The Rip

Given the success of “Knives Out” and its subsequent sequels whose exclusive rights were scooped up by Netflix, Joe Carnahan’s “The Rip” feels like a smart Netflix hybrid, a mash-up of a crooked cop crime-thriller and an Agatha Christie drawing room mystery. It begins with Miami police Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) being murdered by masked men, setting in motion a federal interrogation of Velez’s specialized Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT, as if subliminally communicating its desire to be a TNT Movie by Netflix) in an effort to determine who might be responsible. After all, rumors abound that certain cops are taking those eponymous Rips - seizures of drugs, guns, or money - for themselves, and the Feds wonder if a TNT somebody might be responsible. This introduces us to the whole crew, including Velez’s second-in-command, Lt. Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), and Sergeant J.D. Byrne (Ben Affleck) with whom she was in a relationship. After this inquisition, the TNT quintet pulls up camp chairs outside headquarters to vent, a nice touch, making them seem like heavily armed boys and girls in an Old Milwaukee commercial. This is when we also meet DEA Agent Matty Nix (Kyle Chandler), rolling around in an armored vehicle that you know is going to turn up again by movie’s end. Indeed, Dumars get a crime-stopper tip via his phone about a Rip and enlists his team to go investigate, setting the mystery in motion. 

At first, “The Rip” generates genuine dread and tension as the team arrives at the home at the end of a caul-de-sac and craftily talks its way inside, discovering an immaculately kept crawl space hiding significant contraband in the form of a lot of money. As a couple team members sledgehammer the wall to get at the barrels containing the cash, Dumars and Byrne interrogate the homeowner, Desi (Sasha Calle). It’s an electric scene in which the sound of the sledgehammer echoing throughout the wall underlines her increasing stress while the cross examination of Damon and Affleck’s characters puts their effortless chemistry on full display. And when the amount of the money is revealed, the tension escalates, especially when a couple cops from the district turn up outside, not-so-subtly implying that TNT is not wanted here. What ensues evokes both “Rio Bravo” and “Assault at Precinct 13” but with some nifty modern flourishes, like a streetlight blinking in morse code and ghost stories of entire blocks like this one bought up by Colombian cartels. 

Yet rather than yield an external threat, the menace comes from within, and from this point forward, “The Rip” becomes as talky as it does action-packed, cop against cop as TNT tries to ferret out where this money came from, who wants, and what they’ll do to get it. This, however, transforms “The Rip” into something more character driven and the characters never amount to much Velez’s death is supposed to hover over everything, but we never spend sufficient time with her for the character to be anything other than a device, while the electric presence of Teyana Taylor as Det. Numa Baptiste is figuratively sidelined for almost the entire movie. Carnahan falls back on Damon and Affleck’s shared history to fill in character where this none otherwise, but Dumars and Bryne’s feints toward the dark side of the force never feel believable. Indeed, Dumars has a tattoo on each knuckle, not unlike the priest played by Robert Mitchum in “The Night of Hunter” having love and hate tattooed on his knuckles. Those, however, were competing ideas, evoking an ambiguity that “The Rip” mostly forgoes in any real or interesting way. One of Dumars’s tattoos, in fact, is a question that the tattoo on the other knuckle answers, effectively solving “The Rip’s” riddle long before it’s solved. What, you thought Boston’s favorite sons were a couple Bad Apples (TM)?

The Way Back

“The Way Back” is akin to “Hoosiers” if the violent-tempered Norman Dale had permanently been replaced as head basketball coach by the hard-drinking Shooter Flatch. Indeed, if director Gavin O’Connor’s film is a familiar hardwood fairytale, right down to the mute kid who turns out to be star, it also proves as much about alcoholism as it is about basketball, belied in the music’s score, more somber than spirited, if sometimes too somber, overly insistent on its mournful piano rather than letting the situational severity speak for itself. But if such melancholy teases a refreshing sentience about basketball being a pipe dream to escape or starting over, “The Way Back” can’t bring itself to follow through, which is why it concludes by literally bathing its character in the warm California sun.

