Leviathan

Runs Fri. April 5–Thurs. April 11 at Northwest Film Forum. Not Rated. 
87 minutes.

Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Leviathan presents itself as a radical rethink of documentary form. There’s no narrator, no context, no thesis or conventional A-B-C scene logic. Nor is there any explanation—until you read the lengthy end credits—as to what fishing vessel we’re watching, or who are its crew. Leviathan is seemingly not “about” anything besides the messy, noisy process of commercial fishing. The camera pivots wildly to and fro, forcing us into its POV; many scenes are shot at night, adding to the murk; and the ship’s grunting crewmen barely utter an intelligible word. Unlike on the reality TV show Deadliest Catch, these guys aren’t given personalities or backstories. They’re just cogs in the manual-industrial business of putting seafood on our plates.

You could argue, of course, that documentary director Frederick Wiseman has been here before; only in a film like his 2009 Le Danse, there’s the appeal of watching graceful performers rehearse at the Paris Opera Ballet. What Castaing-Taylor and Paravel give us instead are fish heads and guts sloshing across the deck, the endless whining of the winches, nets dumping their haul, churning diesel engines, boredom in the break room, and a squadron of seabirds trailing the trawler, their wings lit white against the night by its lights. The camera even lunges overboard, where bloody entrails plummet down like red rain.

Leviathan is certainly not after beauty, which may be its entire point. Instead of seeking soaring tuna or glistening salmon, these Massachusetts fishermen drag their nets for ugly bottom fish, also pulling up crabs, rays, and bulging-eyed beasts that would never be served in any fine restaurant. This is the kind of catch that gets chopped up into bits, then reassembled into something that looks like seafood. Or maybe it ends up as cat food, who knows? Leviathan is a chore to sit through, but it gives you room to think about what you’re seeing. Beyond its stunt opacity, it is just another food doc—like Sushi: The Global Catch, Food, Inc., Food Fight, or Our Daily Bread—only without the talking heads and agenda. This makes it both familiar and completely ineffective. There’s a lack of substance hiding behind a lack of form. BRIAN MILLER

The Place Beyond the Pines

Opens Fri. April 5 at Harvard Exit. 
Rated R. 141 minutes.

Hey, girl. Your imaginary boyfriend, Ryan Gosling, got all muscled and tattooed for his new movie. He’s shirtless in the very first scene, an ultra-long take that leads from the dressing room at a two-bit traveling circus to a round cage full of snarling motorcycles. There he does 360-degree orbits with his crew. His character, Luke, is a bad boy—just the way you like them. But then Luke discovers that a former one-night stand (Eva Mendes) has a toddler-aged son. Suddenly he turns paternal. He quits the circus, tells Romina he wants to settle down to take care of her and the kid. Luke is now both the bad boy and the tender father—the perfect guy, except that he has no job skills but motorcycle-riding and, taught by a new mentor, bank-robbing.

Pines is the second film by Derek Cianfrance to star the Gos (after Blue Valentine), but it turns out to be a much larger and longer ensemble piece, one that eventually skips 15 years forward from its initial story. One of Luke’s stickups is interrupted by an idealistic, ambitious young cop with a law degree. Avery (Bradley Cooper) has his eye on politics, and self-described “psycho” Luke turns out to be a useful stepping stone to that career. Fifteen years later, however, Avery will have to reconsider the debt he owes Luke’s family.

Shot in upstate New York, Pines aims to be a small-town generational saga, in which the sins of fathers are settled by their sons. Cianfrance shows admirable seriousness about his characters, but only the early crime scenes have any spark to them. Mentored by a sleepy car mechanic (Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, of Animal Kingdom), Luke loves the rush of terrifying bank tellers and blasting his bike through traffic, the cops on his tail. It’s better than any circus act—for us, too. The domestic scenes don’t play nearly as well, and the movie’s second two acts are essentially soap opera: bad marriages, dirty cops (Ray Liotta plays Ray Liotta), neglected wives, guilty politicians, errant teens, and teary confrontations. Cianfrance’s seriousness becomes smothering and his plotting claustrophobic, like the motorcycles racing inside the cage, never going anywhere. BRIAN MILLER

PReality

Opens Fri. April 5 at Meridian. 
Rated R. 115 minutes.

Judging from Italian movies about Italian television, that nation’s TV shows consist of nothing but T&A and shameful exhibitionism. Everything that Italian intellectuals loathe about broadcasting can be summed up in two words: Silvio Berlusconi. In Reality, Neapolitan fishmonger Luciano (Aniello Arena) becomes obsessed with the TV show Big Brother. The process is gradual, like a virus infecting its host. Luciano has nice kids and a loving wife (Loredana Simioli); his working-class family lives in a crumbling old apartment complex surrounded by various colorful cousins. Really, he has nothing to complain about. Life is good . . . until that virus infects his brain.

Director Matteo Garrone broke into world cinema with his 2008 adaptation of the true-crime tale Gomorrah, also set around Naples. That film was a transfixing fresco of heady images and primal violence. Sleek mob killers operated by medieval codes of vengeance and loyalty. It was both ancient and modern. Reality is also thus divided. Luciano plies an honorable, traditional trade, but he and his wife are also dabbling in a computer-age scam, taking kickbacks on what they call “robots,” an unreliable all-in-one kitchen appliance. Their apartment is from the 19th century but inside they’re enthralled by the lurid modern hook-ups of Grande Fratello on TV. Luciano’s kids beg him to audition for the show; he does, then delusion sets in. If he gets on reality TV, he reasons, “We’re set for life. All our problems are solved!”

