“Not Fade Away”

Two stars

Starring: John Magaro, James Gandolfini, Bella Heathcote, Jack Huston, Will Brill, Molly Price, Christopher McDonald

Rating: R, for pervasive profanity, considerable drug use, sexual candor and fleeting nudity

Disinterested cast can’t breathe any life into this ode to early rock ’n’ roll

By Derrick Bang
Enterprise film critic

Viewers born after 1965, or thereabouts, won’t have the faintest idea what writer/director David Chase is trying to express in this film.

Heck, I lived through this transitional period just like he did, and I barely followed this storyline.

Chase apparently assumes that the 1960s musical revolution, and all it involved, are somehow grafted into the brain cells of every American, regardless of age. Granted, the obvious high points have become (in)famous: the long hair, the mod clothes, the casual sex and even more casual drug use, the ever-widening generation gap made worse by mounting contempt for the violent quagmire in Vietnam.

But these are mere backdrop elements, against which the main characters in Chase’s “Not Fade Away” play out their restless angst … and that’s where this film falls apart.

We’ve absolutely no sense of the young people at the heart of this story: no concept of what they’re thinking from one moment to the next, or why some of them are so rude and self-centered, or why others are self-destructive. We get no back-stories, no insightful clues, no confessional moments of lucidity. These characters speak in non sequiturs — when they speak at all — and free-associate stray thoughts with snarky contempt, as if daring us to make sense of anything.

Chase apparently expects us to read everybody’s mind, but that’s impossible; his stars haven’t the acting chops to get anywhere near the level of introspective clarity we so desperately need. And, as if aware of this problem, Chase and cinematographer Eigil Bryld rely tediously, tiresomely on sulky, coldly aloof close-ups, as if searching for significance in the pores of each face.

Where is the fire, the acting gusto, that Chase brought to his work on HBO’s “The Sopranos”?

And slow? Oh, goodness; trends could rise and fall during the time it takes this morose, 112-minute film to drag to a conclusion.

The topper is an elliptical “conclusion” that arrives several scenes after Chase blows an opportunity to stop at a much more logical moment. Like several other recent films, Chase hasn’t the slightest idea when to stop, and instead gives us several false endings before settling on the least of the bunch.

I have learned, through long experience, to be wary of intimate projects that are deeply personal to filmmakers; in most cases, they can’t get out of their own way. The results are disappointing at best, mawkish self-indulgent at worst. “Not Fade Away” most often leans toward the latter.

Chase has explained, during numerous recent interviews, that the 1960s represented a tipping point in his younger life: the galvanic moment when, following the Beatles’ eruption on the American scene, he (to quote liner notes) “served time as a drummer in an obscure New Jersey band with bigger dreams than accomplishments.” Chase had the wisdom to abandon this tantalizing fantasy for a career in film, although he frequently has acknowledged these roots with a talent for marrying images with iconic pop and rock anthems.

And, indeed, Chase layers this film with brilliantly employed songs of the era; I’ll give him credit for establishing a solid sense of time and place. Too bad he didn’t cast his film with equal care, or give his characters any truly meaningful dialogue.

We meet the brooding, fringe-dwelling Douglas (John Magaro) during his senior year in high school, as he quietly envies the nascent band assembled by über-popular guitarist Eugene (Jack Huston). Truth be told, Douglas knows the blues — and music in general — far better than his peers, and is becoming reasonably adept on drums, but nobody cares.

Worse yet, girls have eyes only for Eugene, particularly the lovely but pouty Grace Dietz (Bella Heathcote).

Douglas’ working-class New Jersey home life is no better. His father, Pat (James Gandolfini), smolders like a pot set on perpetual simmer, his temper quick to flare over anything that crosses his conservative, reflexively racist radar. Douglas’ cranky, eternally unhappy mother, Antoinette (Molly Price), worries about money and chafes at how her family’s modest means pale when compared to other relations. She’s more caricature than character.

Younger sister Evelyn (Meg Guzulescu) is an unexpected ray of sunshine: both because Evelyn is spunky enough, and smart enough, to rise above her parents’ often toxic applications of tough love, and because Guzulescu herself is effervescent, her wide eyes and unabashed devotion to her brother winning our hearts.

