Watched on a Plane: What Happens Later

This is another in Cinema Romantico’s non-existent sporadic series of reviews of movies watched on planes.

Meg Ryan’s 2023 return to the rom com as both actor and director proves less triumphant than transitory. Set over the course of one night in an unnamed regional airport, it appropriately works best as an airplane movie, which is where I watched it, on a Dreamliner somewhere over the Pacific, and which is why I think I kept thinking the title was “What Happens Here” rather than “What Happens Later” – what happens at 35,000 feet stays at 35,000 feet. Uh, unless you write a review. Moving on. Based on a 2008 play by Steven Dietz, who wrote the script with Ryan and Kirk Lynn, “What Happens Later” is about an old college couple, Willa (Ryan) and Bill (David Duchovny), who run into each other in this anonymous airport when both their flights are delayed during a dreaded bomb cyclone. She is a free spirit, denoted by her rain stick, and he’s a square, denoted by his suit, a juxtaposition as old as “Barefoot in the Park” (1967) and though they have gone on to lead different lives, each one has remained on the other’s mind. It’s the ‘Before’ Trilogy mixed with Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno’s “Jet Lag” (2002) but with something of a mystical bent given an airport announcer who seems to be talking directly to them. (This disembodied voice is credited to a Hal Ligget, though the identity of the real person has remained deliberately unconfirmed, even if I would have sworn in the moment that it was Josh Lucas.)

“What Happens Later” is not all bad, at least, not at first, not when Willa and Bill are just, like, talking and/or arguing. It’s just nice to be in the presence of Rom Com Ryan and her patented exasperated charm after 8 years away from the movies and Duchovny infuses his role with a knowing middle-aged weariness, a guy who just wishes he could retire, already, but still has to go through life’s motions for who-knows-how-longer which, in the interest of full disclosure, was relatable. Indeed, there is a sequence in which Willa and Bill just whine about the curious attitudes and predilections of younger generations for a little while, and well, if in getting older, I have pledged to always remember what it was like to be young, I can also advise the young people that you, too, as Liz Lemon once observed, will get old someday. Right now, the movies are mostly for you, but they won’t always be, and so, let us have this. Where was I? Ryan and Duchovny. The performances work well in this breezier register, but less so when events turn more serious, not least because the attendant set-ups and payoffs, like Bill’s daughter’s dreams of being dancer, feel so rote.

The real problem, though, is that the eventual, ostensible magic realism is conveyed through nothing more than the announcer voice and a dwindling number of airport patrons. The universe might momentarily exist just for Willa and Bill, but that universe is forged of little more than fuzzy shots of snow, standard issue rom com montages, and discussions circling back to what was discussed before. It is hardly the stuff of metaphysics, rendering what should feel otherworldly as merely of this boring old world instead, and unintentionally underlining the struggle of old fogeys to believe life can still be magical. In fact, if “What Happens Later” worked in any way, it was to make me reconsider my dislike of the ending to 2013’s “Before Midnight,” the (possible) culmination of Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ Trilogy. The manner in which its central couple resorts to fantasy as it concludes always struck me as surrender without realizing it was surrender, but now, after so many more miles on the odometer, and one screening of “What Happens Later,” I wonder if I had it wrong and it was, in fact, a grim kind of hope all along. 

End of Days (Going Back to 1999)

(Optional musical accompaniment to this post.)

In assessing the best movies of 1999 for Salon on December 17th of that year, Michael Sragow quoted James Agee assessing the best movies of 1945, deeming himself “neither more ‘hopeful’ nor ‘despondent’ than usual.” And maybe that’s the best way to approach a year-end movie audit, not decreeing it the best of times, or the worst of times, but just a moment in time, one that can be properly contextualized from a significant remove. That’s how Mark Caro saw it for the Chicago Tribune, writing “(1999) was an excellent year for very good movies and a breakthrough year for interesting movies, but only time will tell whether it also was a good year for great movies.” He had an inkling, though, noting, “Hollywood took risks in ways it hadn’t since the 1970s, and the result was films that were exciting, ambitious, innovative and imperfect.” In his year-end appraisal, Roger Ebert had an even bigger inkling: “The last four months of 1999 were a rich and exciting time for moviegoers–there were so many wonderful films that for the first time in a long time, it was hard to keep up.”

