Opening
ThisWeek

PCalvary

Opens Fri., Aug. 15 at hARVARD eXIT AND sUNDANCE cINEMAS. Rated R. 105 minutes.

VeeShapeThis is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions—is that simply to say it’s Irish?—and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Every one of McDonagh’s filmmaking errors is forgiven on account of Gleeson’s cleric, who tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. McDonagh, no dummy, knows the sterling worth of his leading man, while the villagers mostly scoff at Father James Lavelle. He’s widowed and on his second career, meaning we should be unperturbed when his depressed daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly) arrives for a visit.

VeeShapeFather James has been cast as a kind of turnaround artist for a dying enterprise: Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. He’s the right man for the wrong job, a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. He’s blameless, says the voice we’ll try to guess in the seven days ahead: “I’m going to kill you because you’ve done nothing wrong. I’m going to kill you because you’re innocent.” And so, by implication, was the former altar boy—once sexually abused—now grown to be a vengeful assassin.

There’s a certain kind of sick logic to the threat, like a twisted joke made in a pub. Humor, and there is plenty in Calvary, is a way of testing the new boundaries of the permissible—if there are any such boundaries now that the church’s authority is gone. Along with his acclaimed playwright-director brother, Martin (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths), McDonagh grew up on American movies and TV. Here he makes explicit nods to High Noon and I Confess; Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people—more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. (One rent boy talks like James Cagney; the cop Stanton is back from The Guard; and M. Emmet Walsh is on hand, then gone, for no apparent purpose.)

Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. McDonagh has a clunky way of staging dialogue scenes, where Position A and Position B stand up to declaim at each other. But he gets the moment exactly right when Father James, walking to the beach and talking with a seven-year-old girl, is startled by her angry father, a tourist in a SUV. He sweeps his child up and glares at the honorable priest, who can’t defend himself against the man’s tacit accusation. Gleeson looks stunned and wounded, slumps his shoulders in silence, and accepts the scorn. Then he keeps walking forward to his fate. Brian Miller

Dinosaur 13

Opens Fri., Aug. 15 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated PG. 105 minutes.

VeeShapeWhen did fossil hunting become a crime? For more than a century since paleontologists and amateurs began looking for geologic evidence to support Darwin, it was a fairly unregulated domain. Ph.D’s partnered with pirates, from the Gobi Desert to the Dakotas. But that all began to change during the ’70s and ’80s, as we learn in this very one-sided documentary, just as Peter Larson was beginning to build a business—and a private museum, called the Black Hills Institute—in Hill City, South Dakota. He and some college buddies began filling warehouses with, and selling, the finds they made on properties following handshake agreements with the owners—some of them Indians whose land was held in trust by the U.S. government.

VeeShapeFlash forward to 1997, when a T. rex skeleton known as Sue sold for more than $8 million (including fees) at Sotheby’s in New York. Larson found those bones in 1990, paid $5,000 to the Sioux Indian on whose ranch he was prospecting. Todd Douglas Miller’s Dinosaur 13 tells Larson’s unhappy story.

Much of Sue’s giddy discovery was captured on grainy VHS, which alternates here with present-day interviews, a few reenactments, and ’90s news footage of Larson’s federal prosecution for theft, wire fraud, and other charges. Were he and his colleagues criminals, poaching bones from tribal or federal land? Sue’s unearthing was before GPS and without legal counsel. Dinosaur 13 presents Larson and his merry band in the best possible light, but their naivete shines through. There was no contract for Sue, no chain of custody, no clearance from the feds. Oddly, this story—previously recounted in Larson’s 2002 book, Rex Appeal—may be better suited to law students than paleontologists. Good faith collides with an overzealous prosecutor (whom Miller can’t get on camera), and populist anger—cue Bill O’Reilly—confronts federal overreach.

Though this story is 20 years old, it now carries a Tea Party tinge. During one of the TV-oriented ’90s Hill City rallies against the feds, the camera catches a swastika on a protest sign—as if the jackbooted feds were trampling individual rights. (Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City would soon follow.) Dinosaur 13 tries put a happy spin on a long legal ordeal, though it ultimately reinforces the notion that the fossil record (i.e. history) is full of violent, pea-brained killers like Sue, as well as cruelty, sudden death, and mass extinctions—not justice. Brian Miller

The Dog

Runs Fri., Aug. 15-Thurs., Aug. 21 at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 100 minutes.

