RUTHFULLY YOURS

If one of the hairy cast members of “Savage Kingdom” stood up and recited the St. Crispin’s Day speech from “Henry V,” yes, you’d be surprised. But it wouldn’t be inappropriate at all: What Nat Geo is presenting in its ambitious three-part series is nature television as Shakespearean drama, with all the devices: wars of succession, military strategies, sexual politics, conspiracy, assassination, infanticide and exile. Whether the characters consider it history, comedy or tragedy, of course, depends on whether they’re eating, or being eaten.

Narrated by Charles Dance, “Savage Kingdom” opens with “Clash of Queens,” the principal monarch being Matsumi, a lioness leading the pride that dominates life, and death, at Botswana’s Great Marsh. During the production’s yearlong shoot, the marsh suffered through one of its periodic, debilitating droughts and a scarcity of food is just one of the constant threats to Matsumi’s reign—others being rival lions, pregnancies and, to a certain degree, her mate, Sekekama. He’s no benevolent despot: To deny him, Matsumi knows, is to face death (it’s always rough sex at the marsh). Likewise, to challenge his rule, or sexual supremacy: One upstart, ravaged for his audacity by Sekekama, suffers a prolonged and pitiable demise, unable, finally, even to drink water. “Goodnight, sweet prince,” says Mr. Dance. And no, we kid you not.
Savage Kingdom

9 p.m. Fridays, Nat Geo WILD

If Matsumi and her pride are the peers of the realm, the hyenas are its Nazi skinheads. “Hyenas infect the kingdom like a plague,” says Mr. Dance. “Where there is one there will soon be many.” They are pure villainy, and while not the most individually effective of the murderous marsh dwellers, they never attack except en masse and are easily the scariest of a furry lot. (Other species featured in the show include elephants, wild dogs, hippos, warthogs and wildebeest.)Over the years, nature TV has gotten a reputation for being, essentially, about animals eating other animals. There’s no shortage of that here. At the same time, the intimacy with which “Savage Kingdom” was filmed—one can count the flies on Matsumi’s face—and the breathtaking camera work of Brad Bestelink and his Natural History Film Unit, Botswana, add visual luster to what is often stirring and occasionally heartbreaking drama. Children are lost, homes invaded, vicious punishments inflicted. There’s a degree of anthropomorphism at work here, but the intention is a greater appreciation of the animal kingdom, the struggles its members endure and the capricious African environment, which makes the marsh a lush smorgasbord one minute, a fetid swamp the next: One sequence, late in episode one, features the leopard Saba (the favorite player here, for what it’s worth) fishing in the gooey bed of an evaporated river, dragging hefty sharptooth catfish out of the mud for the delectation of her offspring. CONTINUE AT SITE

The main reason to see “Lion,” the latest release by the Weinstein Boys, is Sunny Pawar, an 8 year old actor whose tiny teeth make him look far younger and more precocious. I dare you not to smile when Saroo (his character) pronounces the English words for salt and pepper and I double-dare you not to weep at his predicament – having jumped onto a train that took him 1,000 miles from home and Mum, the only name he knows for his mother. His native smarts enable him to escape all sorts of entrapment by unsavory predators until he is finally adopted by an honorable Australian couple who adore him and raise him with love and advantages he would never have known in his poverty-stricken village. This segment of the film is poignant and appropriately touching until Saroo becomes a young adult played by Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel.

For the next 40 minutes or so, the film loses focus, becoming strident and repetitive as Saroo realizes that he must reclaim his past and find his birth family, with few facts to go on. The action takes on the semblance of “filler,” with little dialogue but lots of weltschmerz as Saroo bemoans his fate to his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) and secretly tries to find his village by calculating the distance the train traveled from there to Calcutta over the course of 3 days. Fortunately, Saroo has Google-Map and colorful pegs to help him solve the mystery, along with the support of Rooney whose empathy derives from the premature loss of her own dear mother. Tolstoy knew that every family has its own share of tsuris – even those living in first-world conditions.