At the same time, set in San Pedro, California, “The Way Back”, despite often being sunny in terms of weather, never feels exactly bright, O’Connor’s frequent lens flares not a neat trick but an evocation of an omnipresent hangover, blinding Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck) waking up hungover to another day. Even before you see him drink a beer in the shower, you can surmise from his downbeat air that he isn’t drinking coffee from his travel mug on the construction site where he toils. His situation is so grave, in fact, and Affleck plays it with such pent-up rage, even in his lighter moments, like goofing with kids at Thanksgiving, that Michaela Watkins as his sister, who I’ve never seen give a performance without some sort of eccentric energy, is entirely restrained, figuratively walking on eggshells around Affleck’s character. Even in “Hoosiers”, where his character’s backstory was shrouded in one terrible act of violence, Gene Hackman had a twinkle in his eye betraying humanity. In a scene where Jack makes a practice phone call, Affleck evinces that any sense of humanity is a put-on.

Jack’s One Last Shot at redemption comes in the form of an offer to coach the Catholic Boys basketball team for which he once starred, long, long ago. If he’s initially hesitant, he finally takes the gig and helps turn the team around, getting reticent Brandon (Brandon Wilson) to believe in himself, speak up and take charge. If O’Connor creates a real sense of high school basketball atmosphere, the cramped gymnasiums making it feel as if the crowd is right on top of the coach, it is nevertheless the coach that is his central focus more than the crowd and more than the players, even. A recurring gag finds Jack flouting the school’s policy against profanity, epitomizing its comical, knowing evocation of coaches as big babies. More than, though, in both the character’s costuming, rumpled dress shirts never tucked in, and his air, Affleck is pointedly not playing redemption so much as desperation. When he designs a game-winning play in a neatly choreographed scene and when he leads them to victory in the otherwise obligatory Big Game, he never comes across like someone clearing his mind or getting it together but someone who needs this as much as he used to need his next drink.

Affleck’s manic air in these scenes underlines the movie’s ultimate insight, that basketball and winning basketball does not cleanse all sins, brought home in how “The Way Back” refrains from ending with The Big Game, forcing him to truly reckon with his addiction instead. That insight, though, only goes so far, counteracted not so much by the ease with his initial go-around at rehab but how he seems to get off scot-free at the property damage he causes in his bottoming out, as if his slate is just suddenly wiped clean. At the same time, the emergent subplot in which his best player’s father questions basketball as the only avenue out, dissolves without any follow-up, reminiscent, come to think of it, of Jack as the movie begins, refusing to look his own truth square in the face.

Gone Girl

“Gone Girl” opens with Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) advising in voiceover how he frequently dreams of taking the head of his lilting wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) and cracking it open in the figurative hope of seeing what psychological remnants come spilling out. This restrained reading of gruesome dialogue helpfully establishes Nick as someone with a possible motive for having murdered his spouse if she were to, say, go missing, which she will. It is also helpful, however, because it puts forth the film’s foremost question – what is going on inside Amy’s head?

The same could be asked of Nick, but Nick is a guy and guys are so simple to read, whereas women, to quote master of observation Jerry Seinfeld, “are working on a whole other level.” Amy’s working on a whole other level, so much so, in fact, that by the time this two-and-a-half hour pulp-plus extravaganza concludes, the philosophical contents of her cerebellum remain inaccessible, possibly because they were non-existent outside the motives of the film's dueling creators.

Point of View is everything in “Gone Girl”. For the first-third of the film, in fact, it’s two separate films running concurrently, one seen through the eyes of Nick and one told explicitly by Amy. In the present, Nick wakes one morning in North Carthage, Missouri, a place fresh off the subdivision cookie cutter, standing by the garbage at the end of his driveway, as if his sense of self-worth has been put out with the trash bags. After an afternoon of beer and board games at the bar he runs with his twin sister (Carrie Coon), he returns home to find the front door ajar, the glass coffee table smashed and his wife missing. He summons the authorities, Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Gilpin (Patrick Fugit). They detect something amiss. Nick seems a little too at ease. He emits too chipper an air in public and the media, represented by Missi Pyle doing a barely not-at-all veiled Nancy Grace impression, seize on this liveliness to paint him, in their sensationalist opinion, as a heartless bastard with something to hide.

