Author: Joel Copling

Rating in Stars: **** (out of ****)
Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal
Director: Christopher Nolan
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence and some menace)
Running Time: 2:32
Release Date: 07/18/08

Upon donning the cape, cowl, and alter ego of the Batman, it’s very likely that Bruce Wayne never envisioned that his plan to return fear upon those who prey upon the fearful would be this much trouble. That becomes clear very soon into The Dark Knight, a thunderous sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, which captures quite forcefully the old adage about good deeds. The symbol for the city of Gotham that the Batman was meant to be has now inspired copycats who resort to the use of shotguns while wondering how their method is any different from the real hero’s and chaos (of the systematic sort) in a city already long prone to it. Here is a symbol meant to inspire good; over there are the forces that would slowly chip away at the influence.

Bruce (Christian Bale) as the Batman has been keeping busy. The mob has been getting hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time from banks that have been infiltrated by their ranks (The opening sequence depicts a meticulous heist of one of these banks, and William Fichtner appears in a cameo as its manager, who is as unabashed to pull out a shotgun as the robbers). Different sects of the city’s mob (whose leaders are played by the likes of Eric Roberts, Michael Jai White, and Ritchie Coster) make deals behind closed doors–and even some of Gotham’s finest are among those on the mob’s payroll, although Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman) and the mayor of Gotham (Nestor Carbonell) represent the ones who haven’t been swayed by criminal influence.

Bruce as a public figure is enjoying the nightlife spoils of his wealth, inherited from the parents for whose deaths he still feels guilty, although the fact that popular new district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) can be seen on the street and in the news with Bruce’s former flame, assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, filling in for a missing-in-action Katie Holmes), hanging off his arm forces Bruce’s faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine) to remind him of the costs of becoming a masked vigilante who spends his nights beating the bad guys senseless. “Know your limits,” Alfred advises; “I can’t afford to know them,” is Bruce’s foreboding reply.

The plot within the screenplay, written by director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, is remarkably streamlined. We have the conflict raising its head almost immediately upon reintroduction to the central characters, we have the conflict being complicated by twists in the development of the series of events, we have the introduction to a new villain (Again, I will get to him in a minute) who introduces a new dynamic within the balance, and we have those dynamic action sequences (shot with stunning mise en scene by Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister, whose compositions are particularly striking here).

And now we get to that villain (who, by the end, is one of a pair, though clearly and distinctly the more dangerous one). He is known only as the Joker. He comes with custom clothing, primitive weaponry such as knives (which, he explains to one character, he prefers to guns because of the methodical way in which he can use them), and a simple request: The Batman must reveal his identity. Oh, and he’ll kill people if this doesn’t happen within his arbitrary time frames. Heath Ledger, who is terrifying here, plays the Joker as a man with both a lack of conscience and a pitch-black sense of humor (a “magic trick” involving a pencil, his reaction to a faulty detonator or to a mob boss suggesting that he thinks he can succeed without bodily injury to himself, his follow-through of the Batman’s plea to “let go” of a hostage).

He’s a villain for the ages because of how merciless he is without even feeling the need to be menacing, and the performance at the center of it is unnerving enough that one doesn’t remotely need to wonder why the Joker character is the Batman’s long-gestating nemesis. The climax, which has two layers to peel back (two boats full of hostages followed by a crisis on a more intimate level), also revolves around the other villain who crops up as a result of the Joker’s influence on the events. They’re far from predictable and manage to reflect the relentless forward motion of The Dark Knight into the territory of not merely a superhero blockbuster but a grand and thrilling crime drama.