Douglas gets his shot in Eugene’s band when the regular drummer winds up in the Army. (Pete Best, anyone?) Now in a position to share his artistic respect for a music form — blues-tinged rock — that evolves by the day, Douglas finds a kindred spirit in bandmate Wells (Will Brill), a condescending fellow with an extremely high opinion of himself … and an apparent belief that everybody else should rise to his standards.

Summer passes; Douglas enters college as a short-haired freshman who pleases his father with tentative thoughts about joining the ROTC program. He returns home for Thanksgiving break with long, frizzy hair and the early stages of a bohemian, peacenik attitude that’ll only grow more strident and intolerant with time.

We’re obviously intended to like Douglas, and sympathize with him, but that’s impossible; he is, throughout this entire film, an unpleasant, self-centered jerk.

He then further damages the family dynamic by dropping out of school, choosing instead to focus on the band. Oddly, despite the way Pat has been portrayed up to this point, he doesn’t toss his belligerent, ungrateful lout of a son out of the house; instead, Pat simply … simmers.

Unfortunately, tensions are equally high within the band — now called the Twylight Zones — because Douglas recognizes that he has a far better voice than Eugene, who until now has made himself lead singer. Douglas also knows that they cannot make a name by merely covering existing pop hits, as both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did, early in their careers; artistic recognition comes only with original material.

But here, too, Eugene prefers the path he knows.

Tempers flare; passions ignite; the band changes its name to TBD. Raw talent and a mildly Dylanesque stage presence turn Douglas into the group’s focus. He gets the girl, when Grace insists that she “believes in him.” Or maybe he doesn’t get her; this couple’s erratic behavior — and particularly Grace’s capricious nature — defy resolution.

Chase lards his script with tragedy. One character gets late-stage cancer: a certain death sentence. Another is confined to a local loony bin. Another smashes into a tree during a motorcycle mishap. Do we care? Not really; each is a fleeting misfortune, unsupported by a cast incapable of bringing emotional depth to these incidents.

One scene stands out: indeed, sparkles like a jewel in a bed of murk. Wanting to have a serious father/son chat, Pat takes Douglas out for a restaurant dinner. Gandolfini owns this moment, as the taciturn Pat opens up, choosing to share a confidence that he never should have revealed, but of course it’s precisely the sort of thing such a man would do. Magaro, as well, sheds most of his character’s aloof hostility.

It’s a brilliant moment, superbly acted and scripted, with both men showing their vulnerable sides and trying to connect. Alas, as happens in real life, they still talk past each other, even as they desperately yearn for connection.

If Chase had assembled the rest of his film with similar care, he’d have a memorable classic. Instead, this tedious vanity endeavor is a dull, dreary slog that flops in the shadow of far better rock ’n’ roll valentines such as “American Graffiti,” “Almost Famous” and “That Thing You Do.”

All of which I now need to watch again, to remove the taste of this misfire.

— Read more of Derrick Bang’s film criticism at http://derrickbang.blogspot.com. Comment on this review at www.davisenterprise.com

“Hitchcock”

3 1/2 stars

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Danny Huston, Toni Collette, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Biel, James D’Arcy, Michael Wincott

Rating: PG-13, for violent images, sexual content and dramatic intensity

Superb period detail and a strong cast are undercut by odd narrative choices

The London Symphony Orchestra debuted composer Nitin Sawhney’s innovative score for a sparkling new print of 1926’s silent suspenser, “The Lodger” — regarded as the first true “Hitchcock thriller” — at London’s Barbican Center on July 21.

“The White Shadow” — a 1924 silent melodrama long thought lost, on which Hitchcock served as scripter, assistant director, editor and art director — was found (mostly intact!) in mislabeled film canisters by a researcher at the New Zealand Film Archive, and has been lovingly restored and posted online, for all to enjoy.

And the past month has seen not one, but two quasi-biopics set during Hitchcock’s prime in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

That sort of attention can be a mixed blessing, particularly when the first of these projects — “The Girl,” which debuted Oct. 20 on HBO — was little more than character assassination. Happily, the newly released “Hitchcock” is a more palatable brew. Scripter John J. McLaughlin — working from Stephen Rebello’s “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho” — doesn’t have any axes to grind, and he also benefits from the genuinely fascinating, behind-the-scenes back story.