Meanwhile, the other movie, told in flashbacks building toward the now, something feels even more amiss. Speaking in voiceovers supposedly culled from a journal she authors with a pink fluffy pen, Amy chronicles the romantic rise of her marriage to Nick and its subsequent fallout. As a trust fund baby on account of a bestselling line of kids book – “The Amazing Amy” – written by her parents, she is the bread-winner, until an economic downturn that causes this storybook story to morph into a beautifully shot Lifetime Movie with her as the Battered Spouse and he as the Potentially Violent Husband. But these sequences, perfectly worded, softly lit, and scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in an awesomely caustic lampoon of a stock Love Theme are purposely too polished to be true.

It is here when the film’s mystery assumes a different shape, and also when it enters that rich, sprawling territory of Spoilervania and so, as your faithful reviewer, I am required by hazily defined critical “law” to refrain from specifics. Thus, I proceed cautiously, if a bit recklessly, and suggest that at this point the two interlocking stories converge with a lion’s roar and a fairly compelling whodunit? emerges momentarily as a transcendent Sleater Kinney cinematic anthem of female empowerment, Amy Dunne metamorphosing into Fay Forrester by way of Ellen Berent. It is also, however, the moment when the story Amy Dunne has been telling is co-opted, a la “The Amazing Amy”, by David Fincher, the director, and Gillian Flynn, the screenwriter, and also the writer of the novel on which the film is based.

The book, which I have not read, has elicited accusations of principally being trash, and while the film is most assuredly full of trashy elements, it also strives for something topical. It's a meme generator in movie form, the film that will (has) launched a thousand op-eds, a morality play as told by sociopaths, outside of the high-priced blood-sucking defense attorney (Tyler Perry) who, in the film's biggest joke, comes across pretty darn decent. It is attempting to re-fashion marriage as a sadistic battle of the sexes by filtering it through the framework of a standard-issue thriller replete with insane twists and re-boots of the playing field. It repeatedly tilts the winds of favor back and forth between Mr. and Mrs., thereby alternating between anti-feminism and feminism, deliberately offering ammunition to each faction.

Tucked within its girth is an intriguing idea of how all humans suffer a sort of break from reality, how a person's point of view is created and distorted by his or her wants and needs, and how every person is an unreliable narrator of his or her life. Amy might be an unreliable narrator, but Fincher and Flynn eventually are proven unreliable too. They make the missing woman of their film's title jump through so many hoops and undergo so many personality shifts that she ceases to be a real person, and the answer of what is knocking around inside her head is never answered.

In this romantic crusade, the film winds up falling, more or less, on the side of Nick, even if it portrays him as inattentive, hot-headed and obtuse, primarily because it transforms his bride into a psychotic android made to do whatever the narrative requires to check another item off the Issue Rolodex. Yet, paradoxically, even if Amy comes across as fictive, she is still the character with the most life, as if she's the automation in “Hugo” in need of her own twisted variation on that heart-shaped key. I yearned for her to find that key. I yearned for a breach of protagonist protocol, for Amy Dunne to throw off the shackles of the Auteur Theory, unlock the restraints of the Schreiber Theory, reclaim the story, open a vein in her forehead, and bleed all over the screen.

Second Image Of Ben Affleck As Batman Released

"Because Chris Parker is the hero Gotham deserves and needs right now." #ShueRoll'd

Countdown to the Oscars: Affleck Has Risen

Barbara La Marr was an infamous starlet in the early days of Hollywood when things on the screen were silent. She wrote screenplays (7 of them) and she starred in films (20 them) and all 27 came over a period of six years (1920 – 1926), which seems inconceivable, before she died at the age of 29 after having been married 5 times. (The official cause of death was tuberculosis but the inevitable rumors abound that this was brought on by drugs and alcohol.) 27 films and 5 marriages by the age of 29!

Movies in those early days of cinema were shot, of course, using hand cranked cameras which sped up the action on screen and made it seem as if everyone and everything was moving in fast-forward, a sensation which symbolizes La Marr and Hollywood in general. You can a live whole life a few times by age 29. Everything in Hollywood is in fast-forward.

If Ms. La Marr is sort of symbolic of Old Hollywood then perhaps Ben Affleck is symbolic of New Hollywood. Not that Affleck’s life has been as tragic as La Marr’s, mind you, not at all, though sometimes you might think it was considering the ill-begotten headlines during the Bennifer days and the way in which he is now being touted as The Comeback Kid.