Rating in Stars: **** (out of ****)
Cast: Christian Bale, Brian Dennehy, Wes Bentley, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman
Director: Terrence Malick
MPAA Rating: R (for some nudity, sexuality and language)
Running Time: 1:58
Release Date: 03/04/16 (limited)

One must remember that suffering is relative to the sufferer. A certain Republican Presidential candidate’s woes regarding his father’s “small” loan of a million dollars and the subsequent problems that so “little” money caused for him are, to the wide universe and to any moral measure, as nothing to a child starving in a third-world country. Getting by on an amount of money that doesn’t actually get one very much within his circles, however, is, to the candidate, akin to that child’s starvation in an existential way. Neither he nor the child, in his mind, has it easy when taken in the context of their individual situations. That is neither to defend the candidate’s cheap way of playing victim when he is one of the richest individuals in the world nor to trivialize the starving child’s predicament within economic strife. But, as Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups wisely reasons, suffering is suffering to the individual, no matter what it looks like.

On the privilege scale, the central figure of Malick’s newest slice of poetic visual storytelling in the vein of his two previous efforts, a screenwriter named Rick (Christian Bale), is closer to the aforementioned Presidential candidate than a child in an impoverished country. This is a man beset on all sides by an existence mired in materialistic woes to go along with the ones of reflection and regret that come with the territory of a brother who has ended his own life (or so they say). Rick’s other brother Barry (Wes Bentley) is a ball of nerves and rage that explodes out of him when even thinking upon their father (Brian Dennehy), whom they resent for his lack of outward sympathy (Their mother, played by Cherry Jones, was a mostly uninvolved one).

Rick lives a cozy life in a Los Angeles apartment constantly fraught by low-level earthquakes. His writing projects take him to parties and raves populated by celebrities (Recognizable names and faces, such as Antonio Banderas, Kevin Corrigan, Nick Offerman, Clifton Collins Jr., and even Fabio, appear in cameos as themselves or perhaps not) and into the employ of agents played by Michael Wincott, Patrick Whitesell, and Rick Hess who try to “tell [him] about [him]” and to encourage him to take various projects for various studios. Rick, meanwhile, is reflecting on his five failed relationships with women in his life and looking forward to the sixth (played by Isabel Lucas) as the ideal to which he aspires (That a romance with her is, on the face of it, as materialistic as what he’s escaping proves that, perhaps, we do not ever truly change, except in the baby steps of recognizing we must).

In chronological order of when the narrative, split into chapters named after figures on tarot cards, presents them to us, the women are as follows. Della (Imogen Poots) is a free spirit, unencumbered by worries but unsure of her own emotional drive. Helen (Freida Pinto), whom Rick meets at one of those lavish parties, is just in search of a fling after feeling a burden to every man with whom she truly connected. Nancy (Cate Blanchett) is Rick’s ex-wife, who ended because he never felt as if the marriage was worth the trouble of sharing in her enthusiasm for children or even being kind to her after a while. Karen (Teresa Palmer) is a stripper who, like Helen, is only looking for something temporary and distracting. Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is a woman who consciously entered an extramarital affair with Rick that ultimately splinters apart.

These women are not characters, which might inspire controversy in a current climate of examining female roles in cinema, but figureheads that represent much for Rick the roller coaster shifts in his life–from progressing in his romantic pursuits to regressing once again. Each actress, but especially Blanchett and a devastating Portman, is up to the task of Malick’s challenging performance showcase of alternating plaintive gazes with disaffected blank stares (and so, for that matter, is Bale, who excels especially in the quietest moments of a very quiet performance). The film is also another magisterial collaboration between Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who makes a conscious decision to frame the actors mostly from behind, highlighting their disassociation with each other and with their situations). Knight of Cups is stirring, searching, soulful stuff.

Rating in Stars: *** (out of ****)
Cast: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman
Director: Christopher Nolan
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements)
Running Time: 2:21
Release Date: 06/15/05

Eight years after two disastrous attempts by Joel Schumacher to return the series to its comparatively campy cinematic roots following Tim Burton’s darker, far superior spectaculars, co-writer/director Christopher Nolan, popular only for a trio of modest psychological thrillers, attempted to bring the legend of the Caped Crusader to the big screen again by way of, well, a modest psychological thriller that happened to star the Caped Crusader. Batman Begins ultimately does not work as well as Burton’s first take on the character (or, for that matter, his highly underrated sequel), but for a long time, it does. For more than an hour, it establishes a new vision of its titular alter ego in the cape and the cowl that is less important than the man who takes it on as a symbol of mankind’s more vengeful tendencies.

