Movie Review: Arrival

Nov 14, 2016 | Movies

Writer and director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Incendies, Sicario) presents another visual puzzle with his Arrival. This alien science fiction drama is slow, deliberate and ponderous and less gruesome to watch than those other movies. Villeneuve still earns strong performances from his cast and Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) and Amy Adams (Her, Man of Steel) in leading roles are fine. Neither as inscrutable as a Shyamalan or Nolan picture nor as clear, elegant and rewarding as a Hitchcock movie, Villeneuve blends his elements into a cold, gray think piece.

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Arrival plants clues to its plot surprises, but it’s still too intellectual for its own good. I figured out what was happening at a certain point in the action—you probably will, too—and, unlike The Sixth Sense and other twist movies, Arrival refreshingly exists to cultivate and encourage thought, not merely to shock, surprise and titillate. So, this is immensely absorbing. Though it is based solely on earth, Arrival belongs to that resurgent genre of Hollywood sci-fi movies such as The Martian, Interstellar and Gravity which emanates from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running and Marooned, even Apollo 13: space or science fiction that makes you think. But, to varying degrees, these movies are lacking in an ability to make you feel.

Arrival comes closer than most. Masterfully scaling back to focus on the individual—a woman named Louise (Adams)—while retaining the expectant sense of awe at a terrestrial visit by aliens, Villeneuve imbues a bleak, remote sense of grayness into the film. Using Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score (strikingly similar to Michael Nyman’s music for Gattaca), Amy Adams’ face and the placidity of a lakehouse, Villeneuve marks the motion picture with singular touches of significance to allow the audience to trade on what one notices. A beautiful tree signals that life stands alone against the world. A pair of wine glasses indicates couplehood. A body pillow suggests loneliness.

The desire to be connected to others is central to Arrival‘s intelligent theme. It comes clearly from the Adams character, Louise, an academic linguist who writes and teaches that language is both art and the basis for civilization. Louise enters her classroom trying to connect, looking out at students, probing for inquiring eyes,  reaching out to family, from her daughter to her mother, and, of course, to the aliens that she is contracted by the American state to decipher, analyze and interpret. Connection, communion, are key to Arrival.

So are disconnection and departure. Through its gray tones, flat lines and televised scenes of talk radio rants, widespread traffic jams, panic and looting across the world as 12 alien spaceships hover over the earth, Arrival deposits in Louise a feeling of loss, alienation and despair; the earth in its meltdown is leaving her or she is leaving this earth or something extra-terrestrial is going on, even as Louise narrates and hints that life is a grand and meaningful loop to close—in Apple’s words, is it one infinite loop?—blotchy circles are all she has to work on.

With mounting pressure on Louise’s boss (Forest Whitaker) to get fast answers so earthlings can size up the visitors’ aims, Louise is both driven by her desire to connect and taunted by her visions of her daughter. In the meantime, she connects with Renner’s scientist, a sensitive and intelligent colleague who sees the profound effect of the mission and accounts in his own way for its universal implications. Will the aliens attack? Do they hold certain concepts and, if so, how? Can the government be trusted? Will Communist China wage a first strike upon the spaceship over Shanghai? What to make of the naysayers, from those pre-judging the aliens to those claiming that their ships are bad for the environment?

How do we know what we know?

This last question is implicitly answered with a bit of a parlor trick in Arrival, which puts 12 ships over 12 parts of earth, teasing with whatever you know of the number twelve—months, apostles, monkeys—and leading to a final question: Are we alone? The answer will almost certainly make you think, at least if you draw a conclusion about whether an answer is possible, and Arrival supplies plenty of material with which to make one, including a far-fetched notion about what a dictator would and would not do. But in the heroine, thinker and pioneer, who may choose to defy the government, the earth and the whole world to save and enrich herself while leaving the world alone—if arguably putting the world at risk of destruction—one finds inner peace. Arrival‘s screenplay by Eric Heisserer based upon a tale by Ted Chiang leaves few breaks in the loop and little room for interpretation that the meaning of life is to live, let live and fill it in with what’s entirely up to you.

