Opening ThisWeek
Beneath the Harvest Sky
Opens Fri., May 30 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 116 minutes.
The potato harvest of Maine—in this depiction, at least—digs up blue and purple spuds. We see these colorful tubers in the most interesting scenes of the preciously titled Beneath the Harvest Sky, scenes that focus on how a crop comes out of the land and what old rituals attend the annual process; the harvest carries not only expectations of work and commerce but also transitory romance, which will neatly serve this coming-of-age tale. The movie doesn’t want to be conventional about any of that, and it tries hard to shirk the Hollywood cocktail of teen angst mixed with love. Despite the effort, the results here are oddly business-as-usual.
The key romance is not between boy and girl but between hetero buds. These friends play out the classical form of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty from On the Road: the calm observer type who can’t quit palling around with his irresponsible life-force chum. Dominic (Callan McAuliffe) is the level-headed one, Casper (Emory Cohen) the wild man; they’ll head off for Boston together after summer runs its course. The complications include Dominic’s new interest in Emma (Sarah Sutherland—Kiefer’s daughter), a girl he meets during harvest work, who is intent on college and can’t fathom why Dominic would want to bum around Boston with his lunkhead friend. There’s also the fact that Casper’s girlfriend (Zoe Levin) has just informed him she’s pregnant. More generally troubling is Casper’s tendency to get in fights and disappoint the people around him. Dominic’s gotten used to people asking him “Why do you hang around with this guy?”, and he has a stock answer about Casper being the antithesis of the small-town boredom that prevails.
Co-writers/directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly go for a raw texture that shuns the well-scrubbed edges of the average teen picture; some scenes aim for a quasi-documentary style, others look partly improvised. The filmmakers haven’t been able to avoid certain hallmarks of the genre, including third-act revelations and scenes of teachers offering subtext through literary analysis (S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, in this case). Cohen’s performance dominates the film; the young actor from The Place Beyond the Pines is a rangy kid, quick to ignite. His authentic explosiveness, a welcome break from the overall funk, can’t lift this one out of the category of a well-intended nice try. Robert Horton
PChinese Puzzle
Opens Fri., May 30 at Seven Gables. Rated R. 117 minutes.
In three agreeable films covering about a dozen years for his main quartet of characters, now 40-ish, Cedric Klapisch has also grown up as a director. He still embraces the messy, multilingual, bed-hopping, city-jumping complexity of life, which began in Barcelona with 2002’s L’Auberge Espagnole and continued to St. Petersburg and beyond with 2005’s Russian Dolls. Here Klapisch keeps the comedy, street chases, and indecisiveness that plague his novelist hero Xavier (Romain Duris), but I think Chinese Puzzle is the best of the three pictures—largely because it rests on the foundation of the prior two, much like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise trilogy.
The self-absorbed but not exactly selfish Xavier is forced to decamp from Paris to New York, following his ex, Wendy (Kelly Reilly), mother of their two children, who’s found a new man in the Big Apple. With limited English and a half-completed manuscript (essentially the film we’re watching), Xavier crashes in the Brooklyn loft of Isabelle (Cecile de France) and her lesbian partner, who previously asked him to father a baby for them. Later in the film, unattached Martine (Audrey Tautou) arrives with her two kids, bringing the number of children to five, divided among three improvised families (or four, if you count a green-card marriage).
Think back to L’Auberge Espagnole and you’ll recall a sense of life improvised on the fly among those impressionable, transnational students. Now adults, constantly communicating by text, e-mail, and Skype, they seem equally unmoored from any country or ideology beyond shared experience. That sense of community—including infidelities and rivalries—is what keeps our foursome connected despite their travels. For them, culture shock is a permanent condition; and their emblem seems to be the rolling suitcase that careens down the sidewalk of each strange new city. That Klapisch gives Xavier a job as a bicycle messenger seems a little too ’80s, but that’s when the director attended NYU. And the gig is all about route-finding, appropriate to Xavier’s ever-spinning compass needle. With animated subway maps, Craigslist ads, and Google Street View to assist him, Xavier writes an ode to the impossibly meandering West 11th Street. “I’ve got a problem with Point B,” he sighs.
Xavier’s editor pleads, “Could you knock out something a little more linear?” To that, both Xavier and his creator offer a polite shrug to the contrary. If life pushes you in the wrong direction, it’s probably the right direction. Brian Miller
Documented
Runs Fri., May 30–Thurs., June 5 at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 95 minutes.