“Psycho” was a landmark production in all sorts of respects, from the shrewdness with which Hitchcock outmaneuvered the censorious Hays Office — one of the early artistic assaults that illuminated the growing irrelevance of that body of ultra-conservative bluenoses — to the film’s brilliant marketing campaign, which kept people out of their showers for weeks, just as “Jaws” would keep them away from the ocean in 1975.

“Hitchcock” benefits from several great performances, starting with Anthony Hopkins’ dignified depiction of the Master of Suspense, and Helen Mirren’s feisty reading of his wife and longtime creative collaborator, Alma.

They’re merely the tip of the iceberg. James D’Arcy’s portrayal of Anthony Perkins, who starred as Norman Bates in “Psycho,” is so authentic that it’s startling; at times, D’Arcy seems more like Perkins than Perkins himself. Scarlett Johansson is similarly striking as Janet Leigh, who winds up taking that fateful shower in a scene that has been imitated and spoofed countless times. Johansson doesn’t try for mimicry as much as D’Arcy, but she definitely conveys the way Leigh walked, acted and struck a pose; close your eyes slightly, to silhouette D’Arcy and Johansson, and it genuinely looks and sounds like Perkins and Leigh rehearsing a scene.

“Hitchcock” also has a strong sense of the era, thanks to Judy Becker’s meticulous production design, Julie Weiss’ costume design, and the art and set decoration by Alexander Wei and Robert Gould. Hollywood loves to make movies about making movies, but this one feels right; it plants us firmly in the late 1950s, thanks to cars, clothes, cigarettes, California beachfront property, tony Beverly Hills mansions and the Universal Studios backlot, where a flea-bag motel and the creepy, cornice- and pilaster-laden Bates house were constructed for Norman and his mother.

It’s frustrating, then, that with so many top-notch elements in play, first-time feature director Sacha Gervasi frequently derails his film with an ill-advised narrative device that not only brings things to a grinding halt at inopportune moments, but feels as if it had been imported from some low-grade horror flick. As Hitchcock himself said, on many occasions, he wasn’t about horror; he sought to deliver suspense. Big difference.

Events kick off with the completion and release of 1959’s “North by Northwest,” the glossy, all-star adventure thriller that reinforced Hitchcock’s reputation as one of America’s master showmen. This image was further cemented, on a weekly basis, by television’s “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” which had debuted in 1955 and been among the nation’s top 25 favorite TV shows for four consecutive seasons.

Hitch could have made any film he wanted, and the execs at Paramount — to whom the director owed one more picture, on contract — eagerly hoped for another “North by Northwest.” But the always restless and contrary Hitchcock, who hated to repeat himself, was mindful of the financially successful low-budget horror films being made by American-International, Hammer and other smaller studios.

Consider, as Hopkins’ Hitchcock muses to his longtime production assistant, Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette), how much better a first-class, low-budget shocker would be if he directed it.

And thus the die was cast, Hitchcock getting his way via ploys that would have been admired by a master tactician. Longtime agent Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlbarg) makes Paramount’s wary execs an offer they can’t refuse, mostly contingent on Hitchcock’s offer to finance “Psycho” himself. This causes some consternation on the home front, mostly when Alma’s cost-cutting measures interfere with his gourmand’s palette.

As Hopkins so endearingly explains, though, “Psycho” isn’t merely a means for Hitchcock to demonstrate his ability to efficiently helm a low-budget thriller. In one of many warm scenes between Hopkins and Mirren, the director evokes their early days in the 1920s, when no-budget films forced them to be quick, inventive and daring. Wouldn’t it be nice, he suggests, to recapture those exhilarating times once more?

The team of not-quite-stars comes together, with Perkins and Leigh joined by Vera Miles (Jessica Biel), cast as Leigh’s dowdy sister, who comes looking for her sibling after she vanishes, without trace, during the drive to California.

We also meet the production talents: young screenwriter Joseph Stefano (Ralph Macchio), whose obsession with therapy cements his being hired; prickly composer Bernard Herrmann (Paul Schackman), whose slicing string section would add the cherry to the notorious shower murder; and graphic designer Saul Bass (Wallace Langham), who concocted the film’s unsettling title credits and storyboarded interior sequences such as the shower scene and the staircase murder of the private investigator played by Martin Balsam (Richard Chassler).

