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The Grand Seduction

Opens Fri., June 13 at Guild 45th. 
Rated PG-13. 112 minutes.

During the SIFF screening I attended for The Grand Seduction, the audience was chortling and sighing at all the right moments. The picture went over so big it had me worrying that some people might think this is the sort of movie you should see at a film festival. It’s not. For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. He’s becoming an industry at this kind of thing: His fertility-clinic comedy Starbuck had its recent Hollywood remake as a Vince Vaughn vehicle, Delivery Man.

What we have here is some real Northern exposure: A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. (One good gag: They keep leaving $5 bills lying about for the doc to find—because who doesn’t love free money?) The town is, unfortunately, called Tickle Point. At this level of relentless sugar candy, it could hardly be anything else. Director Don (Last Night) McKellar’s participation, given his previously dark-hued comedy output, suggests a surrender to wholesomeness.

I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn.

The French-language original was just as overbearing. Of that one, I wrote, “[It] needs a dash of brine to put it in the Local Hero category,” and seeing this version just confirms how wonderfully 1983’s Local Hero carried insight and beauty beneath its whimsy. But something else relegates Grand Seduction to truly annoying status. The promised factory will be built by a petrochemical corporation, which demands a huge illegal bribe for blessing Tickle Point with its future presence there. But this is no Frank Capra movie, where the rich and the corrupt get their comeuppance by the end. Tickle Point will pay the bribe, and bring in the oil guys. This is what passes for a feel-good movie. Robert Horton

PIda

Runs Fri., June 13–Thurs., June 19 at Sundance Cinemas, SIFF CInema Uptown, and SIFF Film Center. 
Rated PG-13. 80 minutes.

After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. You can’t smell it, but the negative seems to have been developed in a bath of vodka, urine, and cow shit. And that’s the dominant impression of the outside world for virginal Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) when she’s sent to visit her unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a drunken former Communist prosecutor who’ll fuck any man she fancies. Beyond the convent walls, the world is a sorry place; and it only contains more sad tales.

Anna, she discovers, is a Jew—an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Wanda insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. (His god is Coltrane, a far different cat than Christ.)

From The Pawnbroker to Schindler’s List, the canon of Holocaust movies has been fairly well exhausted at this point. Pawlikowski doesn’t dwell on the familiar bones or atrocities; instead, he shadows two women—Wanda being the more interesting character—with different approaches to the past. Wanda’s the former resistance fighter scarred by the war. Anna’s the new generation who’ll hear the Beatles on shortwave radio. But will that—and Coltrane—be enough to sustain a life behind the Iron Curtain?

The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Sometimes you just can’t come to terms with the past. And why should Anna, so sheltered, be forced into such reckoning? (Wanda’s eyes, always open, admit only sorrow.) Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. Brian Miller

Lucky Them

Runs Fri., June 13–Thurs., June 19 at Northwest Film Forum. 
Rated R. 96 minutes.

Something about movies set in the music world—rockers, journalists, groupies, etc.—immediately sets a nostalgic tone. Back when the hormones and serotonin flowed freely, our favorite tunes of youth were wired into our synapses forever. That’s why it’s such a shock to hear a favorite old song, be it “Creep” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and wonder, Holy shit, how did I get so old?!? That’s the dilemma for Seattle music writer Ellie (Toni Collette), 40-ish and sleeping with men too young for her, clinging to print in the Internet age, keeping her CDs when the rest of the world has moved on to Spotify and the cloud.

Ellie’s old boyfriend, presumed a suicide in Snoqualmie Falls, wears a very Cobainesque halo. He’s been gone 10 years, which places Ellie in an indeterminate post-grunge limbo. The music may have died; music journalism is certainly dying (cue an old stack of The Rocket Ellie uses for research); and her love life is nearly DOA. Directed by local filmmaker Megan Griffiths (The Off Hours, Eden), Lucky Them is a lightweight, inoffensive formula picture that borrows Seattle as a scenic backdrop; you could say the same about Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, only that film brought a lot more writing talent to our city. Here, the writer is Connecticut journalist/actress Emily Wachtel, and she’ll have to write a few dozen more screenplays before filling even one of Ephron’s pumps. This one limps along like it’s got several pages missing, or was stapled in the wrong order.