Jeff Gordinier dropped any pretense of qualifying. “You can stop waiting for the future of movies. It’s already here,” he wrote for Entertainment Weekly. “Someday, 1999 will be etched on a microchip as the first real year of 21st-century filmmaking. The year when all the old, boring rules about cinema started to crumble.” Mr. Gordinier appears to have segued into becoming a food and travel writer somewhere along the way, and so I was unable to locate his thoughts on Matt Zoller Seitz’s recent piece at the Roger Ebert site decrying the impoverished, anti-intellectual state of modern popular cinema and whether his heralding the new and improved future had been premature. Then again, the treacly “Cider House Rules” won a few Oscars at the ceremony honoring the best in film from 1999, and a Washington Post reader survey crowned “The Phantom Menace” as the best movie of 1999. Maybe populism is an inviolable fortress. “It was the best of movie times,” Manohla Dargis summarized for the L.A. Weekly on December 29, 1999, “sometimes.”

Even so, in due course of a quarter-century, 1999 has proven a seminal one for the movies, as the ongoing silver anniversary retrospective at the New York Times illustrates, if not the Best.Movie.Year.Ever, which was the title of Brian Raftery’s book, subtitled: “How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen.” That book was published in 2019, going to show how even five years ago the consensus had already formed. Indeed, that same year The Ringer ran a 20-year retrospective much like The Times is running now, Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson lauded 1999’s cinematic risk-taking, and both the BBC and Kristopher Tapley at Uproxx declared no movie year had been better. Esquire proclaimed no movie year had been better ten years ago, five years before 2019.

Esquire also wondered if 1999 was the last great year for movies, which seems a little over-emphatically dubious. I always thought 2007 was an especially great year for movies. And as to whether 1999 was, in fact, the exemplar, there are myriad other noted contenders, like 1939 standing as the pinnacle of the Golden Age, 1960 pointing toward the future, the blooming of New Hollywood in 1967, the disparate tendencies of New Hollywood and the nascent blockbuster age in 1975. That’s why my instinct is to hedge, to say, if the working theory is that 1999 was the Best.Movie.Year.Ever then another movie year is likely just as good. I mean, I worked in a movie theater for most of 1999. I had a front row seat, in a manner of speaking, and I’d like to state for the record that I put together film reels for “My Favorite Martian, “The Deep End of the Ocean,” “Forces of Nature,” and “Pushing Tin,” among many forgotten others, a virtual what’s what of the mediocre DVD shelf from The Onion. They can’t all be winners, can they? And then: I examine the movies released in 1999 and wonder if everybody else had it right all along.

Among 1999’s considerable crop are my favorite Robert Altman movie (“Cookie’s Fortune”), and my favorite David Lynch movie (“The Straight Story”), and my favorite David Cronenberg movie (“eXistenZ”), and my favorite Steve Martin movie and favorite Eddie Murphy movie and favorite Hollywood movie in one (“Bowfinger”), and my favorite horror movie (“The Blair Witch Project”), and maybe, probably, my favorite Kirsten Dunst performance (“Dick”) and, I mean, heck, if you go by the U.S. release date then maybe, probably, my favorite Kate Winslet performance too (“Hideous Kinky”). Of course, these were not all beliefs I held in 1999; a couple of these movies I did not see until a few years later. If the passage of time takes so much, it also gives a lot in the form of perspective and understanding. And if back then I suspected that “Dick” was the essential Watergate movie, time strengthened my belief, and if back then I was lukewarm on Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday,” time has allowed me to see it as the definitive American football movie, and if back then I really liked, even loved, Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” time has cemented it as a masterpiece, an aesthetic work of art, and of the innumerable movies I have so far seen over the years, quite possibly the best.

