceties hardly matter in a doomy scenario like this. Bob has escaped from jail, and we know where his path leads.

Lowery misses few pictorial possibilities with the Texas locations, and his movie has an old-time feel despite being set in the 1970s. Yet the location and the period should have quotation marks, because Ain’t Them Bodies Saints takes place exclusively in a movie universe, aspiring to the tradition of Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night and Terrence Malick’s Badlands. And speaking of Malick: As pretty as Bradford Young’s cinematography is here, we might need to call a moratorium on close-ups of waving wheat backlit by “magic hour” sunsets, because these imitations of the Tree of Life director are getting out of hand.

The people onscreen matter, however. Mara, the girl with the dragon tattoo herself, continues to be a novel presence; and she and Affleck are masters of the art of hushed, uninflected vocal delivery. Affleck doesn’t do anything new here, but Foster does: This incorrigible over-actor (see Alpha Dog or 3:10 to Yuma) has tamped things down to give a gentle performance of great feeling. All of which is admirable—there’s that word again—and consistently interesting to watch. But maybe the film needs less saintliness, and more sinning. Robert Horton

PIn a World…

Opens Fri., Aug. 23 at Sundance and other theaters. Rated R. 93 minutes.

There’s a real basis for the title and guiding spirit to Lake Bell’s winning little showbiz comedy. The basso-voiced phrase “In a world…” began many a movie trailer written and delivered by Don LaFontaine (1940-2008), whose death here inspires a mad scramble for work among Hollywood’s lesser vocal talent. They all want to inherit LaFontaine’s mantle, presently worn by Sam Solomon (Fred Melamed), whose daughter Carol (Bell) is a less successful practitioner of the family trade.

Carol is a voice nerd, fascinated by the accents she covertly tapes with her ever-present Dictaphone, yet her career is confined to voice coaching, not movie work. When the widowed Sam kicks Carol out of the house to make way for a young new girlfriend (Alexandra Holden), he condescendingly tells his 31-year-old daughter, “I’m going to support you by not supporting you.” Implicit in his rebuke is that women, with their higher voices, have no place in his manly profession, where his friendly rival is the jocular trust-funder Gustav (Ken Marino). Then the couch-surfing Carol catches a break at a recording studio run by amiable Louis (Demetri Martin, becoming too typecast as nice).

Everything that transpires among Lake’s players is predictable, but in a pleasant, breezy way. In a World… plays like an overstuffed sitcom, with Carol’s wacky friends and neighbors dropping in for brief, effective bits (these include Nick Offerman, Rob Corddry, and Tig Notaro). It’s a knowing industry satire, but not a mean industry satire. (Eva Longoria shows up to make sport of herself, and a bigger star later appears in the trailer for the ludicrous epic The Amazon Games.) Bell doesn’t write the conflicts, easily resolved, or characters any deeper than they need be—save for the imperious yet fragile Sam. (Some may recall the wonderful Melamed, an actual voiceover artist, from the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man.)

And Lake wisely places a sour little cherry on Carol’s cake with the final caution of a female studio executive (Geena Davis): One small triumph over sexism won’t change an industry. Women still live in a world… Well, you complete the sentence. Brian Miller

When Comedy Went to School

Opens Fri., Aug. 23 at Varsity.

Not rated. 77 minutes.

If the name Shecky Greene does not ring a bell, you might not be the target audience for this new documentary. But there was once a time when someone with this unlikely name roamed the Earth, and this film chronicles the prehistoric, pre-TV age in which such comedians flourished. The doc proposes New York’s Catskill Mountains as the cradle of a couple of generations of comedy, and it is hard to argue with the assertion. A vast parade of stand-up comics, mostly Jewish, passed through the vacation resorts of the Borscht Belt, as the circuit was called. During the mid-20th century, the Catskills hummed with holiday-makers seeking escape from New York, in search of all-you-can-eat buffets and the latest variation on the mother-in-law joke.