This Bruce Wayne, played by Christian Bale in a solid performance of both charming swagger and privileged but world-weary vulnerability, is pushed into a troglodytic lifestyle by missing the opportunity to avenge himself upon his parents’ killer. This is where the story finds him: locked in a prison in the Far East, fighting the fellow inmates over food and a bullying power structure. He is approached by Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), a mysterious man who operates within a league of shadows and offers Bruce the chance to fight injustice by turning fear upon the enemy. Take a rare, blue flower up the mountain on which Ducard and his operatives are located in a monastic combat-training arena, the man says, and Bruce shall get his chance.

Ducard is only the direct subordinate to Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe), leader of the shadowy group, and the two train Bruce in many techniques of fighting and domination, both by way of what the flower produces (a hallucinogen that acts as a stimulant) and through the skills of ninjutsu training (which is as much learning about how to master misdirecting one’s opponent as it is about actually fighting him). The lesson turns out to be a far more complicated one than this, driving a wedge between Bruce and the League of Shadows and the former to travel back to his own city of Gotham.

The problem is that the great city, compared by one character to Constantinople and Rome (understandably, given its size in one aerial shot, strikingly captured by cinematographer Wally Pfister), is approaching its second recession in as many years as Bruce has been alive. He’s been pronounced dead after being gone so long, and while some, such as his faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine) and childhood friend Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes, the weak link among a strong cast), might be celebrating his return, it also rattles cages when he takes upon himself the moniker of the Batman, a vigilante in a thick suit and under a cape who fights the bad guys in a city owned by the mob (Tom Wilkinson plays its chief arbiter, Carmine Falcone, who has most lawmakers and enforcers on his payroll).

The exception is a goodhearted sergeant named Gordon (Gary Oldman in a strong performance), who errs on the side of a masked “vigilante” that brings results to the doorstep of the department; his fellow officers and boss disagree, and public opinion of the Batman sparks debate across the city. The threat, meanwhile, continues to grow as Falcone and a doctor named Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who sends criminals into an insane asylum instead of prison on the orders of a mysterious person above his pay grade, seem to have involvement in a plan to disperse a type of poison into the air within Gotham itself–a poison that heightens fear and drives its victim mad.

Nolan’s screenplay (co-written by David S. Goyer) is best when building up to a finale that feels a bit more familiar and shopworn than what comes before it. Nolan’s staging of action is occasionally impressive, especially when dealing with Bruce’s operation of a variety of gadgets and a tank-like vehicle spray-painted black (provided to him by Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox in a fun montage) and in a finale that challenges the notion of the word “hero.” But what proceeds this is the real deal, a marvel of editing that weaves in and out of multiple time frames with seeming ease and examines the precise, moving steps by which Bruce becomes the Batman. That is the real story of Batman Begins, which is a promising start to a series; the rest is merely what occurs when the Batman is positioned against his first villain.

Rating in Stars: **** (out of ****)
Cast: Jenjira Pongpas Widner, Banlop Lomnoi, Jarinpattra Rueangram, Petcharat Chaiburi, Tawatchai Buawat
Director: Apichatpong Weersethakul
MPAA Rating: NR
Running Time: 2:02
Release Date: 03/04/16 (limited)

Upon first viewing, there is something distinctly odd (and entirely fascinating) about writer/director Apichatpong Weersethakul’s aesthetic approach to Cemetery of Splendor. Here is a story about soldiers in the modern day whose mysterious form of narcolepsy is caused, according to a pair of long-dead princesses, by the spirits of ancient kings still fighting a millennium-old war. The soldiers’ lack of wakefulness is not just physiological but spiritual. When the one to which our chief protagonist latches herself in a maternal fashion does wake, it is through two avenues: his own body, which eventually loses the ability to keep that kind of energy active, and that of a local mentalist.