Arrival is as much about why you want to escape as the wonder of anticipating an arrival and it is skillfully made. It transports, deposits and prompts thought more than it moves the audience with emotion. In a turbulent world being torn apart, getting there is good enough.

Movie Review: Sicario

Oct 4, 2015 | Movies

sicarioPosterDespair is the main theme of Sicario, the new movie by director Denis Villenueve. This one, like his previous picture, Prisoners, is stylized and well made. It proceeds as though it’s got something crucial to convey, with compelling characters, twists, scenes, transitions, music and photography. Everything is designed to build tension toward action and denouement.

That the foundational part is problematic does not make this picture about police, drugs and gangs and the two countries that feed off the buying and selling of drugs, the U.S. and Mexico, less enthralling. Sicario, starring Josh Brolin (True Grit, No Country for Old Men, Men in Black 3) and Benicio Del Toro (Traffic) and Emily Blunt (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Into the Woods), reunited after 2010’s underrated The Wolfman, stretches situational types—the cop as family man, the woman in a male-dominated profession, the jaded professional with a heart of gold—into a tight plot.

Villenueve keeps the audience both at bay and on edge, shrouding a Mexican drug cartel operation in mystery and blood. Hardness sets in from the start, with a federal drug bust in Arizona, and each character, from Brolin’s wise-cracking fed to Victor Garber’s polished professional, plays to Sicario‘s theme that practically no one can escape some form of a drug-induced death in the desert. If Prisoners enraptured with its theme that we are all just prisoners here, as the Eagles’ Don Henley sings, Sicario, which means hitman in Spanish, pushes the notion that everyone is guilty of doing some type of hit.

Blunt’s character bucks the trend, taking out drug gangsters but feeling it afterwards. She’s driven to exact justice with her partner (Daniel Kaluuya) and question the authority of those to whom she volunteers to report for a mysteriously dangerous mission into the center of the drug cartel. Collaborating with a seriously damaged Del Toro and swaggering Brolin and their motley, manly crew of various paramilitary types, Blunt’s earnest agent gives the murky field operation an air of credibility. But why this wild bunch needs her remains a mystery. With slow-moving overhead shots, a Twister-type droning score with pulsating beat before every action sequence, Villenueve makes the players matter one by one and without the camp and cartoonishness of Scarface or No Country for Old Men. There’s real craftsmanship in Sicario‘s filmmaking, alternating fast and slow action scenes, such as bang-bang gunplay peppered with step-by-step journeys into long passageways, signs and cityscapes signalling the bigger pictures and, in particular, one silhouetted transition from a public to private interior.

Sicario has nearly everything a drug gangster movie should include: jaded agents, shifting allegiance, double cross, guns, caravans, border crossings, Texans, Arizona and a honky tonk, too. It has a good script by Taylor Sheridan and good performances by Brolin, Blunt and especially Del Toro, a fine actor who deserves a role outside of drug culture. As good as Blunt is in the role of a policewoman on the verge of becoming a whistleblower as all the planning, raiding and shooting gets more convoluted, I didn’t totally buy her character. Many in today’s audiences probably will. She’s sufficiently blank and tough in the cop role, with a flat American accent that reminded me of Jane Leeves as Brit Daphne Moon doing a deep, flat American accent on Frasier. I like Blunt as an actress because she can play a wide variety of roles with conviction. She does that here, too.

But either the part’s underdeveloped or today’s female supercop is so deeply ingrained through countless movies and TV police procedural programs that you might not notice the character’s several mistakes. She errs in judgment time and again, from losing a weapon and lagging behind to other questionable decisions, including saying the movie’s worst lines. Her character’s stumbles blend into the hyper-tense action, so it’s less noticeable, but each of her out of place objections, mistakes and reckless actions diminish the character’s plausibility. This may be part of bleak Sicario‘s point about the character’s arc, for all I know. It is certainly part of its theme that despair from fighting a war on the drug cartel is human.

“We must be engaged to engage,” someone warns before one of the movie’s most exciting scenes. The ever-looping cycle of engagement, whatever else Sicario lacks, including an examination of what drives engagement of buying, selling and outlawing drugs, is a targeted, terrifying depiction.