Holiday movie reviews

The Pursuit of Happyness

There’s a lot of feel bad before The Pursuit of Happyness gets to the inevitable feel good, but when it gets there, all cockles in the vicinity will be well warmed, just as they should be at Christmas. Will Smith – who turns down his Tom Cruise-y gumption to deliver a proud, elegant performance – plays a real-life former navy man named Chris Gardner, a working class dad who found himself pulled toward poverty by a run of bad luck and bad choices in the money boom of 1981 San Francisco. But he’s eternally optimistic, a believer in the title (which is a misspelling from the sub-literate, prison-like day care where he has to send his son every day) and its less poetic corollary: the pursuit of cash.

Gardner has a gift for math and hustles his way into an unpaid internship at a prestigious San Francisco brokerage firm just as his wife (Thandie Newton) walks out and he and his son (played by Smith’s real-life son, Jaden) become homeless. This is inherently sentimental stuff, but the quotidian struggles aren’t too maudlin-dipped. The film understands that as much as poverty is about basic survival – food and housing – there is an emotional dimension to the state of being without, too, an adjacent shame carved into Gardner’s exhausted face. Even as it’s packaged like an inspirational holiday card, the dream of upward mobility gets a drubbing here; an unpaid internship is only really available to those with money and Gardner is the only black man to be seen in the business world that is so indifferent to his presence – at first.

Gardner’s goal isn’t just to regain his pride: he is running (literally – the guy sprints through San Francisco like a foot courier) toward stuff. The camera, too, lusts after expensive cars, houses and baubles. I was rooting for this guy, but it’s hard to keep the foam finger flying when the big dream is… stockbroker. That’s not the kind of romantic goal that matches the old-fashioned, can-do spirit of the movie; if Gardner had given his all to become a dancer, he’d have sprinted straight to the Bolshoi.

The Pursuit of Happyness has something in common with women’s weepies like Volver and Mildred Pierce: the sacrificing parent who does it all for baby. Give in, wipe a tear and God bless us – and the almighty dollar – everyone!

Release date: Dec. 15

Rocky Balboa

First question: How bad is it? Well, Rocky Balboa (which could have been called Rocky VI) is not Mr. T- bad, but it’s bad. There are no hip waders thick enough to make it unsoiled through the muck of ego that is this vanity project about two-time world champion prize fighter Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), now a senior citizen, taking on a 20-ish world champ named Mason “The Line” Dixon (real-life champion Antonio Tarver). No, really; that’s the plot.

Rocky is bored, see, and he’s still got “some stuff in the basement” as he tells his old pal Paulie (Burt Young), who achieves new heights of irritating side-kickness after being fired from the meat-packing plant. Rocky didn’t invest well – guess he had to sell the robot butler from Rocky IV – and lives modestly, holding court in his South Philly restaurant with tales of the glory days. On weekends, he leaves roses at his wife Adrian’s grave (“She died of woman cansah”). He loves his son (Milo Ventimiglia) but Robert is irked that people call him Rocky Jr. and has turned into a slight stockbroker who doesn’t visit enough. After an ESPN virtual boxing match shows Rocky beating the unbeatable Dixon, savvy promoters put together a real life version in Vegas. Buoyed by a new mousy love interest (Geraldine Hughes), Rocky reaches down deep for one last go-round.

You know what’s coming and maybe you love it: the training montage, replete with a glass of raw eggs and the signature run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. What you might not expect is the strange rambling philosophical asides or Stallone’s inability as a director to stick to the actual fight, cutting in black and white flashbacks and pop flashes so the boxing scenes come to resemble a Gatorade ad. In the parade of product placement, I’m sure Gatorade got its due.

Second question: Is it over? With a franchise like this, and Stallone’s burgeoning modern art collection to support, what do you think?

Release date: Dec. 20

The Good Shepherd

A spy is not usually the life of the party, and Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is a man of solitude; he looks alone in a crowd. At home, he relaxes by placing little ships in bottles, a task of controlling the uncontrollable befitting a founder of the CIA. In this semi-fictionalized account of the rise of the CIA in Cold War America, Wilson is the kind of robotic patriot one would have to be, and Damon is in a perfect state of hackles-raised alertness, as if every passing stranger, every crumpled paper, is a piece of intelligence waiting to be deciphered.