We didn’t have Vibes in 1999, but there were feelings and sensations and there were eerie, unsettling ones in the air, maybe owing to the impending Y2K Armageddon that ultimately fizzled, or perhaps just a natural uncertainty that goes hand-in-hand with the end of a century. If it was unmooring, so many filmmakers also found it inspiring, etching cinematic documents to capture their moods during that moment in time. Grandmaster Martin Scorsese deployed Nicolas Cage’s haunted eyes in “Bringing Out the Dead” to seemingly carry the entire weight of the previous hundred years. Paul Thomas Anderson sought to provide absolution in the form of frogs raining from the sky in “Magnolia” while “Fight Club,” on the other hand, ended with David Fincher calling for revolution. In “Office Space,” Mike Judge conveyed apocalyptic anxiety as indistinguishable from white collar tedium while “American Beauty,” getting one more account of suburban malaise that so often seemed to define the last half of the 20th century in just under the wire, sought to infuse our tedious reality with meaning. “The Matrix,” “Being John Malkovich,” “Run Lola Run,” and “Eyes Wide Shut” all questioned reality itself. Compared to this, “The Insider” felt more traditional, drawing from real events by telling the story of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) blowing the whistle on Big Tobacco on 60 Minutes and Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and the news program’s herculean efforts to air the story. 

If it was classical storytelling, it also epitomized that 1999 sense of upheaval by upending those classical inclinations by handing the narrative from one character to another mid-stream and ended with a victory that felt so much more like defeat. Facts and reality are left distorted, journalism bends to corporations, truth becomes negotiable, doing the right thing only brings reprisals, rendering an upside-down world that comes across an awful lot like the one we are all enduring right now. It might have been pointing toward what laid ahead, but being based on recent events suggested that what ails us now was always in the American bloodstream, and is why, like Gordinier wrote, if in a different manner than he meant, “The Insider” was already living in the future.

Some Drivel On...Welcome to Mooseport

If the unrememberable “Welcome to Mooseport” (2004) is remembered for anything, it’s as the last movie of the irascible, immortal Gene Hackman before he unofficially retired. Did he retire because of “Welcome to Mooseport?” That’s the theory his co-star Maura Tierney half-jokingly floated in a 2014 AV Club interview, though it’s not a theory anyone has ever been able to confirm, not that I could find, likely because of Hackman’s notorious privacy. And having now, 20 years later, finally watched Donald Petrie’s poorly reviewed comedy, I can confirm, that not only is it bad, and not only is it blah, but it is also so, so feeble. It might have been Hackman’s last movie, but it was his co-star Ray Romano’s first (non-animated division), released during the final season of his “Everybody Loves Raymond” sitcom. And boy, does he feel like a sitcom star transplanted to the big screen, figuratively beating a retreat in every scene, virtually shrinking before our very eyes. I kept thinking of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993) during that scene with Billy Bob Thornton’s wannabe outlaw Johnny Tyler in the street: “Oh. Johnny, I apologize,” Doc Holliday says. “I forgot you were there.” I kept forgetting Romano was there. I wonder if Hackman did too. 

Hackman is Monroe Cole, “The Eagle,” not just the former President of the United States but the President of the United States with the highest approval rating in history who finds himself running for mayor in the small town of Mooseport, Maine against Romano’s local handyman Handy Harrison. Why, exactly, Handy wants to run for Mayor in the first place is never elucidated, an early sign of the milquetoast evasiveness in Tom Schulman’s screenplay, but he opts against dropping out upon discovering the divorced Cole has asked out Handy’s girlfriend of many years, Sally (Maura Tierney). She wants to get married, see, and Handy isn’t picking up the signal, which Romano plays with such inert obliviousness that it’s impossible to believe she would be with this dufus in the first place. It ruins any sense of romantic tension from the jump and the whole plot line becomes devalued further in the way it reduces Sally to nothing more than a wedge between the two men. At one point, Cole and Handy even play a game of golf to decide who gets to court her. The screenplay at least admits the insulting outmodedness of this idea, but it never grants her character any real agency, never mind identity, and you can sense Tierney’s disassociation from the role in real time.