The early days of Affleck involved “Dazed and Confused” and Kevin Smith movies when Kevin Smith still had an idea of what he wanted to write, but his Rise culminated when he and Matt Damon each won an Academy Award for writing “Good Will Hunting” in 1997. Never mind that Paul Thomas Anderson’s screenplay for “Boogie Nights” was superior, trickier and deeper, the story of the two longtime best friends from Boston who TOOK THEIR MOMS TO THE OSCARS is the sorta stuff the Academy lives for. And as the two of them stood on stage, percolating boyish enthusiasm, delivering a heartfelt speech, it was easy to picture a future with Matt & Ben running a movie studio at side by side desks in a glittery office. The world was their tallboy.

Less than 6 months later, Affleck was being chased around an oil rig by a shotgun-toting Bruce Willis in “Armageddon.” The world did not know it yet, but Affleck was already on his way out. He began accepting starry-eyed leading man roles – "Forces of Nature", "Bounce", "Reindeer Games". These choices were regrettable. Becoming the third Movie Jack Ryan in “The Sum of All Fears” seemed a good decision but he struck out. “Pearl Harbor” was a softly-lit monstrosity that earned Affleck his first (and second) Razzie nomination. He earned his third for his own stab at a superhero franchise in “Daredevil.”

It was also around this time that Ben began dating Jen – that is, J.Lo, Jennifer Lopez. Fair or not, this Bostonian/Fly Girl romance never stood a chance, and in some ways their trip to Fenway Park for a Red Sox/Yankees playoff game in mid-October famous for an onfield brawl underscored the entire relationship gossip-wise. The Fall of Affleck culminated in 2003 with his Lopez co-starring “Gigli.” In truth, “Gigli” is not quite as bad as the legend (read the esteemed Roger Ebert’s original review, for instance) but the legend overrode fact and “Gigli” came to be viewed as Bennifer’s “Heaven’s Gate.” It was the butt of innumerable jokes and the career of Affleck seemed bottomed out. He and Kevin Smith attempted a revival of sorts together with “Jersey Girl” but it passed by as momentously as that ceasar salad you had for lunch.

Bennifer I ended and Bennifer II began – this is to say, Ben & J.Lo broke up and Ben took up with Jennifer Garner, prim & proper Jennifer Garner, who you might remember as the prim & proper nurse in “Pearl Harbor.” This seems crucial. Garner is not targeted by tabloids to the same degree as Lopez and no doubt this aided Bennifer II in remaining more grounded. And then something curious happened – Ben Affleck took the role of George Reeves in “Hollywoodland.” I say curious because George Reeves was another member of the Hollywood clique who led a sped-up life, becoming an actor, going to war, getting divorced, and then culminating with the role of Superman in 1951. Tragically, though, his life would go downhill from there, financially and career-wise, and he died under controversial circumstances in 1959, chewed up and spit out by the place that made him. I dare say Affleck could identify with at least part of Reeves’ plight, the way in which a quick-to-judge community can live up to its reputation so precisely and turn its back so quickly.

His performance was well received, earning, amongst other plaudits, the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival. But rather than re-enter the spotlight in some sort of tailor-made starring role he took the opposite track, returning to screenwriting for the first time since his Oscar and stepping behind the camera for the first time ever.

He chose Denis Lehane’s novel “Gone Baby Gone” for his directorial debut and despite a too-talky ending and a few gratuitous clarifying flashbacks, he did not really step wrong, serving up a solid slice of raw atmosphere and coaxing several great performances from his impressive cast (most notably from Amy Ryan who was bawdy but never over the top). His follow up was “The Town”, a heist film that was not entirely successful but still impressive in its ambition. And that led to “Argo”, a based-on-a-true-story tale that Affleck creates with a spectacular sense of craftsmanship. It is the favorite to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. If it does, will that be the Resurrection of Affleck? Or has the Resurrection already happened? Perhaps it has, and to think he was Risen at 25, Fallen at 31 and Risen Again at 40 comes across as improbable until you remember it’s Hollywood. Everything is in fast-forward.

What fascinates me most about “Argo” is not the tension Affleck creates in that galloping third act but the way in which he chooses to play the film’s protagonist, C.I.A. operative Tony Mendez. Dana Stevens of Slate called him “an emotional cipher, and not in a mysterious way, just in a dull one.” Manohla Dargis, however, of the New York Times counters that “his control serves the material, partly because it would have been a mistake for him to try to upstage this story.” I think I prefer the latter. In my own review I noted how Affleck almost seems to be resisting the stereotypical heroism that a role of this kind could easily provide. Dour but determined his version of Tony Mendez believes less in his own individualism and more in the story he is pitching (“I think my little story is the only thing standing between you and a gun to your head”) and the support group surrounding it.