It would be easier to enjoy the madcap, stranger-than-fiction revelations of The Dog if it weren’t for the queasy awareness that its central subject is getting such a great kick out of all this. He is John Wojtowicz, the real-life guy whose botched 1972 bank robbery later became the basis for the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon. The unlikely events of that movie really were based on fact, and The Dog is here to introduce us to the truth—if you want to believe Wojtowicz.

VeeShapeEarly in the film, Wojtowicz—interviewed by directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren over a period of years—comes across as blunt and outrageous, with a voice like Joe Mantegna in aggressive wiseguy mode. He declares himself a “pervert,” and the evidence follows. Once a Goldwater Republican, he did Vietnam duty and got married, then fell into the burgeoning New York gay-rights movement. Wojtowicz seems to have been less interested in political liberation than in having sex with anything that moved, although la dolce vita was interrupted when he fell for Ernest Aron, later known as Liz Eden. It was ostensibly to pay for Aron’s sex-reassignment operation that Wojtowicz led two accomplices into robbing a Brooklyn bank and holding hostages. Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film plays with the love story angle, although “love” hardly seems the operative word here. (Wojtowicz later admits that if Aron had not agreed to escape in a plane to Denmark for the surgery, he would have shot him at the bank.) One of the robbers, Sal Naturale, did die at the end of the standoff.

Because Wojtowicz is chatty and disarmingly frank, the film initially plays as black comedy. As the portrait of a sociopath emerges—after he got out of jail Wojtowicz would hang around outside the bank with an “I ROBBED THIS BANK” T-shirt—the laughs tend to curdle. What remains is a documentary of creepiness, a rock turned over to expose a very weird pocket of life. Wojtowicz’s mother Terry is like a character from a Scorsese film that got hijacked by David Lynch, wandering around her apartment declaring wrong-headed life wisdom and vaguely wondering what went on with her son. The movie is successful at capturing an oddball individual and the ineffable 1970s, but the geek-show spectacle leaves behind a squalid whiff of exploitation. Robert Horton

Jake Squared

Opens Fri., Aug. 15 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated R. 100 minutes.

Pirandello meets midlife crisis, this vanity project by Howard Goldberg posits that filmmaker/realtor Jake Klein (Elias Koteas) is making a movie about his fucked-up life and all the unhappy women he’s left in his wake. The tone is comic, rueful, and absurd as Jake casts a young hunk (Mike Vogel) as his youthful avatar. Then while filming, director Jake and the rest of the crew are visited by his five iterations (played by Koteas, Koteas, Koteas, Koteas, and Kevin Railsback). Needless, to say, this creates much confusion for us, director Jake, his two kids, his ex, his current g.f. (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and his BFF (Virginia Madsen). And to complicate things further, hovering in this Felliniesque film-set realm is Jake’s first great love (and second cousin), played by Jane Seymour in the present context and Liana Liberato in nostalgic recollection.

The juggling would be a lot for Woody Allen—name-checked here—or Charlie Kaufman to manage. With barely a few film credits to his name, Goldberg isn’t nearly so sophisticated or funny, but he’s gentle with the material. The women are mostly wise and forbearing, while Jake generally reveals himself to be an idiotic horndog at every turn (particularly when trying to lure women into his hot tub time machine). The balding Koteas, usually cast as cop or criminal, from Shutter Island to The Adjuster, is actually such a warm, engaging presence that you could see him in a Woody Allen movie. But the writing isn’t there to support him; and the radiant auras of Seymour and Madsen are likewise wasted.

When Jake finally loses control of his project, he indignantly shouts, “This is my movie! I say what happens!” You wish that Goldberg was in firmer command of this one. Brian Miller

PThe Kill Team

Opens Fri., Aug. 15 at Varsity. Not rated. 79 minutes.