And then there’s a rather strange detour: Hitchcock’s imaginative channeling of Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), the 51-year-old, small-town Wisconsin serial killer whose gruesome exploits prompted horror novelist Robert Bloch to write “Psycho,” the book Hitchcock later purchased — with an anonymous lowball “blind bid” that netted Bloch only $9,000 — for screen adaptation.

Numerous times throughout this otherwise captivating and firmly grounded docudrama, Hopkins’ Hitch finds “motivation” via imaginary (hallucinatory?) conversations with Gein. I cannot imagine a plot device that would more effectively rip us away from the story being told; it’s a dreadful miscalculation on the part of Gervasi and McLaughlin.

Far better, instead, to concentrate on their film’s finer moments. Both Mirren and Hopkins have choice scenes, hers coming when Alma delivers a wounded harangue to her clearly surprised husband, after he unwisely questions her loyalty. It’s a great speech, and Mirren conveys it brilliantly.

Hopkins’ transcendant moment, conversely, is completely silent; it comes as Hitchcock stands in the lobby of a theater showing the premiere of “Psycho.” He waits, calculating a key scene to the nanosecond, and then indulges in a droll little dance, his sweeping arms perfectly punctuating each collective shriek from the audience within. Pure visual poetry.

I wish “Hitchcock” more frequently aspired to that level of quality. Sadly, while Gervasi’s film is mostly engaging, these ill-advised lapses — which feel like the exploitative indie material Hitchcock intended “Psycho” to exceed, not emulate — leave a bitter and disappointing taste.

— Read more of Derrick Bang’s film criticism at derrickbang.blogspot.com. Comment on this review at www.davisenterprise.com

‘Anna Karenina’

Three stars

Starring: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Olivia Williams

Rating: R, and rather harshly, for mild sexuality and dramatic intensity

By Derrick Bang
Enterprise film critic

Artistic vision is captivating — or clever — to the point at which it calls too much attention to itself, and interferes with the story.

In effect, the tail then wags the dog; we’re too frequently aware of the artifice, at the expense of plot and character development. Empathy and identification become difficult, if not impossible.

Director Joe Wright’s handling of Leo Tolstoy’s venerable “Anna Karenina” is radiant and ferociously inventive, thanks to Seamus McGarvey’s luminescent cinematography and, most notably, Sarah Greenwood’s brilliant production design. The film is a thing of great artistic beauty, and we cannot help being enchanted — initially — by its sheer, magnificent theatricality.

But the artifice soon becomes tiresome, which exposes the oddly flat and vexingly mannered performances. Celebrated playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard undoubtedly deserves equal credit (or blame) for this vision; I’m disappointed, however, that this abbreviated, heavily stylized handling of Tolstoy lacks the narrative snap and sparkling dialogue that brought Stoppard a well-deserved Academy Award for “Shakespeare in Love.”

Indeed, despite all the bosom-heaving melodrama present in Tolstoy’s novel, this newest adaptation of “Anna Karenina” is a curiously bloodless affair.

Wright’s approach best can be described as a stylized blend of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge” (absent the music), Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” and the popular stage farce “Noises Off.” Luhrmann’s flamboyant musical told its story as the characters improbably broke into song; Greenaway’s saga unfolded as the camera tracked horizontally, apparently seamlessly, between events taking place in various settings … as if characters wandered into and out of fully dressed stages in half a dozen impossibly connected theaters.

Toss in “Noises Off,” for its behind-the-scenes antics — the stuff we’re never supposed to see — and the result is, well, fascinating. For a time.

The primary set piece, then, is a once-beautiful but now decaying theater, intended to represent the aristocratic rot of 1870s Russian high society; this building’s various sections, dressed appropriately, serve as the story’s many locales. We find Anna (Keira Knightley) and her husband, Karenin (Jude Law), at home in one corner of the massive stage; as Anna — for example — exits the room, she wanders “backstage” between curtains, scrim and backdrops, perhaps changing her wardrobe in order to be properly garbed as she enters the setting for the next scene.