This is not just spiritual silliness, as this strange and singular narrative is largely told within the present day. The princesses who visit Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas Widner, in a very good performance that conveys world-weariness well) look like any other woman that populates the Isan province of Khon Kaen in Thailand. Jenjira and her oft-absent, American husband (Richard Abramson) had prayed at the foot of a shrine and given various items as offerings just hours earlier. It was an act done in tribute to those soldiers, specifically to Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), the soldier in whom Jenjira develops a parental sort of interest (Itt has little family of whom to speak, and certainly none of them has visited since his relegation to this small, makeshift hospital built out of an elementary school).

Even the hospital is on its way out, so to speak, soon to be replaced by a company that manufactures and sells fiber-optic cables. One has to wonder how the kings’ spirits would affect such a product when even children who attended the old elementary school complained of sleepiness for the years of its run. In any case, Jenjira and the head nurse at the hospital tend to several soldiers by a careful application of palliative medication, a healthy dose of meditation over the internal injuries that might have resulted from their days in combat, and the use of lengthy light bulbs whose hues shift color in particular striking moments within Diego García’s lush cinematography.

That last point brings me to the curious aesthetic choices made by Weersethakul and García. Almost every shot is a static one, simply observing the goings-on within and around Jenjira’s story. A waterwheel spins with great speed and determination. Bulldozers brutally renovate the land on which children play with soccer balls in order to pave the way for that cable company’s incoming location. The soldiers suffer the indignation of being in a coma and without the ability to control their bodily functions (An involuntary erection underneath bed covers is just one of a few things that might have earned the film an R rating if the MPAA had gotten their hands on it).

The film then enters a third act that fully embraces the hallucinatory qualities of Weersethakul’s intentions. The mentalist, Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), comes into the picture as Itt’s spirit, briefly trapped in a body that will perhaps never be cured, only treated, of its ailment, inhabits Keng, who leads Jenjira through a portion of the nearby wood, its metaphysical state now sharing that of the palace that accompanied an ancient graveyard holding the bodies of the soldiers from so many ages before. The allegory is afforded gravity by Weersethakul’s gentle hand, and as a result, Cemetery of Splendor resonates most heavily as a patient but devastating elegy.

Rating in Stars: *** (out of ****)
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger
Director: Robert Eggers
MPAA Rating: R (for disturbing violent content and graphic nudity)
Running Time: 1:33
Release Date: 02/19 (limited)

In its most sinister form, religious fundamentalism can look a lot like its complete reverse, or so says The Witch, an unnerving and effective look at the blurred lines between such a religious persuasion and that of Satanic paganism. The film’s screenplay, written by director Robert Eggers, purports to have gained a lot of momentum from writings in the era in which it is set (the 1630s). The dialogue takes on the Early Modern English dialect of the setting (New England), and the actors perform it with the sincerity of a stage production of something written by Shakespeare. The film is also positioned, rather awkwardly, as studio horror, which it is pretty firmly not for at least 85 of its 93 minutes.

Instead, we have about 45 minutes of build-up to a chamber drama that happens to sometimes take place outdoors. The central characters are the members of a close-knit, Christian family. William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie) are the mother and father, whose strict control of their children is clearly a loving and not abusive attribute of their relationship with them. The elder daughter is the hard-working Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), after whom her prepubescent, hormonal brother, eldest son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), yearns in a way that speaks fairly openly about the confined nature of their tiny, household society, and there are a couple of adorable twins, too, named Mercy and Jonas (Lucas Dawson and Ellie Grainger).