VeeShapeIs the story of The Kill Team singular? That’s the unspoken question that hangs over this award-winning documentary, another artifact from the “war on terror.” In 2010 a group of soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord was arrested and charged with murdering Afghan civilians for fun while stationed in Kandahar Province. The accused had taken photographs of themselves with the corpses of their victims and in some cases collected body parts as trophies. The film lays out the chronology of the crimes, with a particular emphasis on the torment of Specialist Adam Winfield. Twenty years old at the time of the killings, Winfield is in the hapless position of being both whistle-blower and perpetrator.

VeeShapeFilmmaker Dan Krauss interviewed Winfield and some of the other principals in the case during the 2011 trial at Ft. Lewis (covered here and in all the other local media). Winfield, still jittery, describes his alarm at hearing that a new sergeant, Calvin Gibbs, had cultivated the idea of a “kill team” in Winfield’s platoon. Winfield feared for his own safety if he reported the crimes, but he told his ex-Marine father about them. The elder Winfield’s reports to military brass did not lead to action. Somehow Krauss got three other members of the platoon to talk on camera; Gibbs is noticeably—and not surprisingly—absent. Their remarkably calm accounts of dehumanization and violence are chilling in their detail. They describe Gibbs as a swaggering action-movie warrior, with his cache of dead men’s finger bones and his skull tattoos denoting each “kill.”

Their interviews create a portrait of occupational boredom, anger, and resentment, spinning in a perpetual cycle. The film, to its credit, creates little sense of catharsis or resolution. Despite being intimidated into participating in the final killing because he says he feared for his own life (a threat that is confirmed by another platoon member), Winfield is given the choice of pleading guilty to two different charges. There’s little sense of a system working, and Private First Class Justin Stoner flatly declares, “We’re just the ones who got caught.” These crimes only accidentally came to light: When Stoner was annoyed at his fellow soldiers for smoking hashish in his room, he reported them to his superiors, which led to the discovery of the human bones kept as trophies. Stoner got beaten up for informing, which is why we see photographs of him—taken to document his bruises—that show a tattoo that stretches across his back and reads, “What If I’m Not the Hero.” It’s a quote from the Twilight series, and it rounds off the utterly disheartening experience of watching this excellent film. Robert Horton

PRich Hill

Runs Fri., Aug. 15-Sun., Aug. 17 at SIFF Film Center. Not rated. 91 minutes.

VeeShapeA dispatch from the frontlines of rural poverty, this documentary follows three boys (and their families) in the small town of Rich Hill, Missouri. The coal is long gone from this declining hamlet, and with it the economic base that gave families their stability. “We’re not trash, we’re good people,” insists 14-year-old Andrew, who begins the film with the most intact family: two parents and a sister. There’s no money, but somehow they’re scraping by. The situation is more grim for 15-year-old Harley, on various meds and living with his grandmother; and for 13-year-old Appachey, a pudgy, volatile smoker who’s acting out at school, defiant of his single mother.

VeeShapeThe trap to avoid here for filmmakers (and cousins) Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos is that of red-state ghetto voyeurism, to collect these disturbing images and stories from flyover America, then screen them for our smug coastal concern. Fortunately they had family connections in Rich Hill, one reason for their close, non-condescending access; also they ease the camera back and let these three kids narrate their own stories. Though somewhat appallingly uneducated, they have plenty of self-awareness, which makes the situation all the sadder. “I don’t need an education,” says Harley, who seems barely literate—not someone who could even enlist in the Army. But what he may mean is that Rich Hill offers no prospects for those with an education; he’d only need it someplace else. Social mobility would require leaving.

The pathologies pile up with few surprises, and the filmmakers eschew any context or questions. Theirs is an entirely trees-for-the-forest approach to these youths at risk. Rich Hill puts you in mind of recent feature films like Hellion and Joe, only without the Nicolas Cage father figure to intervene and save these kids. But again—that’s fiction, and this is real life. Harley’s mid-film explanation of why his mother’s in jail gives the doc its most shocking moment, yet one related without tears or swelling music.

This year is, no coincidence, the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s War on Poverty—a subject that Democrats and Republicans will continue to avoid through the coming two elections. To help the inhabitants of Rich Hill would require social spending and taxes; it would also force the acknowledgement of poverty and need within culturally conservative and reliably red-voting districts. But to address poverty, much less wage war on it, first you’ve got to describe it. And that is what this small, admirable film does so well. Brian Miller

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