Hackman, at least, comports himself with a believably Presidential air, and even better, effortlessly toggles between Person and Politician without letting the seams show, injecting a little vigor in a movie that otherwise has none. The media circus that descends on Mooseport is ripe for satire of how elections have metamorphosed into entertainment only to sand down every possible edge into weak sitcom punchlines while the purported conflict of the political campaign between Cole and Handy never materializes because, like, there is no political campaigning. There are no ideas expressed, no views established; for God’s sake, the screenplay doesn’t even have the guts to say whether Cole is a Democrat or a Republican. It’s tempting to label “Welcome to Mooseport” as Capra-esque given the Frank Capra-like underdog storyline, but whether they were profound, simplistic, or something in-between, Capra movies had politics. What “Welcome to Mooseport” intrinsically argues is government without politics, a fallacy so fanciful and pitiful it’s enough to make one think Alexander Hamilton’s skepticism of the will of the people was right all along. 

In the Land of Saints and Sinners

By now, Liam Neeson has made who knows how many revenge thrillers. Thousands of ‘em, give or take. If they vary in quality, Neeson mostly doesn’t, slipping into the skin of these weary revenge-seekers with practiced ease, an assembly line worker who intuitively knows how close quitting time is but never glances at the clock. What does vary, however, is the worth of Neeson’s opposition. A hero, even an anti-hero, is typically only as good as his or her villain, and in so many fly-by-night direct-to-streaming thrillers, you can’t always enlist an actor equal to a Neeson, unfortunately. It’s just how it goes. Ah, but in Robert Lorenz’s “In the Land of Saints and Sinners,” recent Oscar nominee Kerry Condon is so good as the chief heavy that she doesn’t steal the movie so much as own it right up front. And if on the page, Neeson’s character is a little more restrained than usual, as an actor, he also seems to register Condon’s volume and harmonize with it, withdrawing just a bit to spiritually give her the floor.

Neeson is Finbar Murphy, a WWII veteran who works as contract killer for a local crime boss (Colm Meany) along the Irish coast. He might murder people for a living, but hey, he’s also got a soul, as his running an alarm clock for 60 seconds to give his contracts a chance to say their piece before they bite the dust evokes. In fact, it’s one of these confessions that causes Finbar to give up his line of work, to show people who he really is, to offer something else to the world, or so he says. Indeed, “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” has him say it, but then never follows up, never explores his latent desires. No, he basically pulls himself out so he can get pulled back in once Doireann McCann (Condon) and her small IRA crew show up in County Donegal looking for a place to lie low while the heat blows over from a bombing gone wrong.

Despite the Irish locales and thick brogues, there is a from the box sensation to “In the Land of Saints and Sinners,” characters and situations that feel as if they could have been transported to, say, British Columbia and not missed a beat. Ostensibly, the provisional Irish Republican Army being involved would counteract this notion, but Lorenz hardly pushes those political buttons. Doireann proclaims she’s fighting for a free Ireland, but we don’t see much of that what that entails. And yet, when Condon says it, in the moment at least, in the space of Condon’s line reading, you believe her, and the movie betrays her by never pulling harder on that thread. In primarily seeking to avenge her slain brother, Doireann is more like a stock villain, and yet, even if we know the character stands no chance against Finbar, there is something frightening that lingers in Condon’s air, especially in shots looking down on her as she looks straight ahead, eyes blazing. When she kills the local crime boss, his mother (Anne Brogan) comes to the door, and Doireann stops her from entering, but polite like, almost, talking to her from the other side of the door in a soothing voice. Dressed in black, the way she’s lit, and the way Condon carries herself, she comes across, I swear, like an angel of death. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Dracula (1931)

“In hindsight, the horror genre may have been waiting for silence to end,” my main man David Thomson once wrote regarding the original 1931 “Dracula,” “it wasn't just the wind in the trees, the wolves howling in the distance, or the women screaming in their sleep, it was (Bela) Lugosi’s forbidding welcome, ‘I am Drac-u-la.’” Indeed, while Murnau’s silent “Nosferatu” (1922) might be the definitive Dracula movie despite not officially nor technically being a Dracula movie at all, in watching director Tod Browning’s 1931 talkie, or cinematographer Karl Freund’s 1931 talkie, there’s some debate on who was its true auteur, for the first time since whenever I watched it after reading Roger Ebert’s entry on it for his Great Movies series, what stood out to me most was the sound. Or more precisely, what stood out to me was, as what’s-their-names, Simon and Garfunkel, might have put it, the sounds of silence. 