The Good Shepherd feels like it exists in Wilson’s mind, and with a mind of trap doors and corridors, the film is far too intricate. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when the U.S. fails to invade Cuba, Wilson receives a package on his desk, a blurry photo and a mangled tape of a man and woman pillow-talking. Wilson believes the package is the key to finding out who sabotaged the invasion. As the story shifts between his upper crust childhood, his hazing in Yale’s “Skull and Bones” secret society (extracurricular activity to many powerful Americans, including former CIA chief and President George H.W. Bush) and his disastrous marriage (to Angelina Jolie, wasted here), you feel sometimes like one of those game show contestants in a wind chamber filled with circling money, grabbing at the pieces.

Director Robert De Niro does not move quickly (the film is 160 minutes), preferring to let his cast members do their thing. Luckily, he knows people, enlisting Joe Pesci, Michael Gambon, and even himself, as an aging general who anticipates the potential for corruption. The CIA, he insists, should be the country’s “eyes and ears, not its hearts and minds.”  Wilson looks surprised at the notion of a downside; his faith in patriotism unwavering and the collateral damage is his inner life. For him, and for the world, a question hangs over The Good Shepherd that stays with the viewer: Has it been worth it?

Release date: Dec. 22

Dreamgirls

Dreamgirls was a smash ’80s Broadway musical about the ’60s and ’70s that has been brought to the screen in the oughts. Behold an unapologetic chronological mash-up: afros and cats-eye makeup collide with disco and hip-hop. The filmmakers are riding on the assumption that all these little anachronisms will be forgiven because Dreamgirls is such a glittering bag of fun. And at times, it is; the lush tale of the carefully orchestrated rise of a Motown girl group is bouncy to the ear and yummy to the eye, an overdue showcase for some extremely talented African-American performers. But Dreamgirls is also trite, a film that highlights the play’s weaknesses – not timeless; very hackneyed – and grindingly adheres to the music movie narrative of rise-fall-rise-fall etc. The only surprise is that someone let Eddie “My Girl Wants to Party All the Time” Murphy sing, and as aging lothario soul man Jimmy Early, he’s quite touching, if occasionally knee-sliding a little too close to his James Brown impersonation from the Saturday Night Live days.

Jamie Foxx – showing no capacity for evil – plays Curtis Taylor Jr., a Machiavellian, Berry Gordy-esque producer with an eye to breaking black music in white markets for green dollars. He takes giggling teen group The Dreamettes and quickly shunts the lead, show-stopping, chunky diva Effie (Jennifer Hudson), to the back row and brings skinny babe Deena (Beyonce Knowles) to the front. Soon, Effie is living on welfare while Deena is a superstar wandering the corridors of her mansion, vaguely dissatisfied.  Everyone involved claims Dreamgirls has no relation to Diana Ross and the Supremes but puh-leez; even choreographer Fatima Robinson – who eliminates all traces of ’80s jazz-hands for something more fly – throws Knowles some shoulder shrugs and mermaid-dress shimmies that are extremely Miss Ross. 

The prostituting of musical talent is hardly a new story – Knowles may recognize a little of her own life as lead singer of Destiny’s Child – so it’s up to Hudson, in the scene-stealing role of Effie, to give us a reason to care. Does she ever: she rips into the karaoke/drag queen classic And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going like a dingo with a baby. Listening to Knowles – gorgeous, but without presence – after listening to Hudson is a study in contrasts that flatters only the latter. If the entire film had the same sit-up-and-take-notice ecstasy that Jennifer Hudson exudes in one note, this Christmas would have been a Dream season.

Release date: Dec. 25

Notes on a Scandal

Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), all starched superiority in her Talbots blazers, is a battle-axe history teacher at a scruffy London high school. She records her life nightly in little black notebooks, but what to write about? Her cat, Portia? Her empty evenings? She is in desperate need of a main character. Enter Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), a new crush-worthy art teacher and neo-hippie whose soft cottony sleeves flow past her fingertips while her hair hangs in her eyes. Barbara reads her journal in voiceover during most of Notes on a Scandal, and she proves a scarily unreliable narrator; there is a desert of ironic distance between her descriptions of events and the events as we see them unfold in this beautifully acted, chilling drama based on Zoë Heller’s novel.