I won’t reveal the ending except to say that as with too many other movies lately, this one is based on a true story so the real people appear in the coda and reveal how skillful the casting director was in making Nicole Kidman play your average Tasmanian housewife who might adopt not one, but two Indian orphans. Though this is all very heartwarming, it’s tediously slow watching Patel’s hair get longer and messier – a sign of his inner distress – and really boring seeing the same clips we’ve seen before revived too many times. This movie desperately needs a ruthless editor to eliminate whole segments – such as the disturbed second adopted child whose story goes nowhere – and cut at least 1/2 hour from Saroo’s staring at the Google-Map and thinking. Best of all would be a grand finale with the real parent and the screen actors doing a Bollywood dance that would have us all leaving the theater joyfully instead of checking our watches and heaving a sigh of relief that this attenuated film finally reached The End.

p.s. you have to stay to the end to find out what the title Lion has to do with any of the above – or just ask someone who has already seen the movie and have a savory Indian dinner instead.

If you’d like to see a movie that epitomizes salacious, exploitative misogyny, don’t miss “Nocturnal Animals,” adapted and directed by Tom Ford. Trust a former fashion designer who spent his professional life with rail-thin women to open with a slo-mo montage of aging, obese white strippers in full frontal nudity with their rolls of flesh gently rippling over each other as the women move. I mention their race because no Hollywood director would dare to use a black woman in this humiliating sequence lest he be branded racist – despite the fact the American obesity is statistically most prevalent in the black population. But this scene is a mild harbinger of much more severe nastiness against women – scenes of sadistic kidnap, rape, torture and death against a mother and daughter whose ineffectual husband/ father is unable to stop the carnage.

Don’t be fooled by the pretense of commentary on the shallow contemporary art scene or the mores of the rich and famous. Those serve as convenient vehicles for offering the escalating violence that turns many people on and that Hollywood is eager to supply. Based on a novel by Austin Wright, the film concerns Susan, a successful art dealer (Amy Adams) who receives a manuscript dedicated to her and written by her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhall) whom she hasn’t seen in 20 years. The novel is about a man driving his wife and daughter to their country house and the vicious mayhem that ensues after they are run off the road by a bunch of nocturnal animals – aka- men. At the same time that she is reading this novel, Susan realizes that she is being betrayed by her current husband (Armie Hammer) , the major contributor to her insomnia and our difficulty in determining which of the action is real, in the novel or in Susan’s overwrought memory or imagination.

If Ford hadn’t squandered the opportunity to be taken more seriously with his meretricious opening scene, he might have developed that conundrum in an interesting way. Instead, the film becomes a series of revenge fantasies and alternate realities which the viewer has to puzzle through. Does Susan have a real daughter by her ex-husband or is that what might have been had she not aborted the baby without telling her husband? Judging from the audience reaction, I doubt that many viewers will try to sort it out. Sadly, this pretentious film won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival; it’s too bad that Fellini isn’t around to burst that bogus balloon of hot air pomposity. Ignore Manhola Dargis’ review and boycott this one.

It’s one thing to play off a classic movie and tweak it; it’s another to dress up your actors in vintage costumes and forego the essential irony that you need when re-making a period film. In “Allied,” Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard play the parts of intrepid allied undercover agents in Casablanca, pretending to be husband and wife but really there to assassinate the German commander of Vichy during World War II. They are both superb eye candy but Brad has never been duller, even when wielding a machine gun and speaking French. Marion has the kind of face the camera melts into so she will hold your interest a while longer. But at the moment when the plot thickens, this movie disintegrates so that instead of being a thriller, it becomes prosaically predictable with too many familiar tropes that lack cleverness.

