All the Pretty Horses OPENING NATIONWIDE: DEC. 25
It’s always dangerous turning a beloved novel into a film; its fans are likely to resent anyone’s hijacking their own private images of the tale. In the case of a book as writerly as Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” there’s no way a filmmaker can find a visual correlative for such serpentine sentences, for rhetoric that can soar as high as a hawk over the Mexican landscapes where two young Texas boys go riding in search of adventure.
What you’re left with is the story, and how well you tell it. In Billy Bob Thornton’s handsome, morosely romantic, but ultimately disjointed Western, Matt Damon is John Grady Cole and Henry Thomas is his best friend, Lacey, the two lads who, displaced from their Texas ranch in 1949, wend their way to the vast estate of a rich Mexican (Ruben Blades). There, Cole is hired to break the landowner’s wild horses. There, though he’s warned not to, he falls in love with the man’s beautiful daughter (Penelope Cruz), a dangerous move that will lead to his violent coming of age.
Thornton had bitter fights over the editing of his movie, which shrank from its first cut of four hours to its final two-hour shape. The result is a movie of arresting pieces that don’t harmonize into a satisfying whole. The dialogue captures McCarthy’s tangy, laconic tongue (Ted Tally did the adaptation), and the landscapes dazzle. But “All the Pretty Horses” comes fully alive only when young Lucas Black is on the scene. He plays the volatile teenager Blevins, who tags along with Cole and Lacey, bringing them bad luck at every turn. This skinny, scruffy, quicksilver young actor sneakily steals the show. ( 3 snowflakes)
What Women Want OPEN NATIONWIDE
Mel Gibson is guy’s guy Nick Marshall, Chicago advertising executive and unreconstructed male chauvinist pig. One fateful night in his bachelor pad, Nick slips in the bath and gets a jolt from a hair dryer. When he comes to, he has magically acquired the power to hear what women are thinking. At first this drives him nuts (he’s astonished at how many women think he’s a total jerk). But then he realizes the usefulness of his gift. Not only will he be able to steal his new female boss’s (Helen Hunt) ideas and sabotage her job, it will make him an even more ruthlessly efficient lothario.
It’s a farfetched but promising premise for a romantic comedy. But “What Women Want” is about half as funny as it ought to be. Once they’ve milked the gag for some broad laughs, director Nancy Meyers and screenwriters Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa are more interested in providing us with moral lessons than in giving us a good time. The result of Nick’s journey into the hearts and minds of the opposite sex is–surprise!–to turn him into a model lover, dad and professional.
Gibson, in his first romantic-comedy role, is nothing if not game. He dances, he connives, he mugs, he sends himself up. He makes a likable heel, but you feel the effort in everything Gibson does. The ubiquitous Hunt is appealing as the woman Nick simultaneously betrays and falls for. Trouble is, the better a human being Nick becomes, the duller the movie gets. (2 snowflakes)
Before Night Falls OPENING: Dec. 22 NATIONWIDE: Jan. 22
The life of Reinaldo Arenas, the prize-winning Cuban exile writer who died in New York in 1990, was lived at a level of fever-pitch intensity. A prolific writer from a peasant background who produced more than 20 books, only one of which was allowed to be published in Cuba, a sensualist of pagan proportions whose homosexuality put him on a collision course with the hysterical homophobia of the Castro regime, Arenas crammed several lifetimes of pleasure and horror into his 47 years. This is not a life that can be contained in a conventional biopic, and Julian Schnabel, painter and filmmaker, lets Arenas’s passionate, idiosyncratic personality set his tone. This powerful, lyrical meditation on Arenas’s life achieves a kind of hallucinatory urgency as it leaps and twists from his childhood to his disillusionment with the Castro regime, his brutal persecution and imprisonment, his escape to New York in the 1980 Mariel boatlift and his bitter final days struggling with AIDS. It is not a shapely movie (it wasn’t a shapely life), but it’s a devastating one.
Javier Bardem, who usually plays macho heartthrobs, miraculously transforms himself into the defiantly gay author. It’s an astounding performance that honors Arenas’s courage, wit and hunger for freedom at any cost. Schnabel, in his second film after “Basquiat,” is a master of milieu, transporting us to a revolutionary Cuba that feels utterly authentic. His painterly eye is alert to the jarring contradictions of a sensual culture in the grips of a puritanical ideology. Schnabel’s moving film is a passionate but clear-eyed memorial to a brilliant man caught in a lethal maelstrom of art, eroticism and politics. (5 snowflakes)
Cast Away OPENING NATIONWIDE: Dec. 22
There are shots and sequences in Robert Zemeckis’s audacious new movie as dazzling as any you’ll see this year. After about 40 minutes, Zemeckis stages a plane crash in the midst of a storm over the Pacific that is breathtaking in its horror: it may be the greatest plane crash on film. This is the disaster that hurls Tom Hanks out of his orderly life and onto a desert island where he will struggle to survive, utterly alone, for more than four years. Hanks plays a revved-up, type-A FedEx efficiency expert whose whole life is measured in seconds and minutes. Rushing around the world from Moscow to Memphis, he’s had little time for the woman (Helen Hunt) he intends to marry. It’s the overriding irony of William Broyles’s screenplay that this globe-trotting, always-hurried hero should find himself trapped on an island where time comes to a stop and the horizon never changes.