This was the testing ground for Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar, Jackie Mason, and the king of the one-liners, Henny Youngman. Jerry Lewis was a busboy at a Catskills hotel before he wangled his way onstage. The place was also significant in American Jewish culture, as a collection of genial, elderly interviewees attest. One of them is ex-CNN talker Larry King, who shares both an appreciation of the comedy kings and his recollection of losing his virginity to a married vacationer at home plate on a Catskills ballfield (he was a resort waiter at the time).

Directors Mevlut Akkaya and Ron Frank manage to get Lewis, Caesar, Mort Sahl, and Jerry Stiller to reminisce about the era; Robert Klein—who also had first-hand experiences in the Catskills—is the doc’s agreeable host. Problem is, this rich subject is presented in a scattered way that eventually becomes irritating enough to detract from the funny stuff. A vintage Youngman joke is followed by a vague anecdote is followed by windy generalizing about social conditions in the 1960s. The movie settles for nice nostalgia when you really want to know more about how this system worked, and more about the personalities involved.

And you want more stand-up. The snippets we hear bring back an era that seemed utterly Squaresville by the time Richard Pryor and George Carlin began riding high, yet today they sound quaint and historic and genuinely funny—and are delivered with crack timing, too. The film clocks in at 77 minutes, leaving plenty of room for more jokes. No Catskills dining room would get away with serving such small portions. Robert Horton

The World’s End

Opens Fri., Aug. 23 at Sundance and other theaters. Rated. 109 minutes.

The trailers and ads for this third Edgar Wright-Simon Pegg-Nick Frost collaboration clearly warn that it isn’t a straight English pub-crawl comedy, yet the studio wants its precious secrets kept. It’s a tiresome publicity game, but I’ll play along. Wright previously directed Pegg and Frost in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, movies that inspired much love among lads with too many DVDs and action figures on the shelves of their basement bachelor apartments. These modest English bromances are quirkier and more regional than their Apatowian cousins across the pond, and The World’s End—named for a fateful pub—transpires in the sleepy suburb whence our five heroes gladly escaped after a failed 1990 pub crawl. Decades later, black sheep Gary (Pegg) is the least successful of the bunch (how much so is gradually revealed). The rest of them—played by Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan—have accepted boring bourgeois adulthood as their due. They don’t want to leave their comfortable London lives when Gary demands they complete their drinkathon.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to join them either. Pegg’s made the calculated decision here to ratchet up his screen persona from bossily conscientious to full-blown obnoxious, from control freak to out-of-control freak. We know from the first minutes that Gary’s stuck in the past, but The World’s End flogs that point into the ground (same ’90s wardrobe, car, and cassette mix tapes, etc.). His four mates are soon ready to abandon him in Newton Haven, and so was I. At that point, 40 minutes in, the movie isn’t going anywhere beyond the predictable pitfall of alcoholic nostalgia. Yet I remained in my seat when The World’s End suddenly and enjoyably shifted genres (that being Plot Turn A). The film gets a needed jolt of energy: clumsy, comic fight scenes, panicked chases from pub to pub, and lines like, “Pop her head off like an aspirin bottle!” This works fine for a while—until, like the first section, it runs out of ideas.

In their screenplay, Pegg and Frost again return to their love of cheesy old movie genres and the vicissitudes of male friendship. Before, in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, a pair of movie lovers essentially found themselves in real-life movie plots. But no one wants to watch Pegg and Frost’s characters—Gary and teetotaling attorney Andy—muddle through their mid-life crises a la The Big Chill, and they know it. Yet flipping the script doubles the stakes: They’ve got to write a unified ending for both disparate halves of the movie, and they don’t. Instead they cough up Plot Turn B, an epilogue that should’ve been kept for the DVD extras. For all the prior goodwill generated by the Wright-Pegg-Frost combine, The World’s End plays like three different sketches from their early days in English TV. When Frost says, “We are not teenagers anymore; you should grow up, mate,” it sounds like a note from the writers’ room. Brian Miller

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