Good journalists don’t necessarily become good filmmakers, even if they’ve got a great story to report. Jose Antonio Vargas wrote that story for The New York Times Magazine in 2011, about how he—brought to the U.S. from the Philippines at age 12—was both a successful, taxpaying journalist and an undocumented immigrant. (That’s “illegal alien” for you FOX News fans.) As we see here, Vargas planned this movie and a lobbying campaign (DefineAmerican.com) before he wrote the story. We watch as he first discloses his secret to student journalists at the California high school he once attended. Are you scared of being deported? one girl asks. Yes, says Vargas, “This is definitely the riskiest thing I’ve ever done.” That he should share his feelings so forthrightly is one more reason to like him.
As this commendable doc wears on, however, through speeches, Senate hearings, and a polite protest at a Romney campaign rally in Iowa, you get the sense that Vargas—now apparently a freelancer—doesn’t really know what to do next, professionally and personally. Having shared in a Pulitzer at The Washington Post, he’s now tipped over into activism-land. Almost 30 when the film begins, he hasn’t seen his mother in 18 years because he can’t travel back the Philippines, lacking a passport for re-entry. He’s in limbo, too, being gay despite a conservative Catholic family. And perhaps because his emphasis here is on immigration reform and the Dream Act (still stalled in Congress), he’s a little coy about his home life in New York. (Does he have a boyfriend? Could he gay-marry for citizenship? Those are pertinent questions, as Vargas the journalist surely knows.)
Vargas certainly personalizes an important issue, but never punches it home as an experienced advocacy filmmaker might. (One wishes Michael Moore had called back in 2011.) There’s a tendency here toward self-validation and sympathetic audiences that works against Documented. When not turning the camera on himself and his family, Vargas gets better results out on the road. In Alabama, a drunk white contractor complains (I’m paraphrasing), I got no problem with you, Mr. Fancy-Pants Writer. It’s the Mexicans who’ll do my job for less than 10 bucks an hour. And he does have a point: He could never do Vargas’ job, just as Vargas would never have to stoop to his. There is justice to consider here, but also race-to-the-bottom economics. The exchange is more meaningful than Vargas’ heartfelt Senate testimony. For his next project, I hope he goes back into the field for more such reporting. Brian Miller
Filth
Opens Fri., May 30 at Varsity. Rated R. 97 minutes.
Remember the great cocaine breakdown sequence from GoodFellas, in which the central character endures one long day of panic attacks and paranoia? Ray Liotta’s gangster collapses in his own excess, and looks appalling during the spiral: red-eyed, sweaty, his skin a whiter shade of pale.
Absent the bravura check-out-my-tour-de-force style of Martin Scorsese, that sequence is recalled during the entirety of Filth. In this bad-behavior wallow, James McAvoy looks as bad as Liotta during his crash, and the movie itself aims for unrelenting misery. Which it largely achieves. Based on the 1998 novel by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, Filth cruises through the seedier crannies of Edinburgh at the hip of a corrupt, multiply addicted detective named Bruce Robertson. Any echo in that moniker of the noble Scots hero Robert the Bruce is surely meant to index the degraded world that Welsh and director/screenwriter Jon S. Baird so gleefully paint.
Bruce is alcoholic, drug-addicted, and sexually indiscriminate. He thinks little of sabotaging his colleagues for the sake of an upcoming promotion, or of making lewd phone calls to the lonely wife (Shirley Henderson) of his meek, trusting friend (Eddie Marsan). An unsolved murder case provides a (very flimsy) spine for this character study, but the police-procedural aspect drifts into the background, as though Bruce’s easily distracted, coke-addled personality were in charge of the movie as well as the investigation. A fine cast of supporting actors—including Kate Dickie (Red Road ), Jamie Bell, Jim Broadbent, and Imogen Poots—nearly makes this tawdry carousel bearable. Watch closely for the cameo by David Soul, just to add to the surreal atmosphere.
Having served up all this stomach-churning detail (a contributor to IMDb helpfully notes that McAvoy can regurgitate at will, thus the vomit on display in the movie is authentic), Filth begins to reveal its very sentimental backstory. And here’s where it gets indefensible: All this grinding in the audience’s face has been in the service of a very conventional narrative device. Kudos to native Scotsman McAvoy, who also suffers an existential crisis in X-Men: Days of Future Past. This is the kind of role actors take to prove themselves more than a pretty face, and—beyond his skills with bodily functions—McAvoy’s convincing in the part. That the movie leaves him exposed on the tightrope isn’t his fault. Robert Horton
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