Two Recent Movies: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol

The plot is ridiculously impossible, the character development is nonexistent, the attempts at emotional connection are so clunky you can hear the impact, and the way everything is related back to the third film is annoyingly convoluted (if ultimately rather clever and satisfying), and yet, for all that, it’s one of the most purely enjoyable popcorn flicks of the year.  Even a nonentity villain and a weaker third-act can’t derail the whole thing. (As for the cast: Renner and Pegg are good, Cruise is Cruise, Paula Patton was lousy, Josh Holloway should have been given a real part.)  The biggest reason for this success is the excellently staged action setpieces, which exhibit the gratifying, all-too rare quality of actual bodies being flung about in actual space, meaning that despite their lunacy the sequences retain a remarkable visceral impact, especially (1)Cruise’s leap from the hospital, (2) his scrabbling up the side of the Burj Khalifa, and (3) his Pixar-esque pinballing fight with the villain in a giant  mechanical carpark.  And of course it’s filled with ridiculously awesome gadgets and that staple of modern action movies, men running/falling/fighting in really, really nice suits.  It reminded me of what Bond movies used to be in the ‘60s.  Count me in for whatever Brad Bird wants to do next.

Rating: 7/10 stars.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Despite the general awfulness of the trailers and posters, this sequel to 2009’s steampunk-actioner Sherlock Holmes is remarkably entertaining and generally improves on the original in almost every way.  It benefits enormously from the addition of Jared Harris as Holmes’ archenemy Professor James Moriarty, a criminal mastermind who probably stands as the first super-villain in fiction, and if I say that the climax of the film takes place at Reichenbach next to a waterfall, then the various Holmes fans out there should be able to figure out where this story is going pretty easily.  In other words, despite the fact that the film is filled with massive explosions every two minutes and moves at an absolutely frenetic pace uncharacteristic of the literary Holmes’ careful deductive skills, this film is far more dependent on Doyle’s original stories than the previous one (including allusions to several other stories and a very brief cameo by the Baker Street Irregulars), and all the better for it.  

Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law again play Holmes and Watson as the original bromance couple, this time upping the ante with several innuendos that include rolling around in sexual positions on the floor of a train and even waltzing together at a diplomatic ball.  Director Guy Ritchie certainly over-does things at times, tossing in random scenes (like a bonfire dance in a gypsy camp) that are completely extraneous to the rest of the plot, and including a couple of overlong action pieces (especially a horrible chase through a snowy forrest peppered by artillery shells) that rely to an ungodly degree on speed-ramping slow-motion as if that would automatically make the sequences cool and exciting.  Nevertheless, I was impressed by how much the movie actually trusts the audience to piece clues together, cycling through montages of items that added up into solutions for Holmes’ brilliant mind with little to no voiceover to explain how they all fit together.  It’s a surprisingly intelligent device for a movie that seems so in love with spectacle, and this willingness to be smarter than it needs to be extends to Holmes’ scenes with Moriarty, where the conversations are laced with subtle jabs, brilliant insights, and cunning stratagems.  The  climax, notably, leaves explosions behind and focuses instead on the two geniuses literally playing chess with each other, a life-and-death game that concludes the only way it ever could.  I’d say this is a worthy addition to the Sherlock-ian film canon.

Rating: 7/10 stars.

Review: The Sunset Limited

The setting: A dingy apartment in a not-particularly nice neighborhood in New York City.  The characters: Two men--one black, one white--with diametrically opposed views on life, sitting at a dinner table.  The plot:  They have an argument.

The Sunset Limited is a film made for HBO, directed by Tommy Lee Jones, and starring Jones and Samuel L. Jackson.  They are the only two people we ever see.  The script is written by Cormac McCarthy, arguably our greatest living writer, adapting his own play.  It is about the fundamental questions of life, of religion, of purpose, and despite never leaving the one-room apartment, it is one of the most thrilling films of the year.

