Capone's Art-House Round-Up with T2 TRAINSPOTTING, SONG TO SONG, WILSON, and DIG TWO GRAVES!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


T2 TRAINSPOTTING
I’d certainly be within my rights to get long winded about the way director Danny Boyle uses clips from the original, 20-year-old TRAINSPOTTING to provide contrast between the drugged-out characters he introduced us to (in his adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel, via a John Hodge adaptation) and the more modern versions of them in their 40s. Not all of them are on drugs still, but they all manage to appear just as elegantly wasted. Less frenetic but just as much of a hardcore, gut-wrenching, gloomy portrait of lives adrift, T2 TRAINSPOTTING is not meant to be a return to form. Instead Boyle and his returning actors present us with characters who likely never thought they’d live to see 40…or 30, for that matter, and are now lost in a world of choices, responsibility, and the agonizing prospect of living a full life.

Two decades after he betrayed his friends and took a great deal of cash that was meant to be split four ways, Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to his native Edinburgh after dodging a bullet from a health scare. On the surface, Mark has returned to make amends, with his surviving father and his old mates, including Spud (Ewen Bremner), who is the only one still hooked on heroin; and Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), who owns the family bar, snorts a lot of cocaine, and has a chip on his shoulder about the same size as Renton; he also lives with a woman named Veronika (Bulgarian actress Anjela Nedyalkova), who is infinitely smarter than he is. The other member of the group, Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is tucked away for a long stretch in prison, which he breaks out of at the top of the film. When he finds out Mark has returned, he sees red and wants revenge.

In so many ways, Danny Boyle (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, 28 DAYS LATER, 127 HOURS, STEVE JOBS) has changed as a visual stylist and has become a lot more controlled and refined as a filmmaker, so returning to the world of TRAINSPOTTING gives him the chance to let the camera go and float through a scene with a youthful vigor, while still acknowledging that these characters are mostly miserable all the time. After engaging in a knockdown, drag-out fight with Renton, Sick Boy proposes a business venture that Mark seem eager to help with. Meanwhile, Begbie hasn’t changed a bit. He makes it over after breaking out of jail, attempts to enlist his now-grown son on some of his criminal activities, and is legitimately angered and hurt when his boy wants nothing to do with it.

We get brief glimpses of other TRAINSPOTTING characters, such as those played by Shirley Henderson and Kelly Macdonald, but the movie’s most genuine and moving surprise is that Spud has taken up writing. Specifically, he’s been writing about his early years with his friends and the stories are sounding a lot like adventures from the first film—or perhaps more to the point, like Welsh’s first book. The implication that Spud is a version of the author is tremendous and personalizes these stories so much more than placing a title card on the film that declares it “based on a true story.” By the end of the film, characters are reading these stories to each other, and it was the type of deviant poetry that made me forget my hesitations about Boyle using clips of the original film. He doesn’t edit these bits in to capture a feeling that his new film can’t; he’s not interesting in that at all. Instead, he uses them to recall a time when these young men and women reckless, careless and pathetic, even if they were smiling. Placing these images next to the current versions of the characters is a melancholy affair.

I suspect there will be some who will crucify T2 TRAINSPOTTING for leaning too heavily on nostalgia, and they wouldn’t be wrong. But Boyle is too smart a filmmaker to try to capture lightning in a bottle twice. Instead, he is interested in using our memories against us, in a sense, and allowing them to fuel our emotions concerning a group of middle-aged men who are stuck in the last chapter of their lives and are desperate to figure out what’s next. This may be a more difficult step than kicking drugs, and it’s a curious and desperate journey. I was left with a similar feeling I get when watching Michael Apted’s UP films (SEVEN UP, 14 UP, etc.) in that I’m quite eager to get updates on these characters, but I also dread it just a little because the odds are good that some of the subjects will have taken bad terms in the interim. The TRAINSPOTTING films are certainly a bit of fun and games, but it exacts a cost, even today.


SONG TO SONG
Terrence Malick (DAYS OF HEAVEN, THE THIN RED LINE, BADLANDS) is stuck. More specifically, he’s stuck making the same movie over and over again. Even more to the point, he’s stuck making movies in the same way, and the wildly inventive, almost mystical way in which he and Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki made THE TREE OF LIFE has become less a blueprint for future works and more of a mold into which Malick pours random images of people twirling around on beaches, in homes and apartments, through fields of tall grass, and, more specifically in the case of Song to Song, on the outskirts and backstage at a music festival in Austin, Texas, where most of this movie was shot several years ago.