Ellie goes in search of her mythic lost Matthew, aided by a dorky dilettante of a documentary filmmaker (Thomas Haden Church) and urged by her gruff editor (Oliver Platt), on a retrospective quest that’s clearly intended to help her move on, as they say. That Ellie needs to let go of the past and the whole bathroom-sex-with-rockers thing is nicely crystalized in a reaction shot from the ever-redoubtable Collette. Ellie and her new boy toy (Ryan Eggold) are discussing Matthew’s music. I was a huge fan, he tells her, in eighth grade. The camera cuts to Collette, whose eyes reel like the spinning numbers on an adding machine. If the filmmaker, Charlie, is ridiculously uncool (admitting “I hate music”), at least he’s age-appropriate. And he’s got money. Ellie may not say as much, but a franker assessment of where her life is heading is what a better writer—meaning Wachtel or her surrogate—needed to tease out of this story. Failing that, Griffiths does an adequate job with the script handed her. Brian Miller

Palo Alto

Opens Fri., June 13 at Harvard Exit. 
Not rated. 98 minutes.

We will address the C-word right away: Gia Coppola is the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola, niece of Sofia, cousin of Nicolas Cage, etc. Just 25 when she wrote and directed Palo Alto, this newest member of the filmmaking famiglia has opted for safe material for her debut: This one’s solidly in the high-school-angst genre. Watching this humdrum movie, I couldn’t help but wish she’d followed her grandfather’s route and chosen to cut her teeth on something less pretentious and meaningful—you know, like a down-’n’-dirty horror picture. Perhaps such a project would summon a little more oomph. (Pause here for a fond memory of Dementia 13, directed by the youthful F.F.C. in 1963 at the behest of Roger Corman.)

Palo Alto is adapted from a book of short stories by the apparently inexhaustible James Franco, who also plays a supporting role in a handful of scenes as a sleepily lecherous soccer coach whose focus of attention is a confused 16-year-old named April (Emma Roberts). That’s not the center of the film, however; along with April’s issues, there are also promiscuous Emily (Zoe Levin) and diffident Teddy (Jack Kilmer, son of Val Kilmer—who cameos, daffily), a lad with poor decision-making abilities, one of the worst being hanging out with best friend Fred (Nat Wolff, also currently scoring in The Fault in Our Stars). Fred is either a sociopath or someone so bored by high-school existence that he can’t help pushing situations, and people, to a dangerous ignition point.

The boredom is understandable. This is California ennui born of an overabundance of privilege and living space, captured in a manner that seems weirdly pedestrian. If it weren’t for the excellence of Roberts (another scion: daughter of Eric, niece of Julia), Palo Alto would have an eerie lack of distinguishing features. Roberts makes April an authentically vulnerable soul, a smart but slightly average teen who’d probably be able to share her emotional issues with her mother if Mom could ever take the phone out of her ear. Her awkward scenes with Franco—April’s also babysitting his kid—are well-played and truthful. They will impress anybody who has never seen a film about teenagers before. Robert Horton

The Signal

Opens Fri., June 13 at Sundance and other theaters. Rated PG-13. 97 minutes.

Sci-fi, like real estate and society in general, is headed in two unequal directions. Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow cost some $175 million. This modest sleeper from William Eubank, previously the director of 2011’s Love, is a more thrifty, handmade affair—The Blair Witch Project gone to Area 51. Three brainy MIT students are driving west to Cal Tech when they decide to investigate some sort of Internet hacker/troll named Nomad. Bad idea. Their leader, Nic (Aussie TV actor Brenton Thwaites of Home and Away), wakes up in an underground government bunker—a rotary-dial relic of the Cold War, it seems, suggesting both Lost and The Twilight Zone.