Jones plays a professor (referred to in the credits simply as White) who is suicidally depressed, and indeed has just come from attempting to throw himself in front of a train.  Jackson plays the Bible-thumping ex-con (called Black) who prevented Jones from jumping and has brought him back to his apartment in an attempt to convince him not to do it again.  The two men are as opposite as they can possibly be: pessimist and optimist, atheist and born-again Christian.  One wants to die, the other to live.  Jones is not only an atheist, but a man who sees the entire world as evil worthless, perceiving no meaning or hope anywhere, and wallowing in his despair.  Jackson is not only a believer, but a strongly evangelical one who apparently preaches to just about anyone he meets.  Even the small heresies he admits to--a general disbelief in original sin, and a suggestion of the perfectability of man--emphasize his positive philosophy, differentiating him from fundamentalism or dogmatic Calvinism.  Jackson aims to prove to Jones that life is worth living, that he is loved by God, that the world is a place of beauty that ought to be valued.  You may think the deck is stacked pretty steep in his favor, but in truth the outcome is very much in doubt.  This is the battle for two men’s souls, and there’s no telling who will win.

Some argue that a one-location film like this can never be truly cinematic.  If by “cinematic” you mean wide vistas and lots of movement, that’s true.  But if what you mean is an absorbing film shot with intelligent, elegant use of the camera that  maintains interest and avoids visual fatigue, then this film is most certainly cinematic in the best sense.  It is certainly more cinematic than the similar (and also brilliant) My Dinner With Andre, where things are most chopped up into shot-reverse shots between two men talking at a restaurant.  Here there is more space around the two men, allowing both the camera and the characters more room to move.  The shots can shift from intimate back-and-forths to swooping, spinning movements that heighten the drama and excite the eyes.  (If I’m being perfectly honest, I’ll admit there were one or two shots which seemed awkwardly/distractingly pointed and noticeable, but that’s probably just me because I think about these things.)  The use of color and light is also highly creative, using oranges and shadowed greens to suggest a trashy ghetto but still evoke some beauty and vibrancy.  The soundtrack is filled with offscreen voices and sound effects, constantly emphasizing the world outside and serving to both isolate the characters and situate them in an identifiable location from which they will leave at the end of the night.  This is not Jones’ first time around the block directing, and he demonstrates ample skill in the staging of the whole production.

Nevertheless, this is still a film of a stage play, and the ultimate author has to be Cormac McCarthy.  I have read McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, No Country for Old Men, and about two thirds of Cites of the Plain.  I plan to have all of the latter, Outer Dark, The Road, and Blood Meridian read by the end of next year.  The Sunset Limited seems to me to be concerned with the ultimate theme of all his work: the problem of evil.  How do we deal with a world so irreparably violent and corrupt?  Each of his characters attempts to deal with this fact in their own way, crafting their own codes and beliefs to protect themselves, but it’s a dangerous world and their codes might not be enough.  I do not know his personal beliefs (he gives few interviews), but it seems like it would be hard to write Sunset Limited if he were not a Christian at some point in his life.  Based on his other writings, I would be very surprised if he still was.

The film is thrilling because it does two things movies rarely do: It tells without showing, forcing us to imagine instead of receiving pictures straight through our eyes, and it features a sustained argument about actual issues, allowing us to evaluate each character’s position on its own merits.  In most films the rule is show, don’t tell, and that is generally a good idea for movies with plot--but a movie featuring only people talking has its own kind of openness, a scope not limited by a budget but as boundless as thought and conversation can be.  Also in most films, arguments are predetermined and short, featuring one character who is absolutely right and another who is stupid for not listening to him.  Or else, the characters argue only about themselves, and what they say reveals psychology and motivation, serving the story but offering allowing the actual substance of the argument to dissipate in favor of character beats.  Even in something like 12 Angry Men the debate is really all about revealing the various hang-ups of the jury members.  Here, the characters’ personalities and back stories are certainly important, but their positions on the issues are even more so, and it’s intellectually stimulating to watch and listen in a way we almost never see.

Jones and Jackson are both among our finest actors, and here they give two of their very best performances, Jackson especially acting with more soul than he has in years.  These characters might have seemed overly schematic on the page, the stereotypes of “Black” being an ex-con who speaks in strong Afro-American dialect and is the more talkative, funny, and spiritual of the two, crushing down the debate and preventing the reader from relating.  On film, though, the two actors bring their characters to life, and the words pour out of their mouths with an enthusiasm and power not often matched.  While they debate, this little room is the center of the world, the only order amidst the chaos.  An epic battle is playing out, and it will determine whether or not the chaos is kept at bay for another hour.


