Opening
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Gett: The Trial of 
Viviane Amsalem

Opens Fri., April 10 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not rated. 115 minutes.

This movie never leaves the courtroom or its antechamber, but that’s not the only reason things are unbearably claustrophobic. The limited range of movement perfectly sums up the situation of an unhappy wife, whose suit for divorce against her estranged husband takes years to untangle. Why would it take years? Because the courtroom in Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is not a civil one, but a religious one. The scenario feels like it was dreamed up by Franz Kafka on a grouchy day, but it’s one that is unfortunately still possible in Israel.

Israeli brother-and-sister filmmakers Shlomi and Ronit Elkabetz have made two previous films chronicling the breakdown of an arranged marriage, To Take a Wife (2004) and 7 Days (2008). Having not seen them, I can say with complete confidence that you do not have to to fully comprehend Gett, which takes the same characters and actors and puts them in this terrible endgame. Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) has employed a charismatic lawyer (Menashe Noy) to represent her case for divorce. Husband Elisha (Simon Abkarian)—when he bothers to show up in court—refuses the divorce, which means Viviane must make her case to a tribunal of rabbis, who basically keep asking Elisha whether he’ll let Viviane go. No? Then maybe she should move back in with him for three months. Then maybe six months. Maybe another year.

Each grueling stage is enacted in the same cramped, dreary room, with much of the action played out across Ronit Elkabetz’s extraordinarily grave face (she was a memorable presence in the excellent 2001 Israeli film Late Marriage). She has to give a great performance with her face and body, because Viviane only occasionally has a voice—this matter is for the men to talk about and decide. For a film so militant in airing its cause, Gett is adept at unspoken communication; for instance, something in their glances suggests that Viviane and her attorney have a mutual attraction going on. But for all we know, such an attraction might still be completely unacknowledged. The movie’s not entirely grim—there are colorful supporting characters and moments of comedy—but the experience is absolutely nerve-wracking. Unlike in Twelve Angry Men, there’s no Henry Fonda character to steer the proceedings into satisfying completeness. Given the film’s political nature, that’s as it should be—Gett is meant to agitate, not gratify. Robert Horton

Ned Rifle

Opens Fri., April 10 at SIFF Film Center. 
Not rated. 85 minutes.

It arrives with something less than the heated expectations of, say, the Avengers sequel, but Ned Rifle is nevertheless the climax of a movie trilogy. You have to be a follower of the career of longtime indie hero Hal Hartley to really appreciate this closure, but apparently there are enough fans out there to have crowd-funded the budget for this typically modest finale. Hartley got on the map with The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, tiny-scaled films with dialogue written as 1930s screwball patter but underplayed by a hip, pokerfaced ensemble. The writer/director’s visibility waned after an epic-scaled character study, Henry Fool (1997), the movie that inspired the scattered sequel Fay Grim (2006) and now Ned Rifle.

This one won’t pay off unless you know the previous installments. It’s a tribute to Hartley’s work with actors that essentially all of his main players from Henry Fool return to their roles (along with other Hartley regulars, such as Martin Donovan and Bill Sage). This includes Liam Aiken, who was only 7 when he debuted in the ’97 movie and has since had a successful career as a child actor. He plays the title character, the son of big-talking philosophical jerk Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and the currently incarcerated Fay Grim (Parker Posey, razor-sharp in her few scenes). Ned plans to kill his father for all the trouble he’s caused, but has to find him first. This leads him to his uncle, Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), the garbageman-poet previously mentored by Henry, but also to a jumpy grad student named Susan (Aubrey Plaza). She is obsessively stalking Simon, but her reasons won’t become clear until after she and Ned travel across the country—to Seattle and Portland, according to this entirely New York-shot film.

As much as I generally enjoy revisiting Hartley’s world, there’s a touch of half-baked off-off-Broadway theater about Ned Rifle. Some of its effects are downright cornball. Still, the film is much more in the groove than Fay Grim, and it has some signature Hartley non sequiturs. The cast understands how to deliver the material, and the newcomer—Plaza, the Parks and Recreation grump—doesn’t take long to fall into the house style. A technique as artificial as Hartley’s can be a kind of trap, but the ending of this 85-minute exercise feels like a real rounding-off (it’s as stirring as the end of Henry Fool ). And it suggests the possibility of something different for Hartley next time out. ROBERT HORTON

October Gale

Opens Fri., April 10 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 91 minutes.