Somewhere in the muck and mire is a story about a love triangle among three people in the music business. The centerpiece of SONG TO SONG is Faye (Rooney Mara) a bass player and would-be songwriter who falls for two men—the obvious choice, BV (Ryan Gosling), a songwriter; and Cook (Michael Fassbender), a music producer and executive, who seems to enjoy manipulating people and exerting control over them whenever he can. He’s a terrible person to fall for, so of course Faye does just that while maintaining a fairly run-of-the-mill relationship with BV. Making matters all the more complicated, the two men are also quite close. The film’s timelines are all over the place, but at various points in these on-again/off-again pairings, Cook lets his guard down with a local waitress (Natalie Portman) and falls for her hard, while BV does a little tumble with an older woman named Amanda (Cate Blanchett).

Every line of dialogue seems to be spoken with corresponding choreography, and after more than two hours of this, I was ready to throw myself into traffic. The most potentially fascinating part of Song to Song is its setting in the Austin music scene, and while a great number of moments take place backstage (or even on stage) at various concerts and festivals in the area, the music is muffled and brief, adding nothing to the scenes and often only serving to obscure the characters’ voices. The only true upside of being in the midst of musicians is that every so often, a familiar face will enter the scene and provide some actual words of wisdom while the actors sit and attempt to look unphased. Cameos by the likes of John Lydon, Iggy Pop, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and some extended moments featuring the wise Patti Smith are among the best moments in the movie.

The actual point of any of this clearly escaped me, and if there was a deeper meaning in the film, it either went right over my head, or I stopped caring at a certain point and it drifted right by. What seems more likely is that Malick likes posing his distractingly good-looking cast in ways where they appear contemplative, and we’re just supposed to assume they’re thinking deep thoughts. Instead what he’s done is given us a movie filled with empty vessels who care more about success than each other, so what is our motivation for enjoying their company in any way?

After about an hour of floating camera movement and ethereal dancing by the actors, I began to find SONG TO SONG not just pointless and dull, but outright unpleasant. I’ve been doing this job too long to care if a film has an actual plot or likable characters; give me something experimental with asshole lead characters any day of the week. But Malick is almost challenging us to enjoy ourselves on any level. It’s as if he’s attempting to inject a soul into characters and events that are inherently soulless. There’s certainly no mistaking a Malick movie for anyone else’s, and I have no doubt that Song to Song is exactly the movie he wanted to make with his three credited editors and endless supply of performances on the cutting-room floor (including an entire character played by Christian Bale).

Malick is not so much a storyteller any longer but a captor of moods and emotions. I’m not convinced we’re supposed to even believe what we’re seeing is real any longer; it certainly doesn’t resemble the way people behave in the real world. If you’ve been unfortunate enough to catch the filmmaker’s last two films (TO THE WONDER and KNIGHT OF CUPS), then you’ve essentially seen this. Do with that information what you will. I’ll certainly never give up on one of the great living directors, but he’s in desperate need of re-inventing himself once again.


WILSON
What I remember about the graphic novel “Wilson” by Daniel Clowes (GHOST WORLD), from which the movie Wilson is adapted by the author, is that it’s a series of humorous, life-altering moments in the life of its middle-age protagonist, played with a glorious combination of affability and vague hippie sentiment by Woody Harrelson. Wilson is just as likely to strike up an unwanted conversation on a long bus trip as he is to curse your name if he thinks you’re part of the establishment that’s keeping free thinkers like himself down. What the source material is not is a series of set-ups and punchlines, which is effectively what the film is, to its detriment.

Director Craig Johnson (TRUE ADOLESCENTS, THE SKELETON TWINS) is clearly a fan of the graphic novel, but he can’t get past his desire to make it less long-form, darkly funny moments and more punchy, quotable lines, which, admittedly, Harrelson is an expert at delivering. Without the actor, WILSON would likely be a great deal more insufferable. When a plot does finally kick in, Wilson’s father dies, and in an attempt to reconnect with his past, he unsuccessfully attempts to meet old high school friends, whom he quickly realizes he never liked in the first place.