Rating: 9/10 stars.

Review: The Mill and the Cross

Then began I to dream a marvellous dream,
That I was in a wilderness wist I not where.
As I looked to the east right into the sun,
I saw a tower on a toft worthily built;
A deep dale beneath a dungeon therein,
With deep ditches and dark and dreadful of sight
A fair field full of folk found I in between,
Of all manner of men the rich and the poor,
Working and wandering as the world asketh.

--Piers Plowman by William Langland

This is a difficult film to review.  It is strange and beautiful and unique, but also a little remote and perhaps too subtle for its own good.  It felt, to me, like it could have been a masterpiece and wasn't, but I am not sure that I wouldn't feel different after a second viewing.  I have often found second viewings of films that I find challenging but remote to be far more emotionally involving and satisfying than the first viewing. 


Written by Michael Francis Gibson and co-written and directed by Lech Majewski, The Mill and the Cross is the story of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his masterpiece, The Way to Calvary.  It is important to get a couple facts straight about this going in, or you will find yourself completely lost.  Bruegel painted in what is now the Netherlands (and was then Flanders) in the 16th century.  At the time of this painting, the Protestant Reformation was still in full swing, and the Low Countries had a reputation for being open. But Philip II, ruler of Spain, the Netherlands, and much more, came to power, and, as defender of the Catholic Church, began harshly cracking down on any reformist preachers and sympathizers.  This inquisition is what the painting is really about, placing the Crucifixion amidst the people and politics of the times, and depicting the soldiers dragging Christ to be crucified as Spanish.  It is unclear whether Bruegel himself was Protestant or Catholic, but he certainly seems to have opposed the Spanish police measures.

The film is not, however, about the making of the painting.  It shows Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) sketching scenes, but it never shows him actually painting.  The process is not what interests the film.  Nor is it a detailed historical portrait of the times and issues involved.  Instead, the film seems to take place inside the painting, telling the stories of ever person pictured over the course of the day the painting depicts.  There are only three speaking parts:  Bruegel, his patron Nicolaes Jonghelnik (Michael York), and Mary the Mother of Christ (Charlotte Rampling).  They first two periodically give speeches about the painting and the political context, while Mary contemplates the approaching death of her son.  While Hauer endows his lines with a certain gravity and wisdom, the other lines mostly come off as stilted and awkward, interesting in the abstract but not dramatically compelling.  Fortunately, the dialogue is very limited.  Outside of the few speaking interludes, it’s practically a silent film.

The film has been rendered in a complex process of live action, green-screening, and CGI backgrounds layered over each other dozens of times to create the texture of the original painting.  Colors pop off the screen, and foreground and background   shift in strange, surreal ways.  It is often astonishingly beautiful, and it looks like no other movie I’ve ever seen.  However, one gets used to the look of thing fairly quickly, and if it had nothing else worth recommending it would be little more than a curiosity.  What matters is how the film juxtaposes art and life, and what this juxtaposition ultimately reveals.  To borrow a term from another internet commenter, there is a diegetic blurriness to the film, meaning it shows both the creation of the painting and the what the canvas depicts at the same time, mirroring and reproducing the way the painting imagines both the death of Christ and the Counter-Reformation crackdown intersecting in the same artistic space.

Over the course of a single day, we see life roll by, as various people arise in the morning, take their wares to market, interact with each other, watch the executions,  and eventually go home.  At the end they join hands in a dance of death that recalls Bergman’s Seventh Seal, though the image is taken from the upper right corner of the painting.  The vertiginous foreshortening of the frame, with an infinite background suddenly made as close as any of the characters, mirrors the radical perspective shifts as the viewer sees first the painting’s creator and then his smallest creations, a shift that also suggests the religious juxtaposition of the mundane and the divine, mortal and immortal.  The wandering lives of the dozens of characters can feel shapeless and test the viewer’s patience, but the philosophical ideas behind it all are highly provocative and affirming.  At one point, Bruegel says that his painting “must be large enough to hold everything,” and that ability to include both the high and the low in his art is dramatized and analyzed here especially.  This quality is a peculiarly medieval trait, despite the fact that Bruegel was a man of the Renaissance/Reformation era.  One can see it in medieval literature like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the mingling of the sacred and profane, or in Piers Plowman, where the narrator can telescope from a view of a tower or a single man, zooming into that object with a word and discovering whole valleys, multitudes, and worlds within.  The film achieves a similar feat by juxtaposing a young peasant couple making love or a peddler dancing and drunkenly leering with a view from above on a mountain that suggests the perspective of God, “the great miller of heaven, grinding out the bread of life.”  This is a rare quality, almost unheard of in today’s art and literature, both hugely ambitious and warmly compassionate to the smallest person and thing.  The only recent film I can think of that attempts something similar is The Tree of Life, but that of course has none of the medieval flavor.