As an exercise in coordinated activity, the result is breathtaking; I cannot imagine how much rehearsal was required, to get everything and everybody to move just so at all the right moments. But we also cannot help noticing the many and varied technical demands, to make it all work, just as Alfred Hitchcock’s extended single-camera takes in 1948’s “Rope” eventually overwhelmed the drama.

Every inch of this cavernous space is used; sometimes characters ascend stairs to overhead catwalks, suggesting a disquieting journey through Moscow’s seamier underbelly. Wright takes a similarly whimsical approach to set elements: At one point, Anna and her beloved young son Serozha (Oskar McNamara) play with a tabletop toy train, which unexpectedly chugs through a wintry Russian countryside and then morphs into the full-scale train that takes Anna on her fateful trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

Are we impressed? Absolutely. But are we moved?

Likely not.

The plot, then: Events are set in motion when the gorgeous, privileged Anna travels to Moscow to help her philandering brother, Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), save his marriage to Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). During the aforementioned train journey, Anna encounters Countess Vronsky (Olivia Williams), who is met at the Moscow station by her son, Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a dashing cavalry officer.

Dolly is distraught, having been humiliated one too many times by her promiscuous husband. Anna counsels forbearance, citing family responsibilities, the deep ties of marital love, and so forth: all the “reasons” that we know she’ll soon disregard herself.

By coincidence, Oblonsky is entertaining his best friend, Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), a shy, sensitive landowner with a crush on Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty (Alicia Vikander). Levin proposes, but Kitty has eyes only for Vronsky … who, in turn, ignores her completely, having been smitten by lust-at-first-sight over Anna.

The feeling is mutual.

Anna cannot put Vronsky out of her mind. Illicit thoughts give way to flowery declarations; a full-blown affair results. The rest, we can anticipate (or we know, having read the book).

But this, finally, is where Wright loses control of his film. Knightley’s take on Anna is incongruously rash and improbably arrogant: much more the behavior of an emancipated 21st century woman. But if her conduct seems unlikely, Law’s Karenin is even worse: essentially dead from the neck up. Law’s foolishly naïve and laughably stoic performance makes Karenin look and act like a block of granite … and the biggest idiot on Earth.

We’re intended to believe that Karenin wants to trust and believe in his wife, but Law makes the man seem dense and uncaring. Things become even sillier when Anna, gravely ill, insists that the two men now in her life come to some sort of “understanding.” Nobody in the room can pull off this scene — not Knightley, Law or Taylor-Johnson — and the story never recovers, despite (because of?) the considerable weight of additional melodramatic complications.

We’re far more emotionally invested in Levin’s pursuit of the chagrined Kitty, who realizes that her earlier treatment of this timid young man may have destroyed her only chance at happiness. Vikander is warm and sympathetic, with the fresh glow of youth; we also adore Kitty, just as we grow to despise Anna. Gleeson, similarly, makes Levin an honest and honorable suitor.

A film’s balance is off when its secondary characters pull focus from its stars. I recall being bothered by the same problem in “Out of Africa,” where the sidebar characters played by Michael Kitchen and Suzanna Hamilton were far more interesting, at all times, than Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.

Nor do Knightley and Law lose this battle merely to Vikander and Gleeson. Macfadyen’s Oblonsky is the only actor to deliver the theatrical flourish that this mannered production demands; the film bursts into sparkling life every time he’s on camera, and his line deliveries are delightful. He almost makes infidelity sound reasonable.

Macdonald’s Dolly, as well, makes the most of her few scenes. We’re left with the unmistakable conclusion that Macfadyen, Macdonald, Gleeson and Vikander are simply better actors than Knightley, Law and Taylor-Johnson.

Wright has a history of inventive filmmaking, albeit always (until now) in moderation. I love the way his camera follows different revelers during a party in 2005’s “Pride & Prejudice,” and the lengthy, single-take camera shot that depicts the British retreat from Dunkirk, in “Atonement,” is simply astonishing.

But these are momentary delights amid rigorously plot- and character-driven narratives. With “Anna Karenina,” Wright has embraced such tendencies far too much; the result, sadly, is uninvolving, overly self-indulgent and quite disappointing.

— Read more of Derrick Bang’s film criticism at derrickbang.blogspot.com. Comment on this review at www.davisenterprise.com