Nic is a bit of a prick, the kind of 2,400-score SAT savant who immediately begins to question his quarantine or captivity or whatever it is that brings him under the solemn scrutiny of Dr. Damon (Laurence Fishburne), leader of “the transition team,” who never removes his ominous clean suit. It takes about 30 minutes to reach this underground facility and about another 30 to regain the surface, where further surprises await. (I preferred the suspenseful first hour, before the big story jolts.) Eubank sets up a puzzle for us to solve, even as Nic is trying to decipher a different mystery. He questions Dr. Damon’s scientific methods while we begin to doubt Nic’s sanity. Is that really his buddy Jonah (Beau Knapp) speaking to him through the air ducts—or a paranoid voice from his own head? Nic’s girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke) is no help, spending half the movie strapped to a gurney, which results in an amusingly slow escape scene: one patient wheeling another down endless, dingy corridors. Nic’s determined problem-solving is more concrete than The Signal’s philosophical detour into Plato’s cave. Certain knots in this story cannot be unsnarled.

Visiting Seattle for SIFF, Eubank told me, “I wanted to make a movie about Area 51 that didn’t ever say it was about Area 51.” (In fact, Jonah only suspects that’s where the trio is being held.) If anything, for his three rationalist heroes, Area 51 is more of a murky concept, a signifier of the realm where science breaks down, he says. “I think it still houses a lot of what-ifs. It’s very representative of the unknown and government secrets and weird tests.” Nic and company see in the place what they, having watched many sci-fi movies, expect to see. Dr. Damon merely reinforces that expectation, among other forms of covert assistance that he provides his three subjects. If they’re his unwitting lab rats, so we are Eubank’s. Brian Miller

Supermensch

Opens Fri., June 13 at Seven Gables. 
Rated R. 84 minutes.

The subtitle of Mike Myers’ first film as director is “The Legend of Shep Gordon.” If this were a comedy feature, and it’s not, he’d play the titular role: a hearty Jewish tummler who smoked dope with—and sold it to—all the L.A. rock stars of the late ’60s, then switched to managing them; partied with them; bedded many beautiful women; did lots of drugs and alcohol; produced movies; dated movie stars; and even bought beachfront Maui real estate when it was relatively cheap.

Today, it’s good to be Shep. He’s rich, largely retired, loved by everyone who, like he, somehow lived through the hedonism of that golden age. He can look back on past excess with the contentment and good karma of a life well-lived. Avuncular and incredibly well-connected in Hollywood, Gordon hobnobs with the Dalai Lama, Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, Willie Nelson, and a host of other celebs. Myers harvests plenty of their A-list praise and logrolling for his friend, now 68, who relates his old debaucheries with only mild embarrassment; he’s lived long enough to laugh at shenanigans at the Playboy Mansion and on the chartered plane of his first and most loyal client, Alice Cooper. (Scenes of the two buddies playing golf—Cooper without fright makeup, dyed hair tucked neatly in his cap—suggest some sort of reality TV show.) As the accolades keep rolling in, however, and as we better appreciate Gordon’s gilded life, the doc becomes poshly self-congratulatory and repetitive. Winners, no matter now nice, become dull after they’ve won. Money softens all the edges and ambition.

It’s the louche, ’70s side of Gordon’s rise that we want to see—and that’s plainly the movie Myers wants to make. From Wayne Campbell to Austin Powers and even to, groan, the Love Guru, he’s always had a backward-looking reverence for his showbiz forebears—all those guests on the Johnny Carson show that he, growing up in suburban Canada, longed to join. Shrek has made him rich since his early-’90s success, though Myers here speaks on camera of “a very hard time” (alcoholism? divorce?) when Gordon sheltered him. This film is partly the repayment of a heartfelt karmic debt to Gordon, whom anyone watching would want to have as a friend (especially given his open-door policy toward Maui visitors). It’s also the outline for a script that, after Gordon’s death, Myers might eventually film—with more misbehavior and less serving tea to the Dalai Lama. Brian Miller

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