Philip Glass recorded an after-the-fact musical score in 1988, but it’s hard to imagine. A musical score would take the piss outta the whole thing! Those early talkies can feel strange to a modern audience, all the dead air between sentences, but that dead air is effective in “Dracula,” seeming to hold the fear and the terror in the air that much longer, leaving you at the mercy of creaking coffin lids, and waiting for Lugosi to finish his sentence, already, the way you wait for some unnamed horror movie killer to just gut the person with the fish hook. “By regressing to an archaic, almost presentational style of filmmaking,” the indispensable classic movie blogger Nitrate Diva writes, “Dracula is no mere movie. It is a ritual, a summoning, almost a séance.” 

That’s true, I think, up to a point. “Dracula” was based on a play, remember, and the further it goes, the more those stage roots show as it turns overly talky and, in the process, leeches its own sense of terror, all while failing to truly bring home the potent idea of the undead finding release with a conclusion that is way too rushed. Still, when “Dracula” cooks, it cooks, like it does in the scene The Nitrate Diva discusses at length, the one on a foggy London Street in which Dracula pushes a frightened flower girl behind a pillar, presumably to drink her blood. It’s a simple shot, the camera never moves, and it doesn’t have to, the Transylvanian Count simply enters the frame and then removes the two of them from it, the primordial nature of the image mirroring the primordial nature of the moment, one that nearly a century later still made me shudder.

5 Favorite Performances in The Departed

On last week’s episode of Defector’s flagship podcast The Distraction, co-hosts Drew Magary and David Roth fielded a question from a reader about which A+ list actor has starred in the biggest number of (very bad) movies. The reader cited Alec Baldwin, and when Magary and Roth put the question to their guest Rohan Nadkarni, he posited Baldwin’s co-star from “The Departed,” Mark Wahlberg. Frankly, I’m less interested in the question itself and whether Baldwin or Wahlberg is the right answer then I am in Magary noting that Wahlberg was giving the best performance in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning “The Departed” (2006). He was good, nay, great, and he was the only one of the stacked cast to score an Oscar nomination, but was he giving the best performance in “The Departed?” By way of answering, a list scribbled on a cocktail napkin at the corner bar over a lager and some peanuts.

5 Favorite Performances in The Departed

5. Martin Sheen. His fatherly affect does as much as anything to root “The Departed” to something real.

4. Kevin Corrigan. You wanna talk perfect casting? Kevin Corrigan as the coke-dealing “jerk-off cousin” is perfect casting.

3. Matt Damon. Damon is a tremendous dramatic actor, that goes without saying, yet (not so) secretly, I think he’s an even better comic actor as “True Grit” and “Ocean’s Twelve” and “The Departed” suggest. The language of the last one is almost exclusively talking shit, even his character’s first date with Vera Farmiga’s psychiatrist, and in drawing, I would imagine, from his Boston upbringing (where the movie is set), he talks shit proficiently. I’m not going to stop in the middle of this list and make another list, but if you thought about best first dates in a movie, you would not naturally think of “The Departed,” and yet, the first date between Damon and Farmiga is one of the best scenes in the movie. 

This screenshot does not do it justice.

5B.) In fact, I thought Farmiga wasn’t making the list, but that isn’t fair, especially because of the moment during the date scene when, playing a psychiatrist, remember, she momentarily tries putting Damon’s character on a figurative couch and then puts a finger to her chin just like a psychiatrist would and that little bit of physical behavior cracks me up.

