BEFORE: Anthony Hopkins carries over from "Proof", and I still feel like I'm running a day behind, thanks to that trip to Connecticut a couple weeks ago, when I returned on Tuesday and watched my Tuesday movie late on Tuesday. Of course, I'm not really behind, I'm right on schedule, but since I'm still posting reviews on the following day, it just feels like I'm behind. And sneaking out to the theater last week (and doing that again in a couple days for "Avengers") means I don't have time to get back on my usual schedule by watching two films back-to-back. So I'll have to wait for my upcoming (pre-"Solo") break in mid-May to get back on track.
THE PLOT: A disgraced former college dean has a romance with a mysterious younger woman haunted by her dark past, and he is forced to confront a shocking fact about his own life that he has kept secret for fifty years.
AFTER: Throughout this film, various characters discuss the Monica Lewinsky case, or it's heard in the background on news reports. This is done mainly to set the time period for the story - but it's a reminder of a time when, and this may seem hard to believe for modern audiences, the President of the U.S. not only had sex with a woman who was not his wife, but also then tried to cover it up after. I know, right? Thank God that our country never had to deal with that happening again.
But my goal, as always, is to get around to a movie before I learn what the "hook" is - which is not always easy, because of all the press, reviews and internet spoilers that tend to surround a movie these days, plus the fact that I talk a lot about movies with people AND on top of that, I often see too much when I'm dubbing a film to DVD. So the odds are stacked against me, yet still I managed to watch "Get Out" about a year late and still not know the hook, though I had a few guesses that turned out to be quite wrong. Ditto for "Dolores Claiborne", "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby" and "Collateral Beauty", and that's just this year. It seems I do better when I see a film right after it opens (duh...), wait entirely too long, or somehow find a film that's so weird that it's off the spoiler radar.
None of those are the case tonight, so I went into it knowing the hook, but I'll still try not to mention it here, if you want to know, go check Wikipedia now, it'll take about 5 seconds, I'll wait. There, feel better? Now you really don't have to see this film, unless you want to. If you now think that things don't really add up, you would be correct. But nothing really adds up here, the story spins off of a college professor accidentally using a word during his class that gets taken as a racial slur, even though it's pretty clear he didn't mean it in that context, but in today's overly-PC culture, he loses his position, even though the people that he supposedly offended weren't even in attendance, so right there you have to wonder how offended they could feel over something that they didn't even hear directly. So I guess this film acts as a poke at our overly sensitive racial climate, but exactly what does that accomplish, except encourage the racists?
So this professor now has an axe to grind against the college, only we never really see him grind it. He doesn't file a lawsuit of his own, he doesn't take out any kind of revenge, he doesn't plead his case to the press, so then what are we all doing here? Where's the story, where's any kind of narrative follow-up on this? Instead he falls into a relationship with a younger woman who works at the college as a janitor, and she's got troubles of her own, namely an ex-husband who keeps tracking her down to sit outside her apartment, and occasionally berate her over the death of their kids. Oh, and he forms a friendship with an author who's dropped out of society, primarily to play gin rummy and dance with (?) but this is also the device through which his story is related to us, flashback style. Ugh, that's three films in a row that refused to follow a linear structure, and it's gotten progressively worse. I'm at the point now where I'm considering just congratulating every film that manages to tell a story from start to finish without relying on flashbacks as a crutch.
Of course, a movie like this is going to live or die according to its casting, and some may say that Hopkins was a terrible choice for this character. He couldn't lose his accent, and that worked against him here. The man who played the younger version of his character in the flashbacks (most famous for starring in the Fox TV show "Prison Break") was a better fit, but he had no accent, was a tall man, and basically could not have turned into the older man played by Hopkins. Did he somehow shrink two feet when he got older, or did he have the middle part of his legs removed?
What's worse is that I couldn't even tell what happened at the end. I mean, I watched it, but I didn't understand it. And the journalist character even went and talked to the ex-husband to investigate it, but that conversation shed no light on the situation. And now I've got the opposite problem, since I knew too much about the story going in, and I somehow feel after watching it end that I know even less than I did before. How is that possible? Now I have to go to the internet to figure out how this movie ended. That's not a good sign.
Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Ed Harris (last seen in "The Way Back"), Gary Sinise (last heard in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"), Wentworth Miller (last seen in "Underworld"), Jacinda Barrett (last seen in "Poseidon"), Harry Lennix (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Anna Deavere Smith (last seen in "Rachel Getting Married"), Margo Martindale (last heard in "Table 19"), Phyllis Newman, Mili Avital, Mimi Kuzyk, Lizan Mitchell, Anne Dudek, Danny Blanco Hall, Ron Canada (last seen in "Ted 2"), with a cameo from Kerry Washington (last heard in "Cars 2")
RATING: 4 out of 10 boxing matches
No comments:
Post a Comment