A New York Times essay recently suggested that Hollywood abandon the so-called “four-quadrant” marketing plan, in which a single movie can supposedly attract viewers male and female, old and young. The current success of Furious 7 (young, male) proves the impossibility of that task, as do franchises like Insurgent (young, female) and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (old, mixed). Back in the day, Douglas Sirk and other melodramatists made what were forthrightly labeled women’s pictures, and October Gale slots comfortably into that distaff AARP demo.

First of all: Patricia Clarkson, aging gracefully, cast as a recently widowed physician, trapped by a storm on a coastal Canadian island with a mysterious stranger. (Also a handsome younger mysterious stranger, as in All That Heaven Allows.) He’s a tattooed, wounded fugitive; she removes the bullet from his shoulder before a raging fire (after cutting off his shirt and loosening his belt, of course); and later, like any good hero of romance fiction, he’ll also have occasion to save her life and advance a firm but gentlemanly kiss. This is the kind of movie that will cause hot flashes even in men.

Second, though presented as a thriller (and two bodies do eventually hit the floor), the action begins only in the last 20 minutes, with the arrival of Tim Roth’s polite, Brit-accented killer. For reasons he’ll explain in the movie’s big plot twist (its only twist), the fugitive (Scott Speedman, from the Underworld movies) must die. The prior 70 minutes of scene-setting illustrate Dr. Helen’s grief, show us flashbacks of her past happy marriage, and generally describe a comfortably rustic, Ralph Lauren-style summer-home existence. October Gale is a pleasant place to visit, though a dull, predictable movie to watch. Though if you have a place in the San Juans to decorate, the film supplies many catalogue pages to mentally fold back.

Clarkson and director Ruba Nadda made a slightly more interesting romance in 2010’s Cairo Time, where the older woman/younger man dynamic rested on an exotic location, unhurried by killers knocking at the door. For their next collaboration, I recommend Tahiti and Keanu Reeves as a mysterious marine biologist/surfing instructor. That way Clarkson won’t even have to cut off his shirt. BRIAN MILLER

POf Horses and Men

Runs Fri., April 10–Thurs., April 16 at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 80 minutes.

Icelandic humor. Could it become a thing? It seems possible in the wake of Of Horses of Men, a supremely droll movie that weaves together a collection of equine-related anecdotes. Like the human population of that northerly island, the horses of Iceland come out of a limited gene pool. They don’t look quite like other horses, with their short legs and jumpy gallop—a visual joke that director Benedikt Erlingsson uses for repeated effect. The opening section lets us know the kind of mortifying black humor we’re in for: A prideful trainer (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson), out for a public ride, must sit on the back of his immaculate mare while the animal is unexpectedly mounted by a randy local stallion. The latter has unexpectedly broken loose from its pen, much to the embarrassment of his owner (Charlotte Bøving)—though her reaction may be colored by the fact that she harbors some lusty feelings for the proud rider herself. In fact, she may be inspired to try something similar herself, a little later in the movie.

Other characters include a local drunkard who “rides” his horse out to a Russian cargo ship in search of vodka; an immigrant who gets lost in the snow with only his horse as shelter; and a crank whose habit of cutting through barbed wire to exert his right-of-way catches up with him in a grotesque manner. These folks mingle in their rural area—in fact, they’re constantly spying on one another, as the reflections off their binoculars regularly remind us. Along with this dark comedy, Of Horses and Men offers rare information on how to corral horses in the wild and how to survive a frozen night. (The part about swimming on the back of a horse to a passing ship is probably not sound practical advice, however.)

Each vignette begins with a close-up of a horse’s eye, as though suggesting that the film’s deadpan style might be an animal’s resigned way of watching the absurdities of human endeavor. The way Erlingsson frames the action supports this: His camera watches the big moments from a distance, allowing us to savor the ridiculousness of the situations. Incidentally, rest assured that no horses were harmed in the making of this movie, according to the end credits. The same can’t be said for the human characters, who are on the receiving end of some well-deserved satire. Robert Horton

PWhile We’re Young

Opens Fri., April 10 at Sundance, Pacific Place, Thornton Place, & Lincoln Square. Rated R. 94 minutes.

Ben Stiller spent years and God knows how many millions on his recent Walter Mitty remake, a statement movie that no one wanted to see. Noah Baumbach could’ve saved him the time, trouble, and expense—a dozen times over. The writer/director previously deployed Stiller’s peevish wit to fine effect in Greenberg (2010), and While We’re Young is a career-best comedy for them both: generous, wise, and finally consoling for those facing their forlorn 40s.