In other words, the leading man is really a director. Maybe, deep down, it’s what he always wanted to be.

Argo

In "Miracle" (2004), recounting the true story of the United States Olympic hockey team’s improbable defeat of the unbeatable Soviet Union, there is an early scene when coach Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell) is seated at a conference table with a bunch of stodgy know-it-alls pitching old fashioned, lamebrain ideas to topple the hammer and sickle before Brooks calls them on the carpet, explains their ideas won’t work and that his ideas will.

In "Argo", recounting the true story of the clandestine operation to rescue six trapped Americans during the Iran Hostage Crisis, there is an early scene when CIA operative Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) is seated at a conference table with a bunch of stodgy know-it-alls pitching old fashioned, lamebrain ideas to rescue the six hostages before Mendez calls them on the carpet, explains their ideas won’t work and that his ideas will.

That was the moment it hit me – "Argo" is structured like a sports movie. Now I do not mean to suggest that a hockey game – however important and unforgettable it was within its own context – is as critical as the Iran Hostage Crisis and real life lives on the line. But we are discussing the making of a movie, and in movie terminology the framework of "Argo" eerily parallels a sports movie, right down to the barely seen spouse and child on the home front. And this is, in fact, mostlya good thing.

Mendez, dourly played by Affleck in such as way as to almost resist the stereotypical heroism of the role, is summoned to CIA headquarters by his superior (Bryan Cranston, quietly hilarious) after the crackerjack opening in which Affleck, as director, swiftly, flawlessly re-stages the Iranians storming the American embassy in November 1979 and the six Americans who make it out and into the street before taking shelter, unbeknownst even to most Americans at the time, at the Canadian Ambassador’s home, played here by Victor Garber who effortlessly conveys noble humanity in minor screen time.

Once Mendez calls out the stodgy know-it-alls he goes about formulating his own rescue mission – that is, a fake Hollywood movie production, a space opera called "Argo", put into mostly real production by crusty, foul-mouthed producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) and makeup man John Chambers (John Goodman). Mendez will pose as “the money”, a Canadian producer flying into Tehran with six other Canadian crew-members to scout locations. Then he will gather up the six hostages posing as his six crew-members, walk into the Iranian airport with them and fly right on out. It is equal parts bold and ridiculous. “It’s the best bad idea we have, sir. By far,” says Cranston.

You know the rest of the story, right down to the very end, and yet, to their immense credit, Affleck and his screenwriter Chris Terrio manage to still render a riveting drama. They do this partly by elucidating mounds of complex information in a crisp manner. They do this partly by not only playing up the inflammatory political climate of the time but by painting it as something universal, such as in a masterful montage (of which, thankfully, there are but a precious few) where they contrast the table reading of "Argo" with bad actors (Adrienne Barbeau?) in absurd costumes with Iranian revolutionaries listing demands.

They do this partly by wringing every single conceivable drop of drama from the already dramatic proceedings, cramming so many Near Misses – you know, the rescue is a split second away from crumbling, falling apart, going up in smoke…until IT ISN’T!!! – into the third act that, quite frankly, it nearly becomes comedic. And you walk away with a smile on your face, maybe even a tear in your eye, supremely satisfied, highly entertained, yearning to applaud, which is due in no small part to the fact that "Argo" is brilliantly crafted to elicit the same sort of reaction one might have had in the waning moments of the U.S./Soviet hockey game when we all realized that, yes, we do believe in miracles.

Writing for NPR in 2006, longtime sportswriter Frank Deford went about creating his own sports movie with a “one-size-fits-all sports movie script.” See if his four act structure sounds familiar. Act I: The Introduction Of Hopelessness. Act II: Hope Arrives In A Surprise Package. Act III: Unusual Strategy. Act IV: The Climactic Contest. I suspect so many of us are worn out with sports movies because of their well worn formula, but "Argo" takes the formula and injects it with different details and a political allegory. It is Hollywood at its finest. Borrow and tweak. Lester Siegel would be proud.