Katherine has just given birth to another son, who goes missing during an innocent game of peek-a-boo with Thomasin. Evil forces are at work on this piece of land owned by the family, and they do their damnedest to try and ward off those demonic spirits to whom they are merely seven more victims. Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke appoint a suffocatinguse of natural light to the proceedings, which fits well with their oppressive grimness. The film has drawn comparisons in the critical community with the work of Ingmar Bergman, and the film’s insular nature certainly gives those comparisons some weight, especially in the climax that proceeds the baffling final moments.

Those final moments, by the way, offer a kind of black-and-white choice and disturbing sort of sacrifice that feel at odds with the calmer cautionary tale that proceeded them but no matter. The film does quite the job of building the kind of tension that can’t be cut with the proverbial knife, and those performances, kept on that knife’s edge, are an enormous part of this. Not a single cast member here lets the material down, even the younger ones (Scrimshaw is particularly effective during a possession sequence), though Taylor-Joy is very good as Thomasin, whose innocence is quickly corroded by the penetrating forces surrounding her.

Before that baffling final few minutes, the film takes on the patience of an old-school thriller from the 1970s (to be specific, it feels like Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, especially in how it all seems to lead up to those final shocking moments, though they were more suggestive in the earlier picture). It’s a considerable achievement of craft and performance in holy matrimony that occasionally outshines a script that isn’t exactly stretching the boundaries of its central thesis. Luckily that theme is striking enough that crafty effort is all it needs to work. The Witch reciprocates the effort with frightening precision.

Rating in Stars: *** (out of ****)
Cast: Nilbio Torres, Antonio Bolivar, Jan Bijvoet, Brionne Davis, Yauenkü Migue
Director: Ciro Guerra
MPAA Rating: NR
Running Time: 2:05
Release Date: 02/17/16 (New York)

The religious fervor of the tribal West collides with the scientific discovery of the colonial East in Embrace of the Serpent, co-writer/director Ciro Guerra’s take on the Old World’s resistance toward the influence of the New by way of a kind of parable structure. At one end of a time frame, we have an explorer disappearing into the jungles along the border between Colombia and Brazil. At the other end, we have another scientist retracing his steps. It’s a way for the region to comment upon its own history, as these stories are based in truth. Guerra and co-screenwriter Jacques Toulemonde Vidal (taking inspiration from a diary written by its protagonists’ real-life counterparts Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evan Schultes) weave an intriguing tale rife with symbolism and haunting imagery.

In what we will call the “present day” (Although the screenwriters don’t put a specific date on the proceedings, these events took place roughly in the late 1940s), an explorer named Evan (Brionne Davis) searches the banks of the Amazon for traces of Theo (Jan Bivoet), a scientist who came upon this area in forty years previously and never returned from what was to be an exploratory trip. An elderly villager named Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar) meets Evan rather coincidentally, having  done the same with Theo perhaps upon that very shore. As Karamakate reluctantly helps Evan on the search, he recalls the time the “other white” arrived, very ill and in the care of a guide named Manduca (Yauenkü Migue), and asked Karamakate’s younger self (Nilbio Torres) to aid his own search for the yakruna plant (something which will cure his illness).

Interpersonal conflict of some sort exists within these characters from the moment many of them interact with each other. Skin color separates both Theo and, later, Evan from Karamakate by virtue of preconceptions on each person’s part. Both white explorers are wholly unprepared for the primitive lifestyle of the natives whom they encounter and with whom they travel. In the past, Theo, Manduca, and Karamakate come upon a settlement wherein the Christian faith is taught to children with such rigor that the priest whips the boy who welcomes outsiders into their midst. In the present, Evan and Karamakate encounter a tribe whose leader has convinced them that he is Jesus Christ incarnate, come to be married to a young, dying girl he insists be healed by Theo the scientist and to be given the cure to their own, likely nonexistent illness.