The Times critic summoned the name Hitchcock and one can only assume that he was DUI either while viewing or reviewing this film since it is the antithesis of what the master of suspense was about. Once the audience is alerted to the possibility of a more malevolent plot, there are no further surprises or shocks – not one MacGuffin to throw you off track. You will figure out the end ten minutes before it happens and that won’t really matter because the actors are more models than characters with any dimension. I hate to sound as cynical as W.C. Fields but even the baby is a bore. You can tell how phony the screenplay is when you have the mother of a one year old inviting a horde of people to her London house for a party where in 1942, there is smack, sex and lesbianism on display. The baby sleeps through it all – I told you she was a bor

For the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor PBS provides a powerhouse of a film about the USS Oklahoma, one of the U.S. ships and their crews caught off guard in Battleship Row as the Japanese launched their surprise attack of Dec. 7, 1941. It was, as the American president memorably told the nation the next day, a date that would live in infamy. He did not predict, though it would turn out to be the case, that no Dec. 7 would, after Pearl Harbor, ever again feel quite like an ordinary day for countless Americans. It had brought the attack that ignited a towering rage in a people still largely disposed to neutrality in 1941, and had made it a nation ready heart and soul to go to war.

The attack on the Oklahoma, which quickly capsized, is told in part by survivors whose eyewitness accounts come with a haunting clarity. Sailors had to decide whether to jump 50 feet into waters ablaze with burning fuel, after the order came to abandon ship. Many who jumped burned to death, or were killed by Japanese strafing them as they struggled in the water. The Oklahoma lost 429 men, among them those left trapped in the ship.

The Japanese had come well armed for success with their strike force of carriers, battleships, destroyers, tankers and 400 planes, not to mention ingeniously devised special torpedoes that could function, devastatingly, in waters as shallow as those surrounding Battleship Row—a possibility the U.S. Navy had not imagined.

The Japanese planners believed, one of the historians interviewed for the film notes, that destroying these ships, each named after an American state and symbolizing American prestige, would deal a blow from which the U.S. would not soon recover. The documentary captures, tellingly, the thinking of the Japanese command, the jubilation of the attackers. In this story of one American ship, of men who had joined the Navy in Depression-era America and landed in a paradise-like Hawaii filled with sun and hyacinths until it all ended in smoke and flames, there is history of a rare kind—raw, immediate, and perfectly reflective of the day it commemorates.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-place-called-home-review-red-scare-down-under-1479422897

The many devotees of “A Place Called Home,” a series set in the early ’50s about the upper-class Bligh family—Australian royalty of sorts—can look forward to Thanksgiving, which brings the two-episode premiere of Season 4. The brilliantly inventive drama now takes up the politics of the period—Australia is having its own Red Scare, and it figures strongly in the Bligh family’s conflicts, as do most of the world’s hot-button issues.
Family head George Bligh (Brett Climo) is now running for political office. His malignantly vengeful wife, Regina (Jenni Baird), whom he married for reasons of political convenience, is devising vicious plots against the show’s heroine, Sarah (Marta Dusseldorp), the woman George actually loves—among other ways by spreading whispers that Sarah is a Communist. Meanwhile, James (David Berry), George’s son and the family’s most exquisite-looking male, is now free to pursue his gay love interest, though not so free that he feels comfortable being very gay in public, something he refuses to do at the beach party his lover insisted on dragging him to. It’s one of the more interesting developments, a kind characteristic of the writing.

It’s rare that a series increasingly packed, as this one is, with intricate new plot twists and themes, succeeds in sustaining its tension and polish. “A Place Called Home” nonetheless manages to do just that, as its Season Four—possibly the best so far—is about to demonstrate.

I confess that I am a devout fan of writer/director Kenneth Lonergan who makes a brief Hitchcokian appearance in this outstanding film. Seldom do we see a movie that summons such enormous and emotional empathy without devolving into a tearjerker, though you will not only cry but feel your heart stop beating during certain scenes. Having said this, I will add that there is also the requisite amount of humor, anger and unsettled family matters that characterize Lonergan’s work.