When Barbara discovers that Sheba is having an affair with a teenaged student, she finally has the weapon to turn the inchoate friendship into something like intimacy, or an obsessive’s version thereof. Pocked with black humour, the film is a lean thriller that doesn’t let anybody off the hook. Sheba is stealthily belittled by her mother, and her lived-in marriage to a man 20 years her senior (Bill Nighy) seems overwhelmed by the needs of a son with Down syndrome. But she is also flighty and self-indulgent – a failed artist who lives in a punk rock adolescence of her own devising, gazing at her old Siouxsie Sioux records, longing to be longed for. In class-conscious London, she is part of the “bourgeois bohemia,” writes Barbara, with contempt and desire.

Barbara kicks in motion a tragedy, but she isn’t only the psychopath that she is in part. Screenwriter Patrick Marber has made a deft psychological study of a woman whose loneliness has hardened into something poisonous. That Barbara is gay is something she herself, a woman of a particular generation, barely acknowledges. Rather than the cliché of the straight-talking lesbian, she’s evidence of what happens when desire is forced underground, to burrow and fester into scandal.

Release date: Dec. 25, Toronto; Jan. 5, Vancouver; Jan. 12, Calgary, Edmonton; Jan. 26, Ottawa, Victoria, Halifax, Winnipeg, Waterloo

Children of Men

Children of Men is a movie that would not have been made seven years ago. It screams anxieties that were barely articulated before 9/11, imagining a future (2027, London) where bombs explode in Starbucks, illegal immigrants in cages line train tracks and, around the world, police occupy mosques. Still feeling cheery? Try this: Women have become infertile. It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel sick.

Remarkably, the engine of civility trudges along (this is England, don’t forget). Londoners take decrepit double-decker buses and go to work in the morning, though they keep their government-issued suicide pills (“Quietus”) in pocket. Clive Owen – wonderfully numb – plays Theo, a corporate drone who one day is thrown into the back of a van, Abu Ghraib hood in place, by urban guerillas. He has been seconded by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), an American maybe-terrorist, to take care of a young black woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashiety), who is miraculously carrying a child. From here, Children of Men (based on a P.D. James novel) becomes a dystopian thriller: a bloody, livewire, horror show, race-fuelled Nativity scene. Theo’s full-body cynicism helps him see through the agendas of the various organizations that want the world’s only baby and he ends up caring for Kee, calling upon his long-dormant tenderness. In an apocalyptic refugee camp, the two seek something called The Human Project, either the last gasp of the scientific community that will rescue us all, or a tragic urban myth.

Here is a film that speaks of the now, that doesn’t let us off the hook by parcelling out the future to some slick Blade Runner fantasy; no rays in the guns, just guns – and everywhere guns. That we recognize this city, and this burnt-out countryside with its stubborn trees and sunsets, is a reminder that the future is upon us. Occasionally, Children of Men seems silly with its Nostradamus checklist of our worst fears: Ritalin, video games, the statue of David bought and sold on eBay. But silly isn’t wrong and what it gets right is the sensation that our precarious geopolitics are causing a crack in the planet that is growing, and on the other side lies the chaos of Children of Men. Director Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien) steers this ungainly ship with confidence, and in one astounding tracking shot through a gunfight, leaves a smatter of blood on the lens, forcing us to look at the madness straight on.

Release date: Dec. 25

The Painted Veil

A few years ago, director John Curran made an excellent, compact film called We Don’t Live Here Anymore, a hard-to-watch autopsy of two dead relationships. In SUVs and renovated kitchens, the four battling characters had endless (shouting) conversations about infidelity and custody. With The Painted Veil, Curran proves that bitter and broken-hearted is not just a modern condition. In this handsome, inert rendering of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel, a nerdy bacteriologist (Edward Norton) takes his unfaithful wife (Naomi Watts) to the backwaters of China during a cholera epidemic; these two make Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf look like a rom-com.

Watts is wonderfully wry as the former party girl reluctantly reined in and Norton uses his squinting blandness to good effect, showing his spiny side at the very moment you’re rooting for her to leave him.

A few narrative nods to anti-foreigner sentiment, and a ready-made AIDS allegory attempt to put some meat on the film’s pretty bones. But really, 1920s China is just a backdrop – and a steaming, luscious one – for the couple’s mental mutilations, which are far more interesting than their reconciliation. A melodrama that works better as verbal fisticuffs.

Release date: Dec. 29