In outline, this is a Gen-X midlife-crisis movie: documentary filmmaker Josh (Stiller) and producer wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are stalled in careers and marriage. He can’t complete his weighty, unwatchable opus (something to do with geopolitics and a disheveled Chomskyian scholar, played by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary); together they’ve IVF’d once for kids, failed, and are settling into a staid, childless rut. They need a shakeup, and it arrives in the form of a spontaneous, fun-loving Brooklyn couple half their age: would-be documentarian Jamie (Adam Driver, from Girls) and wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried, recently seen in Lovelace and Les Miserables).

Jamie, who professes to love Josh’s prior work, is not what he seems, but such third-act revelations are best unmentioned here. While We’re Young sends cynical Josh into unexpected bromance, and much of the movie’s charm lies in our being swept along, too. Jamie freshens his newfound mentor’s perspective on film, revamps his wardrobe, and invites him into new, more adventurous social circles. (One, with musician Dean Wareham presiding as a shaman, involves an ayahuasca ceremony and copious vomiting; the physical humor here is broader than in Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale.) The appeal for Cornelia is more diffuse: Oppressed by the Park Slope mommy cult, she’s liberated by the younger couple to take hip-hop dance classes. Still, the female characters aren’t so skillfully drawn as the males, who include gray-muzzled new father Fletcher (the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horowitz), the only guy who can speak truth to Josh’s blind infatuation. Charles Grodin also brings welcome, sour appeal as Josh’s disapproving father-in-law, who lords his filmmaking success over him.

Is Josh deluded and ridiculous? Of course he is, and yet that’s not the movie’s real source of laughter and inspiration. In denial about his fading eyesight and arthritis, Josh will discover that being foolish and confounded is good for the system, a tonic. If Jamie is a hustler, he’s also like a personal trainer—pushing his client (who forever picks up the lunch tab) into discomfort. As the two collaborate on a doc about a PTSD veteran/children’s-birthday-party clown, the younger man rejects Josh’s purist ethics, yet Baumbach doesn’t condemn this comic betrayal or reward Josh’s outrage. More than a generational clash, this is a satire of an entire class of narcissists (the director perhaps included).

By the time Cornelia and Josh have woken from their spell, they’ve absorbed the movie’s best gag and fundamental irony: Accepting that you’re old takes no less imagination than pretending you’re young. BRIAN MILLER

White God

Opens Fri., April 10 at SIFF Cinema Egyptian. Not rated. 119 minutes.

There are movies about good dogs (Lassie, Benji, etc.) and bad dogs (Cujo, White Dog, and so on), but it’s hard to accomplish both in the same picture. Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo begins White God with a promising, eerie prologue on the bad-dog side of the fence: an empty city, almost like that of 28 Days Later, with a small 13-year-old girl riding her bike through the desolate streets. Behind her, a marauding pack of feral dogs slowly grows in size, numbering into the hundreds, until they finally, deliberately pursue her. Lili (Zsofia Psotta) pumps her legs madly, totemic trumpet in her backpack, until she’s finally overtaken. Rendered in slo-mo, it’s a strikingly good sequence, a nightmare. Then the movie loops back to the start of its story, revealing the snarling future pack leader to be Lili’s beloved gentle pet.

How did good dog Hagen turn bad? I wish, after that auspicious opening, the answer were more magical and enchanting. White God initially suggests fairy tale or fable, then splits into familiar, parallel accounts of two rebels brutalized by the cruel system. Hagen’s you can easily guess: cast out of Lila’s father’s apartment because of a neighbor’s complaints; roaming wild with other unwanted street mutts; pursued everywhere by animal-control authorities; and captured by a dog-fighting ring. (Those latter sequences are nowhere near so realistic as in Amores Perros.) Lila, her mother remarried and on a trip, meanwhile acts out in the usual ways: mouthing off to her school orchestra leader, running away from home, following an older boy to a disco, swigging vodka, etc.

After the recent Planet of the Apes reboot, with CGI Caesar (Andy Serkis) leading his simian troops, we’ve come to expect a lot more from the revolt-of-nature genre. There’s a nice potential irony to global insurrection being led by the family dog curled up by the hearth, but Mundruczo doesn’t have the tools or the ambitions to push beyond the symbolic Lila/Hagen dyad. (Her father is no ogre, so the symbolism doesn’t really hold up anyway.) Psotta has the solemn, delicate countenance of a fairy-tale heroine who deserves more than Lila’s typical tween adventures. White God never ventures into real Cujo-style horror, and violence against animals is barely shown (it’s OK for kids 12 and up, I’d say). There’s also a political aspect to the purebreds-versus-mongrel theme that Mundruczo fails to develop. You remember the first shots, and the last, but the film never really finds its footing. BRIAN MILLER

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