However, as I mentioned the film often feels shapeless and meandering.  It does not demand your emotional involvement, it observes and offers commentary, inviting analysis only if one is willing to put in the effort.  There is complex symbolism bound up in Bruegel’s painting, and if nothing else the film ought to make you appreciate the genius of the artist and his work.  The Way to Calvary encompasses a whole world, suggesting all of life and the Biblical drama of salvation inside its 4 foot by 5 foot frame.  There is the Tree of Life on the left and the Tree of Death on the right, and in between are the humble multitudes going about their business, living and dying in ignorance of the great drama playing out among them.  For in the center of the frame is Christ, one Man among many, but upon whom all else rests.  It is the achievement of the painting--and of all the greatest art, the film suggests--to capture the ultimate truths of life in a single image of such surpassing beauty that the audience is transfixed, made to know something which had heretofore been obscured.  

In the end, perhaps the film can be taken as an illustration W.H. Auden’s famous poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” itself concerned with another Bruegel painting:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Merry Christmas!!

Yeah, it hasn't been very exciting around here, and I'm not actually even posting this on Christmas, but here's wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season!

Recent Movies: 50/50, Moneyball, The Ides of March

50/50
An excellent young cast mines comedy and tragedy beautifully in this film about a 27-year-old who gets cancer.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues to be one of my favorite current actors, and Seth Rogen is actually quite warm and believable as his best friend trying to help him through his illness (a role he apparently played in real life with the film's screenwriter, Will Reiser).  And I think I'm mildly in love with Anna Kendrick, despite the fact her therapist character does things here that would probably get her fired in the real world.  The movie is obviously funny, but it's also very moving--there are so many little things it gets right, from the shock of learning of illness to the resistance to pity from certain sources to the way nobody ever seems to know how to talk about it to the trepidation before surgery.  The pain and fear is genuine and deep; there is real humanity here.  Basically I just loved this movie.

I will say that looking back on it, it does seem rather limited--apparently such a confrontation with his mortality did not cause the main character to question the purpose of his life that much or wonder about the existence of an afterlife.  He hardly has anyone to reach out to either--just 3 or 4 friends and relatives.  That makes it very small and intimate, but also strangely closed off.  The character's response is depression and apathy, not powerful soul-searching or determined resistance.  I guess I understand that, though.  The prospect of death does not always lead to exciting, movie-movie action and melodrama, nor does illness often open one up to the wider world.  It may accentuate how brief and meaningless your life has really been.  It is only after such an experience, perhaps, that the search for meaning can truly begin, and the movie's last line suggests that:  "What now?"


Rating: 8/10 stars

Moneyball
"Like The Social Network for baseball."  The comparison is trite but apt.  Co-written by Aaron Sorkin, the film has a similar sense of insider's knowledge of back room deals, high-speed business decisions, and brilliant insight being put to forceful use to change the way the world works.  Both are based on true stories, but drop characters and fictionalize things quite a bit in order to explore themes more closely.  The cinematography and color scheme are also similar, with lots of dark greens and deep browns in shadowed rooms (though Wally Pfister's work here lacks the precision and rigor Fincher brought to Network).  The most thrilling scene in the film is distinctly Sorkin-esque (whether he wrote it or not): When Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is attempting to acquire a new player who can sew up his new system and ensure his team's success, but must work three deals at once with other team managers, calling back and forth between them at high speed while he debates his assistant Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) on which players to offer in order to make the trade.  There is a palpable excitement here, and a fascinating expose on how these kinds of deals work, despite the fact it's all set in a tiny office with two guys talking on the phone and looking at charts; we never see the other managers, only here their voices.