2. Mark Wahlberg. Speaking of talking shit, Damon might be proficient but Wahlberg speaks it fluently. There isn’t a lot to the character, but there doesn’t have to be, it’s a true supporting turn, in many ways making the movie by merely rounding it out, showing up now and again for a profane aria, occasionally even a profane duet, like one with…

1. Alec Baldwin. Wahlberg is hilarious, I don’t dispute it, but Baldwin is mind-blowingly hilarious. It takes a lot to make me literally LOL in a movie theater and Baldwin in “The Departed” made me literally LOL in the theater at least twice. He gets some great lines, and he knocks them out of the park, but it’s more. “The Departed” does not prove all that revelatory, more just a spectacularly entertaining piece of pulp, and that’s great! Yet, if there is profundity, it is less in the themes of self-deception than in Baldwin absolutely embodying the sort of supercilious country club oaf that runs this great American horror show. 

Wolfs

A nameless cleaner (George Clooney), a guy who “makes problems go away,” as the celebrated writer and editor Elaine Benes once described the ambiguous profession, is summoned to a luxury hotel where the tryst of the New York District Attorney (Amy Ryan) has gone wrong, leaving a kid (Austin Abrams) she picked up in the lobby apparently dead on the floor after an accident. The cleaner is just getting to work when lo and behold, another nameless cleaner (Brad Pitt) knocks on the door, having been dispatched by the hotel upon seeing the apparent death on a surveillance camera. Both men work alone, both men assume this is their job, both men take great umbrage at the mere existence of the other one, though eventually, by reasons both pointless and paramount, they are ordered to team up. It’s a Meet Cute, in other words, and it’s why even if director Jon Watts’s movie is hearkening back to the hearty chemistry developed between Clooney and Pitt on the Ocean’s movies, “Wolfs” hearkens back even further, all the way to 1996 and Clooney playing opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in “One Fine Day.” “Wolfs” is One Fine Evening. There are bromances, and there are dad movies, and this becomes a shrewd merger of the two: a dadmance. True, I’m not a dad, but in nearing 50, I’m in the proper age range, and so perhaps everything I say should be sprinkled with a few grains of salt. I stand by all of it, nonetheless; “Wolfs” rocks!

The nameless men’s clean-up grows more complicated upon the discovery of several cocaine bricks in the hotel room and then more complicated, still, when the apparent dead kid wakes up. Turns out the kid, who like the cleaners never gets a proper name, had been signed up to deliver the drugs on something like a whim and now the nameless cleaners’ respective bosses tell them to safely return the drugs to avoid further complications, forcing them to cut a comic swatch across New York at night to clean up two messes. This is all rather inconsequential, of course. I lost count of how many times one of the cleaners declares “doesn’t matter” when other one, or the kid, tries getting to the bottom of things. Theoretically, the kid’s looming fate is meant to inject some drama, but despite a spirted performance by Abrams, his character merely exists a youthful counterpoint to the two older men and as the fulcrum bringing them together. Still, if the stakes are low, they are rendered with panache, by the performers and the director. Romantic comedies tend to be plot based, but this is one that succeeds in the mirth of its rendering, airy and light despite the bursts of violence. Yes, kids, dads can be all vibes too.

There is a delightful and nimble mid-movie chase sequence, maybe too nimble, really, given the aches and pains of the aging cleaners, but where Watts really excels is in the myriad dialogue sequences tending to involve a bickering Clooney and Pitt. The rhythm of the cutting mirrors the rhythm of the wordplay though just as often Watts takes advantage of the two men in space, framing them together in a variety of ways rather than just relying on an abundance of shot-reverse shots, underlining two characters who are stuck together, yes, but also the familiar electricity of his leading men. Withering looks, supercilious body language, disdainful ripostes, this all comes in comic droves, and rather than tamp down the notion of two movie stars in these roles, “Wolfs” leans into it, as the lack of character names suggests, slyly effusing the sense that we are, in fact, watching Clooney and Pitt as much as a couple lone wolfs. That sounds meta, but it’s not overly so, not like “Ocean’s Twelve,” a movie I cherish, and which came in for accusations of being smug and self-impressed as I’m sure this one will. How ever the drink tastes to you, man. Like “Ocean’s Twelve,” I saw friends having the time of their lives on screen, and that’s what I saw in “Wolfs,” brought home in a wry conclusion functioning as the Movie Stars’ last stand.