Hanks, who can make the smallest gesture speak volumes, has no trouble holding the screen by himself for close to 70 minutes. (Nor does he have the help of a musical score: the whole time he is on the island we hear only natural sounds.) To survive, he must start from scratch, inventing tools for eating, rediscovering fire, employing the contents of the FedEx packages that have washed ashore. In one is a volleyball to which he gives a face, names Wilson and begins to talk to.
Up to the point when Hanks is finally rescued from his ordeal, “Cast Away” is a triumph. But once he returns to the world, the movie takes one wrong turn after another. What would that first re-entry feel like, for a man driven to the brink of madness by solitude? That’s just what the filmmakers don’t show us. (Instead, we get a maddening title card, four weeks later, and a hero halfway recovered from culture shock.) Worse, “Cast Away” tries to twist itself into some kind of love story, assuming that the audience gives a fig whether he gets back together with Hunt. It’s sad to see such stunning work self-destruct. You leave haunted by the movie that might have been. (3 snowflakes)
The Family Man OPENING NATIONWIDE: Dec. 22
While you’re watching this fable about a rich, single, hedonistic Wall Street “master of the universe” who wakes up one morning to find himself living the life of a suburban dad married to his college sweetheart, countless other movies may come to mind: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Big,” “Regarding Henry,” “Sliding Doors.” “The Family Man” borrows bits and pieces from the large library of Hollywood fantasies about alternative lives and magical transformations. Originality is not exactly its strongest suit.
What gives Brett Ratner’s sentimental comedy its own distinctive flavor is the casting: Nicolas Cage plays the Ferrari-driving stock trader transformed into a tire salesman, and Tea Leoni plays his beguiling wife, a pro bono lawyer. Cage has never been an actor to take the straight and narrow road to a characterization; he’s drolly discombobulated as a father so unprepared for his familial duties that he expects a receipt when he drops his daughter off at day care. Leoni’s smart, effervescent sexiness makes it easy to understand why Cage might stick around to change diapers.
As the supernatural agent of our hero’s journey, Don Cheadle is wasted in a poorly conceived role that manages to combine two offensive stereotypes for the price of one: the mystical black man as the white man’s savior and the black man as urban thug. The movie’s predictable pro-family, anti-corporate-greed philosophy is the usual Hollywood knee-jerk bow to middle-class values it likes to pretend to believe in. Still, one doesn’t have to take “The Family Man’s” messages too seriously to enjoy the elegance of Dante Spinotti’s camerawork, or the palpable chemistry between its stars. What charm, quirkiness and warmth the movie possesses is due largely to them. (3 snowflakes)
Thirteen Days OPENING: Dec. 25 NATIONWIDE: Jan. 12
My first reaction when I heard a movie was being made about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis was: why? Everyone knows the calamity was averted. Where’s the suspense? I’m happy to say I was wrong. “Thirteen Days,” a behind-closed-doors account of the nail-biting deliberations that went on inside the JFK White House, keeps you hanging on every twist and turn of its wilder-than-fiction plot.
It’s an extraordinary tale of political brinkmanship played for the highest of stakes, as much about the infighting John Kennedy and his brother Bobby waged with the hawks in the military as it is about the game of dare and double dare being played with the Russians, who had planted nuclear missiles on Cuba that could have turned most of the country to dust.
Screenwriter David Self (who had access to White House tapes) does an admirable job of condensing these byzantine machinations into a charged two-and-a-half-hour film. His point of entry is presidential confidant Kenneth O’Donnell, played by Kevin Costner. Whether O’Donnell was as pivotal a figure as the movie suggests is open to historical debate. But it’s not his story (and certainly not the unnecessary scenes with his wife and kids) that we come away remembering. It’s the Kennedys, as usual, who steal the show–a brooding, cautious, canny JFK (Bruce Greenwood, a tad too stolid) and his brilliant, aggressive younger brother (Steven Culp), who must fend off the likes of trigger-happy Gen. Curtis LeMay (Kevin Conway) while trying to second-guess the cryptic messages coming from the Kremlin.
Director Roger Donaldson’s film won’t win any prizes for stylishness. It has a bland, textureless TV-movie look. But you will probably be too caught up in the drama to care. It’s terrifying to realize how close we came in those 13 days to the nuclear edge, and sobering to contemplate how our newly elected president might navigate a crisis this dire. (4 snowflakes)