Moneyball is not the masterpiece Social Network was, but it's still pretty darn good.  I never follow baseball (I'm more of a football/basketball kind of guy), but I was fascinated here by all the ins and outs of the strategy, and thought about it for days afterward, trying to figure out its implications for professional sports in general.  This is a film fascinated by ideas, the way new ones come in, the way they're resisted, the way they eventually cause change.  But it's also grounded in some strong emotional territory, with a wonderful movie star performance by Brad Pitt, who creates in Beane a character we feel for and want to root for, despite the fact he's a baseball manager who's making millions of dollars a year and looks like Brad Pitt.  The movie knows how to play with the sports movie genre, depicting an underdog team that manages to surprise opponents and bring its fanbase to life, but it is not tied to formula and repeatedly upends expectations. Both this and 50/50 are the kind of films Hollywood should be making: smart, moving, movies for adults.


Rating: 8/10 stars

The Ides of March
I had hoped this would be a third straight film I could add to that list of Hollywood-should-be-making, but unfortunately it was not to be.  Ides of March is a well-made film--well-directed by George Clooney, well-acted by a top-notch cast--and it's fairly compelling to watch.  But it has several plot holes, or at least plot weaknesses, and it's insights into politics are the same tired things we've heard so many times before.  It would have been great if this film could have offered the same behind-the-scenes excitement and insider's knowledge that Moneyball offered for baseball, but alas it cannot.  The way political campaigns are run now is a cutthroat, high-stakes game, and while the film knows this, it is disappointingly uninteresting in showing us the ins and outs of how the game is played, instead attempting to teach us the tired lesson that the game is dark and crooked.  I had hoped from the way Clooney's presidential candidate is set up as an Obama figure, the film would have something to say about the dangers of putting too much faith in a politician-as-savior.  (Clooney spends much of his screen time delivering speeches to the audience, espousing ultra-liberal positions on a diverse range of issues--including declaring that within ten years of taking office, no new cars with internal combustion engines would be made in the US, which made me and a couple other people giggle.) The film does touch on this, but really all it has to say is: don't do it, they're all corrupt.

Evan Rachel Wood's character is the weak link, I think, going from seductress to scared little girl in seconds, and acting illogically the whole time.  But the whole film is compromised by its utter cynicism.  Not a single person in this film, for all their political ideals, ever acts ethically.  There is a complete lack of moral compass among these politicos, and that is all the film has to offer.  Fear for your republic, for those who run it are not of the human race.  They have left it long behind them, in the pursuit of power.

Rating: 6/10 stars

Review: J. Edgar

Biopics are strange things.  When done correctly, they can illuminate a historical figure's life and character with real insight, increasing the figure's impact and influence in the process.  This is rare, though.  Most often, biopics end up being long, dry, bloodless affairs, desperately attempting to be sympathetic to their subject while not denying his/her character flaws.  They are often handicapped by their wide scope--how many other films ever attempt to cover a character's entire lifespan?  The most effective biopics are nearly always those which approach their subject in the most creative manner--whether pinpointing one particular point in the character's life to focus on (Lawrence of Arabia, Patton), tossing factual accuracy out the window (Young Mr. Lincoln, Amadeus), or attempting to capture character or impact through alternative, impressionistic means (I’m Not There).

Unfortunately, J. Edgar attempts none of these things.  Instead, it attempts to show every major event in FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover's entire 46 year career, heavily narrating it throughout as an elderly Hoover in the Sixties dictates his self-serving memoirs.  As a result, the film is virtually devoid of a dramatic arc, and forced to rely on Hoover's (playedby Leonardo DiCaprio) relationship with right-hand man, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer).  The film portrays them as devoted romantic partners who nevertheless remain chaste out of Hoover's fear and hatred of homosexuality.  This is a potentially controversial move as neither of them ever admitted to such a love, but it is based on fairly strong conjecture by many not all) historians and does not seem unjustified.  What's wrong with placing this at the center of the plot is that it attempts to demand our attention based on a lot of sublimated signals within a large historical narrative, then awkwardly shoehorns in emotional confrontations between the two men, including a sort of fistfight-cum-lover's quarrel which becomes downright ridiculous and laugh-inducing.  Their relationship is never believable and hardly ever sympathetic--only in old age does their come any real tenderness (though Armie Hammer's make-up is so ridiculous it's hard to take anything he says seriously).  Strangely, Clyde becomes something like the voice of reason in the film, telling Hoover when he's wrong and detailing his character flaws.  I guess this is somehow supposed to relate to the tension in the film between criticizing Hoover and admiring him, but it comes off as ham-handed talking-to-the-audience moralizing instead of any sort of honest moral inquiry.