Are the talent scouts secretly monitoring him? Luciano is a natural performer, introduced doing a drag act at a lavish fantasia wedding in a rental palace. Before, he could go home and wash off the makeup. But now he succumbs to the agony of constant media self-consciousness, trapped in performance mode. He makes extravagant gestures, gives the family’s furniture away to the poor. Patrons at his fish stall or random passersby prompt paranoid speculation. Are they actually TV executives? Acting becomes his permanent new reality. In one of the film’s most comic and bizarre moments, Luciano engages in a staring contest with a cricket, as if it’s a hidden camera watching him. Watching him. Watching him with those tiny antennae.

Reality may be a bit too weird and uneven for American tastes. It’s rich with native textures that defy translation. (Could we explain Honey Boo Boo to Italians?) The TV love/hate dynamic is far stronger in Italy, where the Internet is weak. But the remarkable Arena—a convicted killer allowed to leave prison to act in this movie—gives humanity to Luciano’s improbable quest toward a garish, televised Oz. His triumph is to become intimate with all that Reality despises, and somehow we share in his victory. BRIAN MILLER

PRoom 237

Opens Fri. April 5 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not Rated. 104 minutes.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. So goes the quote so often attributed to Freud, but it’s hard to make that case for coincidence and happenstance in the films of Stanley Kubrick. You can’t completely remove chance from cinema, with all its actors and technicians and moving parts, but the detail-oriented, notorious micromanager Kubrick came close. What appears to be a continuity error may in fact be a carefully placed clue for the observant viewer.
That argument is made in Rodney Ascher’s documentary, which explores five uniquely different and obsessively catalogued perspectives on Kubrick’s 1980 The Shining. (See the Wire, page 21.) It’s about the genocide of the American Indian, argues Bill Blakemore, pointing to the prominence of Native American art (and Calumet baking powder) in certain frames. Geoffrey Cocks sees it as a metaphor for the Holocaust. According to Jay Weidner, it’s Kubrick’s surreptitious confession about faking the moon landing. (2001 was supposedly his “research and development project for the Apollo footage.”)

That last theory is easily dismissed, but that’s part of Ascher’s design. He doesn’t make fun of his Shinologists, who lay out their theses in voice-over (no talking heads here), or the five detailed, obsessively catalogued exegeses under consideration. Each obsessive interpreter is granted their own area of expertise in the Kubrickian details.

Ascher mostly plays it straight, illustrating the commentary with film clips and using slow motion, step frames, split screens, and visual effects to render the evidence under consideration. He’s particularly taken with Juli Kearns’ reading of the film’s mazes and “impossible” architecture, laid out in gorgeous maps that he matches to Kubrick’s mesmerizing tracking shots. But then he adds his own commentary using clips from other Kubrick films—a generous collection that suggests at least tacit approval from the Kubrick estate—for counterpoint or comic effect.

Ultimately, The Shining can’t be reduced to any one theory, no matter the critical observations and obsessive replaying and deconstruction of key clips and images. It’s a magnificent and complex film layered in doubles and symbols and references. Ascher respects these five obsessive fans/scholars because The Shining allows them to find meanings within Kubrick’s labyrinth. Whether Kubrick intended those interpretations seems beside the point to such passionate readings. SEAN AXMAKER

Wrong

Runs Fri., April 5–Thurs., April 18 at 
Grand Illusion. Not Rated. 94 minutes.

Quentin Dupieux, a prominent French electronic musician who goes by the stage name Mr. Oizo, made his mark as a filmmaker in 2010 with Rubber, a comedy about a car tire that murders people using telekinesis. Dupieux’s second film takes a similarly absurdist bent. Jack Plotnick, best known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Reno 911!, plays a suburbanite named Dolph Springer who awakens one morning to a series of strange happenings. His alarm clock clicks from 7:59 to 7:60 instead of 8:00; his neighbor is acting fishy and getting ready to skip town; and a traffic cop is unnecessarily rude to him. Most troublingly, his boon companion, a dog named Paul, has disappeared without a trace.

Dupieux describes Wrong as “an homage to this special love between people and dogs,” and while there are traces of that sentiment—Dolph drives around the neighborhood holding a squeaky toy out the window, hoping to attract Paul—it’s not an accurate description of the film at all. A dog doesn’t even appear onscreen until the last few minutes. The bulk of the movie follows Dolph’s puzzling, beleaguered life; he’s like some sort of suffering Job, who keeps running into people even weirder than he is. His gardener is trying to figure out how a palm tree in the backyard turned into a pine. A very forward pizza-parlor employee named Emma has an insistent crush on him. He hires a pet detective (Eastbound & Down’s Steve Little), who shows up with a Polaroid camera and starts tasting Paul’s dog food. And then arrives a mysterious man, with a half-burnt face and a long pigtail, named Master Chang (a very un-Asian William Fichtner), who drops maddeningly incomplete hints as to Paul’s whereabouts.

Surreal tableaux are interspersed throughout Dolph’s meandering story. A crew of firemen ignore a van smoldering on fire; one is texting, another pulls down his pants, squats on the street, and opens a newspaper. At Dolph’s old office, the fire sprinklers are always raining, but the dripping-wet employees keep typing, drinking coffee, and answering phones. These scenes are memorable, but contribute nothing to the narrative. Wrong’s one right is Plotnick’s performance. His Dolph is convincingly dazed and bewildered, just as confused by the nonsensical plot as filmgoers will be. ERIN K. THOMPSON

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