Casey Affleck plays Lee, a divorced man at odds with himself and his world, who is summoned to assume guardianship of his teenage nephew after his brother’s sudden death. Through flashbacks we learn Lee’s backstory as well as that of the other principal characters – his ex-wife, his brother, his sister-in-law (the boy’s mother) and a close family friend. We also learn of a tragedy so immense that it has the effect of tilting the balance of the film after its revelation. This is unquestionably a dilemma for the viewer who will have as difficult a time moving on from the impact of this as Lee, a lonely and isolated man paralyzed by guilt and memory. It skews our ability to consider any of the other more current problems he is asked to face that pale in comparison. Structurally, the movie would have worked better without as shattering an event in the recent past but this movie is redeemed by its restrained acting, its wonderful inter-acting within the family and community and above all, Casey Affleck’s performance which allows you to feel what’s going on in his head without his batting an eye or uttering a word.

At a time when too many people are indulging in hysteria over an orderly election – not a coup d’etat or assassination – it’s particularly moving to see Affleck’s stoical determination to live up to his responsibilities as best he can. I recommend that grief-stricken students and disappointed voters leave their safe spaces and therapy dogs and see this movie instead. It will surely restore their perspective concerning life’s very real tragedies and help them to appreciate the essential things that make or break our private lives.

We are used to seeing science fiction films that have lots of action, weird-looking aliens and some hair-raising danger. Arrival is a quiet film that uses language as the most significant inter-planetary bridge we possess. In it, Amy Adams plays a world-famous linguist called upon by the government to act as intermediary between humans and whatever inhabits the elongated oval hovercrafts that have landed in 12 different parts of our world. Jeremy Renner is the physicist/mathematician who partners with her in this endeavor and subsequently, in an equally important one. Since most of this movie consists of unraveling and understanding the proper sequence of events and their significance to each other, it’s important not to give away the plot.

Having said that, I can say that too much of the movie exists in a zone that becomes more soporific than spellbinding – this is not 2001 with its balletic sequence that mesmerizes accompanied by a melodic soundtrack. The sleek oval aircraft, looking like the most graceful carriers, contain creatures whose sound belches and reverberates as if we were underwater and whose attempts to communicate are insistently repetitive. In one dramatic scene, our intrepid heroine enters the interior of the craft unprotected by the requisite space-movie outer gear. What follows is a slo-mo unfolding and volumizing of her hair that looks more like a Clairol commercial than a close encounter; the actual impact of this scene is only grasped in retrospect when we understand the ramification of her personal life vis a vis this experience.

Unfortunately, it is easier to untangle Amy’s ponytail than the threads of the plot and I would bet that no five people would render it the same way. Though this may work well with a novel where you can re-read an earlier portion, it’s more difficult with a film in which you must rely on memory and on the director’s tricky flashbacks and flash-forwards throughout. There was an unusual amount of audience mobility which I attribute to a lack of comprehension of what was happening onscreen, especially since it is being shown at multiplexes instead of art theaters. Part of me applauds the decision to make this movie but the honest part admits that it became more boring than it should have and more confusing than elusive. Ironically, the skills of the linguist were of little help in extrapolating meaning from experience.

Impassioned patriotism and religious conviction constitute the core of “Hacksaw Ridge,” a stirring—and surpassingly violent—dramatization of the life of Desmond T. Doss, the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor. As an unarmed combat medic in World War II, Cpl. Doss saved the lives of at least 75 fellow infantrymen during a horrific battle on the Japanese-held island of Okinawa. He’s played by Andrew Garfield, whose extraordinary performance turns inner torment into ardent resolve, and a desperate heroism seldom seen on screen.

The film was directed by Mel Gibson. It’s his first in that capacity in a decade, and at least two films in one, perhaps three. In a beautifully textured, extensively fictionalized preface— Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan share credit for the script—Desmond struggles, as a child growing up in small-town Virginia, with his own violent urges focused mainly on the drunken, abusive father he loathes and adores. In basic training he’s persecuted for his pacifist refusal to carry a weapon; the sequence is long, derivative and weakened by floridly literary writing for a drill sergeant played by Vince Vaughn. In subsequent battle scenes, as powerful as they are shocking, Desmond’s faith takes him only so far. He’s terrified by the danger, all but overwhelmed by the carnage, yet he carries on, lowering the wounded to safety at the foot of a steep escarpment and repeating, as a litany, “Please, Lord, help me get one more.”

