RUTHFULLY YOURS

After the opening shot establishing Denzel Washington and his buddy as garbage men making small talk while driving through Pittsburgh on the back of a truck, the movie closes in, metaphorically fencing in the audience to a small set that could be the staged version of this play. As director, Washington clearly wasn’t interested in opening up the play to be more cinematic – we are watching people whose damaged lives have been circumscribed by their race, their economic vicissitudes, their war experiences and mostly, their character flaws. Troy, the husband and father, was kicked out of his home at the age of 14, ending up in prison for a stint of 15 years, during which he discovered his talent for baseball. Ironically, prison was the only place where he had the freedom to play as he discovered when he was released in the years before Jackie Robinson integrated the sport.

For the first half of the film Troy is seen as the victim of a punishing father and a racist society that kept black men from developing their potential. His saving grace seems to be his happy marriage to Rose, played to perfection by Viola Davis, as a woman with enough strength to accept second place to a blustering, bigger than life man. Rose seems to be a woman capable of working on Tony and getting him to do the right thing despite his protestations to the contrary. She lets him talk his head off, gesture theatrically to his small audience of friend and family, but she pulls him into line when he’s let his steam off and gets him to do her bidding.

Suddenly the plot changes course and we discover that Troy has some secrets from Rose and the audience, ones he appears to feel guilty about initially though this soon gets rationalized into his entitlement as a man. His behavior becomes shockingly dense and abusive and our allegiances turn from his charismatic nature to the quieter less dramatic Rose whose behavior has some surprises for us as well. Though the mise en scene is kitchen sink reality, the language and entrance of minor characters are stagey in a formulaic way. Critics have compared this to Death of a Salesman and that is legitimate in its format as well as theme – there is a dated quality to how the characters interact even when the problems raised are beyond the boundaries of time, place and society’s conventions.

Perhaps it was A.O. Scott’s coronation of Isabelle Huppert as “the world’s greatest actress” that sealed my assessment of her latest film, “Things To Come” (L’Avenir in French). In it, Ms. Huppert plays the part of a middle-aged philosophy professor whose biggest problem is her aging, intensely neurotic and demanding mother, a character played more for laughs than for pity. The rest of Isabelle’s life is purring along smoothly; she is adored by her students, her husband, children, publisher and hunky former student who invites her to his home for the weekend, a tease for the audience. Within short order, all the preceding perfections fall apart and Isabelle does get one chance at a good cry. But faster than you can say Mon Dieu, she perks up and resumes her purposeful career, her terrific relationship with her students and a new role as grandmother. It led me to think that Mme Huppert’s stiff upper lip was more British than Gallic and that this part might have been more believable played by Kristin Scott-Thomas who at least is half of each.

This is a movie that remains superficial. Picking up on the banal philosophy quotations sprinkled throughout the script as shorthand for gravitas, the dialogue is sterile and boring. It lacks depth and emotion and Huppert’s performance, as is true of most of her work, lacks affect. By contrast, think of the short scene in Manchester By The Sea in which Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck meet on the street and she insists on explaining her past actions – a few restrained minutes packed with more poignancy, fragility and heartbreak than the total screenplay in Things to Come. Surely being discarded by a long-term husband who shared your life-work, your parentage and your taste in music is worth more than the brief remark “I thought you would love me forever.” Audiences should not be intimidated by serious critics implying that there is more to this film than most of them will experience. It’s a dud. So is Isabelle whose facial expressions remain frozen for its duration. The small bursts of color allotted to us are in the various sundresses and sportswear worn by the actress and these are hardly designer clothes. On the positive side, there is a soundtrack that includes Woody Guthrie, German arias or lieder and the slow harmonic version of Unchained Melody sung by the Fleetwoods – a haunting and unforgettable thing of beauty revived from the fifties. Would that the screenplay had summoned as much feeling as this poetic song.

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