In a Review Roundup, I give brief
thoughts on movies I am just now catching up with or those that never quite got
a full review. I may be doing a handful of these as the year comes to an end.
Today, looks at three films that are sure to be discussed a lot on year-end
lists and awards shows: Holy
Motors, Life of Pi, and The Sessions.
Holy Motors
Dir: Leos Carax
“And if there’s
no more beholder?”
Leos Carax’s Holy Motors may perhaps be the greatest
movie ever made that is based on a false premise. There is only one person on
this planet who understands what this movie is up to at any given moment, and
that is Carax himself, but if there is one obvious theme to be found it is that
cinema is not what it once was. Maybe. All that really matters is that Holy Motors is easily the most inventive
and unexpected movie of the year, and it discovers that the key to keeping the
audience on their toes is to not keep the same identity for more than five
minutes. Not only does every scene in Carax’s film feel like a new experience;
it feels like an entirely different movie. It’s a jumble, admittedly, but it’s
a purposeful jumble full of some truly transcendent moments.
In the best
performance by any actor this year, Denis Lavant plays “Oscar.” At least, that
might be his name. At the start of the film he seems to be a wealthy French man
who hops into the back of a limo to go to work. However, it quickly becomes
apparent that his work isn’t what it appears to be. As he sits in the back of a
limo, he methodically changes costumes until he reaches his next “appointment.”
Once they get there, he leaves the limo in said costume—each one far different
from the last—and he goes to work. Work can mean anything from standing on the
sidewalk begging for change, to donning a motion-capture suit and following
various commands, to actually killing someone. In one particularly inspired
sequence, he dresses as a disgusting creature named “Merde” who walks around a
Paris graveyard being generally repulsive. He kidnaps a zoned-out model played
be Eva Mendes, takes her down to a sewer, and things just get weirder from
there.
Holy Motors is as absurd and strange as movies get,
but it also displays more creativity in any five minutes than most movies can
manage in one or two hours. Of all the films I’ve seen this year, this may be
the one I’m most anxious to revisit as soon as possible. It is a
mournful-but-energetic film that seems to examine all facets of cinema before
deciding that perhaps the art of it all is starting to drift away. One of the
first scenes in the film features Carax himself stumbling upon a movie theater
filled with a zombie-like audience. (Some reviews have characterized the
audience as asleep while others have said they are being attentive, which is a
testament to the film’s Rorschach test-like quality.) Holy Motors is the work of a movie fan clearly worried about where
his beloved medium is going, but if people keep making films like this there
may not be anything to worry about.
Grade: A
Life of Pi
Dir: Ang Lee
If the first 30
minutes and final 15 minutes were removed from Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, it would probably be the best movie of the year.
Unfortunately, these scenes exist and there’s no way to get rid of them anytime
soon. Based on the hit novel by Yann Martel, Life of Pi is a visually dazzling story of survival that would have
been well served to stay that way. Instead, Lee decides to throw a lot more
baggage into the film as well without ever really bothering to make it all
cohere. There are some truly fascinating themes at play here, but I’m not quite
sure the film earns some of its more potentially profound moments. The less the
movie has on its plate, the more transcendent it is.
Pi (primarily
played by Suraj Sharma) is an Indian boy who grew up choosing to believe in
every major religion. He was also incredibly naïve, which nearly comes back to
bite him while his father owns a zoo. During Pi’s teenage years, his family
decides to move to Canada, and on the way the ship sinks into the ocean during
a nasty storm. Pi gets on a lifeboat, and is the only human survivor. In an
interesting twist, he is joined on a lifeboat by a few of the zoo animals: a
zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a tiger named Richard Parker. Eventually only
Pi and Richard Parker are left, and they spend an incredibly long amount of
time drifting aimlessly through the ocean. Despite the initial fear, the two
eventually start to bond.
While at sea, Life of Pi is incredible to watch.
Sharma is a convincing protagonist, and Richard Parker is one of the most fully
realized CGI creations you’ll ever see that Andy Serkis had nothing to do with.
Above all, experiencing this movie in 3-D was mostly an awesome experience, as
Lee makes decisions with the ocean environment that are unorthodox but
inspired. This isn’t meant to be a wholly realistic ocean, but rather a
surrealistic one. These sequences fortunately make up the meat of the movie,
and they’re spectacular. The early stuff about religion and Pi’s childhood
never carries much weight, and the ending—which potentially could have been a
powerful gut-punch—lands with a thud. None of this completely sinks Life of Pi, but it is more than enough
to keep it from true greatness.
Grade: A-
The Sessions
Dir: Ben Lewin
Ben Lewin’s The Sessions is a great story featuring
great actors, but it never has much interest in becoming a great movie. It’s
the sort of wannabe prestige film that looks to coast on all this surface-level
greatness without ever breaking the sweat, and that has yielded an
appropriately minor film that asks almost nothing of the audience besides 90
minutes of their time and a brief refrain from checking their cell phones. It
isn’t an unsatisfying experience per se, and it’s able to put together some
fantastic moments, but it never bothers to really sink its teeth into the material
and come up with something that claims to have an inch of depth. It politely
communicates the story to you, shakes your hand and moves on with its day.
The Sessions is based on the true story of Mark
O’Brien (John Hawkes), who is paralyzed from the neck down due to polio. He
hires a surrogate named Cheryl (Helen Hunt) to lose his virginity, and the two
of them get to know each other in many ways over the course of four sessions. Cheryl
is not a prostitute, as she is quick to point out, but more of a therapist who
helps patients in their sex lives by actually having sex with them. Mark spends
a lot of time discussing his actions with Father Brendan (William H. Macy), who
helps assure Mark that what he’s doing isn’t a horrendous sin. Really, Mark is
just looking to make as many human connections as possible in a life where
there haven’t been that many. Those connections that he makes usually fall
through.
The best scenes
are between Hawkes and Hunt, as two characters on opposite sides of the sexual
spectrum are able to communicate in ways other than just sleeping together.
There’s an honesty and charm to these interactions that just about every other
aspect of The Sessions lacks. At worst,
this movie is as bland as bland can be, and Lewin brings absolutely nothing to
the table on a visual or stylistic level. Frankly, this movie looks like it
could have been exclusively shot on iPads. The whole enterprise just feels
indifferent towards itself, and that’s never more apparent than in a final act
that packs almost no emotional punch. The
Sessions is interesting enough while it lasts, and any awards notice that
Hawkes gets will be wholly deserved, but it’s hard to get excited about a film
that has less interest in its own material than the audience.
Grade: C+
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