Through it all there’s also a sense of Mr. Gibson struggling to confront the dynamics of his turbulent career: the penchant for graphic violence that has both distinguished and afflicted such films as “The Passion of the Christ” and “Apocalypto”; the enthrallment with martyrdom that informed “Braveheart” (one fleeting shot finds Desmond, wounded himself, suspended on a litter at the face of the ridge in what could be seen as a state of grace); and, unavoidably, given the dramatic inventions of the preface, the fraught relationship he has had, sometimes in public, with his own father. Remarkably, “Hacksaw Ridge” coalesces into a memorable whole. The movie was shot in Australia by Simon Duggan, and the mostly Australian, uniformly excellent cast includes Teresa Palmer as Desmond’s girlfriend and then wife, Dorothy; Hugo Weaving as Tom, Desmond’s father; Rachel Griffiths as his mother, Bertha, as well as Sam Worthington and Richard Roxburgh as officers in Desmond’s beleaguered rifle company.

Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is much more than a war movie. Titled after the 1945 Battle of Okinawa on the Japanese bluff known as Hacksaw Ridge, it tells the true-life story of Desmond Doss, a religious conscientious objector who nevertheless saved dozens of fellow soldiers’ lives while serving as a battlefield medic during the final days of World War II. Doss received a Medal of Honor from President Truman, but, ironically, the movie is the work of a famously Christian filmmaker who was publicly excoriated by the mainstream (i.e., secular) media, which lashed out against his 2004 The Passion of the Christ (discussed in my 2014 NRO article “The Year the Culture Broke”).

With Hacksaw Ridge, Gibson openly responds to what has now become a routine character-assassination attempt by the media; he envisions the Battle of Okinawa as a test of morality and religious faith. Doss, a Virginia-born Seventh-day Adventist (portrayed by Andrew Garfield), claimed conscientious-objector status based on his personal Christian pacifism. Gibson shows how that pacifism derived from Doss’s background: Having grown up as a violence-addicted son of a bitterly traumatized WWI veteran (Hugo Weaving), Doss as an adult becomes a devout pacifist who clashes with military tradition to win his right to service. What he encountered in fulfilling his faith and duty is movingly depicted in the film, but it’s the emotional undercurrent that makes Hacksaw Ridge extraordinary.

Gibson disposes of the “anti-war film” cliché with a full-throttle War Is Hell scenario. His scenes of carnage and savagery have nearly surreal intensity. The black-gray, smoke-and-flames imagery of rugged terrain, bodies charred and mutilated in deadly piles, plus head-banging artillery noises and painful human howls express fascination and revulsion. It is a conscientiously masculine vision — male aggression chastened by a sense of horror. Obviously, this is not documentary horror remembered from actual wartime experience. Rather, Gibson vents the ambivalence he probably acquired as a thinking macho (being both a star of violent ’80s and ’90s spectacles and a perceptive, ambitious artiste). Hacksaw Ridge is sensitized by a wounded man’s humility and a thinking man’s sincerity. Thus, the film’s vision of Hell on Earth has peculiar authority.

It’s clear that Gibson is fully conscious of man’s inhumanity to man, maybe more than anyone else in Hollywood. He didn’t have to actually participate in combat to learn about human savagery; the mainstream media taught him that. But alongside the film’s dramatization of Doss’s family life and his courtship of Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), the lovely, bold-spirited nurse he married, Hacksaw Ridge anatomizes military aggression and its complex links to masculine character. Garfield’s Doss uncannily recalls Anthony Perkins’s pacifist performance in Friendly Persuasion. Other, variously wounded American GIs are memorably etched by Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, and Luke Bracey as men who sacrifice themselves while dealing with personal issues. (These conflicts are fleetly dramatized by screenwriters Robert Schenkken and Andrew Knight.)