This latter encounter exhibits a problem shared by the film’s second half, which conflates symbolism with a kind of thematic opacity that makes much of it hard to pin down in any significant way. The business with the plant for which Theo is searching inspires an acid trip of sorts (the only instance of color in a film that is quite effectively shot by cinematographer David Gallego in stark, black-and-white hues), but it isn’t quite established what purpose the climax of the journey (which then cuts to credits rather insignificantly) holds.

It is also, ultimately, less relevant to the film’s impact as a cinematic effort. Flashbacks are an iffy tool to utilize and even more so to execute in a way that doesn’t make them feel like a gimmick. Here, they are used to inform Karamakate’s past; the shared performances by Bolivar and Torres are both very good at conveying a weariness with the world and with the West. Bivoet is also a highlight in this ensemble as Theo, whose fate is as uncertain as his real-life counterpart’s, the actor compelling in his portrayal of a sick man trying to make his mark. Embrace of the Serpent, in spite of its drawbacks, proves in this regard an unexpectedly tender treatise on the inadvertent marriage of two sides of civilization.

Rating in Stars: *½ (out of ****)
Cast: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Penélope Cruz, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig
Director: Ben Stiller
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for crude and sexual content, a scene of exaggerated violence, and brief strong language)
Running Time: 1:42
Release Date: 02/12/16

The appeal of 2001’s Zoolander was that its titular protagonist was so adorably daft that one couldn’t help but to like the guy. Zoolander 2, then, seriously tests that theory. Everything about the first film is exacerbated here, including the ever-present potential of going so far over the top that, as the late Roger Ebert (whose infamous hatred of the first film only nurtures curiosity about what the film critic would have thought of this clearly inferior sequel) once put it, it circumnavigates the globe. The jokes come at a faster pace as the targets for the film’s attempted satire have been updated by 15 years. The cameos are more numerous by three times, to a point far short of amusement when one begins to realize that’s the only novel trick up its sleeve. The ratio of the film’s successes to its failures is about one inspired minute to 15 subsequent ones of uninspired lunacy.

Indeed, the best stretch is right at the beginning. After “a scene of exaggerated violence” (clever, MPAA) in which Justin Bieber is murdered rather excessively right outside Sting’s villa in Rome, we become reacquainted with Derek Zoolander’s (co-writer/director Ben Stiller) and old friend Hansel’s (Owen Wilson) fates following the finale of the first film (which, if one remembers, was positively, absurdly optimistic about the possibility of a model’s facial expression stopping a Chinese throwing dart in mid-flight). Derek’s wife Matilda (Christine Taylor) died after the educational institution she and Derek built (the one with the elaborate name) collapsed. Derek’s parenting skills were gravely affected by the tragedy, and Derek Jr. (Cyrus Arnold) was transferred through the system to an orphanage. Derek sought refuge in northern New Jersey (an arctic wasteland).

For his part, Hansel, whose face was, um, disfigured by the collapse, has fled to Malibu (an arid wasteland) and into the arms of an orgy, all of whom, he learns, have been impregnated. He isn’t ready to be the father of 11 children, though, so in spite of Kiefer Sutherland’s tearful protests and when Billy Zane comes calling upon his (and Derek’s) talent as a male model, he travels to Rome to try and find work with new fashion moguls Don Atari (Kyle Mooney) and Alexanya Atoz (an unrecognizable, mostly incoherent Kristen Wiig) in order to find Derek Jr. and be reunited. Soon, though, he is drawn into an investigation led by Valentina Valencia (Penélope Cruz), an agent with the fashion division of Interpol (what?), that has uncovered a startling conspiracy.

Apparently, there is a conspiracy dating back to the very beginning of the human race wherein Steve (the third wheel to Adam and Eve, here played in cameos by Alexander Skarsgård and Karlie Kloss), the first male model, will be the ancestor of the male model to end all others. Bieber’s death was the latest in a series of celebrity murders that all ended with an attempt at one of Derek’s most signature expressions, which when unlocked leads our incredibly stupid models right into the clutches of old foe Mugatu (Will Ferrell) and an ancient tribunal of all the great fashion minds.