This is a shame, because a life of J. Edgar Hoover, one of the two or three most hated and controversial Americans of the 20th century (right after Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, two men the movie quotes Hoover as despising despite certain ideological similarities), and his story is an ideal place to question issues like the extent of federal authority, rights of privacy, police authority and brutality, and the conflict between freedom and security.  The movie is at its best when detailing the exploits of Hoover's early career.  Hoover forcefully makes his case for the necessity of a highly-trained, well-funded federal police force in the face of threats like anarchist and Bolshevik bombings in the wake of WWI, prohibition-era gangsters, and bank robbers/spree-killers like John Dilinger, Baby Face Nelson and Bonnie and Clyde.  If the film had confined itself to this era, simply chronicling the formation and rise of the FBI Hoover's role in that, it might have been much better.  The 1919 Red Scare era is an especially poorly remembered historical period, and the film could have done much to illuminate it.  I suppose that with Michael Mann's Public Enemies and HBO's Boardwalk Empire so current, though, the filmmakers decided to avoid too much rehashing of Prohibition-era gangsters.  

The most interesting episode involves the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and the role of the FBI in catching the kidnapper (though doubt remains about whether he acted alone and/or was the one really responsible for the death of the child).  This is the one place we are given detail about how the FBI worked and Hoover's embrace of new scientific methods of forensics to improve police work.  But even here much of the story is glossed over through voiceovers, with only a few of the high points actually filmed.  I am fascinated by historical events, processes, and turning points like this, and if the film had become more of a historical essay, attempting to elucidate certain trends and define the historical moment (a la a more factual Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), then the narration would have been justified, even welcome, and the movie as a whole might have become far more thought-provoking.  Instead, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black really wants this to be an in-depth character study of an enigmatic and tortured figure, and the narration of past events seems mostly to be meant to let us inside Hoover's worldview.   But we never grow close to him, and the reluctance of the film to make too many strict judgments, attempting to leave Hoover somewhat unexplained and enigmatic, instead ends up coming off muddled and uninteresting.  Even the sensationalized aspects of the story are unexciting:  The very dubious (even scurrilous) accusations that Hoover enjoyed dressing up like a woman are here dramatized as a weird expression of grief at his mother's death, where he pulls on her necklace and dress in an effort to remember her.  The moment is weirdly reminiscent of Norman Bates, but it's played low-key and semi-sympathetically, and it's not clear how this is supposed to fit in with the accusations--did this apparent one-time-thing end up becoming a habit?  Did someone see him like this--alone in his room--and spread the word?  As far as I can tell the scene is pure fantasy, but it's drawn out an agonizingly long time as if it reveals some dark secret or key to Hoover's identity.  (And I'm not even mentioning the egregious use of an Eleanor Roosevelt letter as some sort of exemplar of the beauties of Hoover and Tolson's love at the end.)

All this said, Black's script could (with a few tweaks) have been made into a moderately solid movie if it had been directed well.  But Clint Eastwood films the thing in his habitual color palette of shadowy blues and grays, a style that worked in Mystic River and Letters From Iwo Jima but has grown remarkably stale and trying over the course of the last 8 movies.  Eastwood has never been anyone's idea of a visual stylist, but he has managed to muster a certain warm, pictorial beauty a couple times in the past (Unforgiven, Bridges of Madison County). This washed-out, blue-gray scale thing has become just lazy though, not to mention rather ugly and boring.  The plot may have been sluggish but it could still have been interesting if Eastwood had brought a fraction of the flair that, say, Scorsese brought to The Aviator (another, far better, DiCaprio biopic about a major 1920s-1940s figure).  Instead, everything looks the same and everything feels the same, and it just drags you down.

With a cast and director and subject like this, this movie should have been a home run.  Indeed, the idea seemed to connect strongly with audiences--I saw it on Saturday night with a sold-out crowd. Unfortunately, though, it's an intermittently interesting muddle that's likely to disappoint just about everybody.

Rating: 4/10 Stars