One of the many people he locates is his troubled ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern), who confesses that the baby she was pregnant with when they split was given up for adoption (Wilson had been led to believe the pregnancy was terminated), and he immediately gets it in his head to find the now 17-year-old girl and have the three of them spend time as a family. The daughter, Claire (a nice turn by Isabella Amara) is so much of an outcast from her schoolmates and her adoptive parents that she’s fine with the idea of spending time with Wilson and Pippi, even if taking her out of school and driving around with her constitutes kidnapping. In an effort to show Pippi’s snooty sister (Cheryl Hines) that she had her life back on track, they take Claire to the sister’s house for a visit, and that’s when the charade begins to unravel, and Wilson is arrested for child endangerment, landing him in jail.

The primary plot in WILSON is probably the least interesting thing about the film. Much like the graphic novel, it’s the individual peripheral moments that shine, especially a wonderful scene in a diner between Harrelson and Margo Martindale. The conversation is so blunt and wrong that it ends up being the funniest sequence in the entire movie. Another standout performer is Judy Greer as Wilson’s dog-sitter and eventual love interest Shelly, who keeps him close after his brief stint in prison, during which Wilson does a great deal of soul searching and growing up. It may not be apparent until the end of the film, but Wilson is a coming-of-age story about a man in his 50s with no real social or practical skills outside of the gift of gab and irreverence.

Wilson has more than a handful of solid moments, but they are peppered between fairly stock observations about the way the world works, and how everybody tends to screw everybody else when given the chance. I’m not certain you can say that Wilson learns life lessons along the way, but not everybody does when they get older. Some people, including our antihero, simply fall into a pattern of living that works for them and sees them through to their final days. If you think you can handle or tolerate a film that offers no clear messages about how to improve yourself to make a better life, then WILSON might be for you.


DIG TWO GRAVES
The second feature from director/co-writer Hunter Adams (THE HUNGRY BULL) is the kind of film that sneaks into a single screen somewhere in town and you wonder one of two things: why is this great movie only on one screen? Or, how does this junk get released when so many better film don’t? DIG TWO GRAVES actually falls somewhere in the middle. While the film is certainly not priority viewing for either horror fans or fans of the more off-beat, it does feature a couple of key performances that might make it worthwhile.

Things begin intriguingly enough in Southern Illinois circa 1947 with two sheriffs dumping a pair of bodies into a flooded quarry. As soon as they’ve completed their unenviable task, one of them draws his gun on the other and declares that the other is not longer a sheriff. The film jumps ahead 30 years to the same ledge overlooking the quarry. This time brother Sean (Ben Schneider) and younger sister Jake (Samantha Isler) are preparing to dive in. Sean goes in first, never to surface again and eventually presumed dead, leaving Jake racked with guilt. Giving her some comfort is her grandfather, Sheriff Waterhouse (Ted Levine), whom we suspect is the character pointing the gun 30 years ago. But one day in the woods, Jake runs into a seemingly out-of-place and out-of-time stranger named Wyeth (Troy Ruptash) who runs with two equally odd-looking fellows. He proves to be even stranger when he attempts to strike a deal with Jake to bring her brother back (whether he means back from hiding or back to life is a bit unclear at first).

DIG TWO GRAVES (which has been on the shelf for at least a couple of years) attempts to capture a bit of a Gothic horror vibe without diving too deep in big scares or blood and guts, and I certainly respect its ambition. Levine (best known as the skin-wearing serial killer Buffalo Bill from SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) is a magnificent character actor who simply devours this role, making Waterhouse a man spilling over with secrets and knowledge that he can’t keep quiet much longer in the face of these three strangers who have entered his granddaughter’s life. Director Adams (who co-wrote the film with Jeremy Phillips) does a nice job capturing the remote locations and small-town atmosphere, but a great number of the performances seem overplayed and slightly vague in their purpose.

As you might have guessed, there’s a supernatural element to the film that simply doesn’t work and isn’t nearly as compelling as the filmmakers believe it is. They especially don’t service the story because Levine is so compelling as an actual down-to-earth character that the supernatural aspects seem pointless when they aren’t nearly as interesting as he is. There are certainly things in DIG TWO GRAVES to appreciate and even admire, but it doesn’t quite come together the way it it should to be looked at as a serviceable piece of low-grade creepy filmmaking or a worthy mystery. It’s a close call, but it’s not quite worth recommending outside of Levine’s performance.


-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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