This all sounds far cleverer than it is. The screenplay by Stiller, Justin Theroux (who also appears opposite Milla Jovovich in their old roles as Mugatu’s henchmen), Nicholas Stoller, and John Hamburg barely follows any detectable structure until the controlled chaos of the climax. The celebrity cameos, which number far greater than any I have mentioned, lose their luster by the time stars like Olivia Munn, Joe Jonas, Susan Sarandon, and far too many more simply exist in the background (the less said about Benedict Cumberbatch as an androgynous model and Fred Armisen as a ten-year-old child laborer via disturbing digital effects the better off we would be). Zoolander 2 is, frankly, bizarre in a tired way.

Rating in Stars: ** (out of ****)
Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson
Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for some suggestive content and smoking)
Running Time: 1:46
Release Date: 02/05/16

(Note: The following review may have spoilers. It’s impossible to tell. Seriously.  You might want to see the movie before reading this or any other piece written on it. Good luck.)

So here I am two-and-a-half hours after an advance screening of Hail, Caesar!, the new film from writing/directing duo (and siblings) Ethan and Joel Coen, attempting to write a review. Questions spring up in my mind, mainly one in the form of an acronym that includes the 23rd, twentieth, and sixth letters of the alphabet, in that order. This movie is not one for classification of any particular sort, yet here I sit, trying to classify it with a rating in stars. The advertisements, once again proving their inadequacy at conveying a film’s qualities, sell it as a comic mystery, yet the joke isn’t a very funny one and the central mystery is solved almost immediately. That alone raises a whole load of other questions, most of them personal in nature.

For instance, how in the world can I possibly lead into the narrative-summation part of this review when so much of it is a potential spoiler? Further, how can I detect what is and is not a spoiler when almost all of it, by the final shot, is reduced to being inconsequential? Is all of it really inconsequential, or is the veiled commentary on the capitalistic structure of the Hollywood machine (and one group of men’s response to it) part and parcel with the oddities surrounding that thread? Does one despise the movie for the abject nonsense of the plot’s trajectory, or does one admire it for going whole-hog and not caring what anyone else thinks?

I’m in a state between these two extremes. I could tell you that Baird Whitlock’s (George Clooney) kidnap at the hands of a sort of tribunal with specific political leanings is crucial, but it doesn’t even seem to be so by the man himself, an actor currently shooting a movie within the movie whose name it shares. I could tell you that the ransom money given to them by Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is significant, but I’m not even sure to what end it was supplied. The film is an explosion of ideas that are promptly handled so ineffectually as not to exist and characters that are either dropped unceremoniously or handled as the inspiration of what amounts to a series of extended and pointless cameos.

There’s Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a dreadfully awful actor whose latest starring role in Lawrence Laurentz’s (Ralph Fiennes) Broadway production of Merrily We Dance is going predictably unwell. There’s DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), who is caught in a pickle with her latest romantic relationship and must adopt her own child (or something like that). These seem to be the foremost subplots in the Coens’ screenplay, playing second fiddle (I think?) to the kidnap, which itself seems to be of no consequence even to the culprits of the crime.

The result is a mishmash of form that is occasionally inspired (anything involving Fiennes and Ehrenreich, both of whom are very funny as industry folk on two sides of the camera) and, at an equal pitch, grueling (Sequences that show the process of filming often go on for far too long in a movie that may or may not be padded, even at less than two hours). The actors are constantly playing to the room, the production is glossy but unrefined (Roger Deakins is the director of photography here, but he seems to be having an off-day), and it all comes to mean absolutely nothing before cutting to credits. So, back to a previous question: Despise or admire? With Hail, Caesar!, I’m settling for polite incredulity at an extended in-joke that I didn’t get.