5 Moments That Made the Movies in 2014

A couple years ago my favorite film critic, David Thomson, put out a book titled “Moments That Made the Movies”, a compilation that focused, as you might surmise, on specific moments from specific films. In keeping with its spirit, the venerable web site Indiewire asked the incredibly esteemed Mr. Thomson to digress on the five moments that made the movies in 2013. It does not, however, appear that he took up the same task for 2014, which is where Cinema Romantico comes in.

To be sure, taking this torch from Mr. Thomson is an act of pure idiocy. I am essentially Nicholas Sparks to his Leo Tolstoy, and yet, like the fool I am, I must forge ahead, even as I suspect he’d look at my moments, his eyebrows raised quizzically, and query: “Those?”

5 Moments That Made the Movies in 2014

Morgan Freeman is legendarily a vocally resonant actor. He’s the go-to for voiceover gospel. He’s played the President, he’s played Nelson Mandela, he’s played God. Which is why when he’s prodded into stupefied stammering, you sit up and take notice. This occurs in “Lucy” when the titular character is getting all #science on him. The titular character is played by Scarlett Johansson. There is a lot of gobbledygook regarding Movie Stars these days; who they are, how they are defined, whether they exist. Well, put away your op-eds and, for God sakes, stuff a sock in those think pieces. Lauren Bacall became a Movie Star when she made the most cynical man in showbiz smile; Scarlett Johansson became a Movie Star when she turned the most melodious man in showbiz verbally inept.

“Somehow Doug feels that this stuff defines him.” That’s what the wife of Doug Brown, former chief engineer of the Deepwater Horizon, says in “The Great Invisible”, a riveting documentary chronicling the gulf oil spill. “The stuff” to which she refers is his Transocean and BP accouterments, kept in a box out in the garage that he has held onto since the 2010 disaster, even in the face of worker’s comp claims, post-traumatic stress and a suicide attempt. It’s revealed, in fact, terribly, that it was among these personal effects where he had planned on taking his own life. That which gives us life, threatens to snuff it out, an apt metaphor for the oil industry, and for this whole fucked up world.

It’s pretty much what you’d expect a foot chase in Wes Anderson Land to be – a gruff, affectation-afflicted Willem Dafoe ominously following a goateed Jeff Goldblum on a train through marvelous European locale that winds up at the Zwinger Museum in Dresden where the clip-clop of the each man’s respective shoes echoes across the screen. But then, when the chase concludes, a door closes on Goldblum’s hand, slicing off his fingers and staining the blood with snow. Those saying “The Grand Budapest Hotel” garnering so much Oscar nomination love when previous Anderson works had failed to move the Academy's needle are apparently missing the encroachment of reality - actual reality, however small the doses - on the auteur’s fussy, fantastical aesthetic, whether in the form of a Wes-ed version of WWII or, as in this blurb's example, legit violence. Those missing fingers might be remembered as the moment Wes Anderson stopped being twee and started getting real.

Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and Mats (Kristofer Hivju) have spent a day on the slopes at a pristine Swedish ski resort. They relax in the sun with chalices of malted beverage. A lithe lady, several years their junior, approaches them and explains to Mats that her friend thinks Tomas is, like, the most handsome dude in the resort. Tomas struts his metaphorical feathers, never mind that he’s married with a couple kids. He’s a MAN. Then the lady re-approaches. She explains it was a mistake. She explains her friend meant some other guy was handsome. Mats, for reasons known only to the mind of dudes, takes offense and rises. An argument ensues. A guy approaches to calm things down. A shoving match breaks out. And all the while Tomas sits there, confused, defeated, emasculated. In that moment “Force Majeure” shatters the male ego so abruptly and enormously it makes five Goldman Sachs bros faint every time it screens.

Since the boy at the center of “Boyhood” was always going to have to reach the precipice of Manhood by the end we have known full well for the preceding two-and-a-half hours that this moment would arrive. By “this moment” I mean the moment when the boy, or Mason Jr.’s, mother, played by Patricia Arquette, would have to come to terms with her son standing at the precipice of Manhood, ready to go off on his own, represented by his departing for college. She sits at the table. She listens to him talk as teenagers boy do. She’s barely registering what he’s saying. We’re barely registering what he’s saying. LOOK AT HER! She breaks down crying. How can she not?! Her life is flashing before her eyes! Right here! At this table! All of it! And then she says the most terrifying thing, the thing that would have made Jack Torrance put down his axe and get misty-eyed, the thing that would have made a depressed Alien curl up for a long winter’s nap. She says: “I just thought there would be more.” If the film is a “gimmick”, as so many have claimed, then let them wait 'til the passage of time renders final judgement, as it surely will....then they'll see how gimmicky it is.

Lucy

At roughly the halfway point of “Lucy”, Scarlett Johansson's face appears on a flat screen TV and being that her titular character has by the mercurial stroke of fate gained superhuman intelligence on account of additional cerebral capacity – we can only use 10% of it but she’s able to employ a whole lot more – which is made possible by a precise movie-esque thingamajig, she recites a monotone spew of facts and information at such jaw-dropping speed with such little effort that she leaves the one person in the room stammering and stumbling for the words to respond. And what is crucial is the person playing that stammering, stumbling person – Morgan Freeman. He is perhaps our most eloquent actor, his distinct baritone routinely employed for cinematic voiceover to automatically lend authentic gravitas no matter the words. He's been the voice of God, after all, and yet in this moment, the man who gave God a voice can hardly find his own. Finally he locates a few words and says something of sustenance, but that takes longer than it's ever taken Mr. Freeman before. He may be playing a Professor of significant esteem but he is hapless and tongue-tied in the face of ScarJo, and in that moment he is essentially (not) speaking for all us flabbergasted organisms in the theater seats. 

Johansson starts dumb, dressed like a Jersey Girl living in Taipei and dating an even dumber dude (Pilou Asbæk) in a faux-Stetson who heedlessly chains a briefcase to her wrist and sends her into a high-rise to deliver it to a gangster named Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi). It seems death awaits but rather it’s servitude as a drug mule, whereby Mr. Jang removes a baggie of mysterious blue powder from inside the case and has it sewn into poor Lucy’s abdomen. The bag, however, breaks and leaks inside her, and soon she learns in one of the film's glorious bits of unabashed how-much-more-obvious-can-this-be exposition that the powder is CPH4, specifically a molecule carried by pregnant mothers when.....oh, who cares? It might as well be called the MacGuffin. Whether any of the film's “science” is credible is of no concern to me, and should be of no concern to you. Science belongs in this movie like ketchup belongs on a hot dog. CPH4 is the rocket fuel that provides Johansson liftoff into the cinematic stratosphere.

Once in the stratosphere, she wields epic brainpower and ass kicking survival skills like a Jason Bourne in Louboutin heels, if Jason Bourne could time travel and bend matter at will. Her main objective is to locate Samuel Norman (Freeman), the aforementioned Professor, not necessarily because his research can save her but because she wants to find someone to whom she can pass along this treasure trove of unexplainably radical knowledge. But the secondary objective is to survive the wrath of Mr. Jang because he wants his drugs back because this is a Luc Besson film and in every Luc Besson film there must be countless handguns outfitted with silencers. And there also must be the obligatory "slam-bang" sequence where an entire posse of bad dudes gather a plethora of automatic weapons and go after the heroine and discharge as many bullets as the budget ($40 million in this case) will allow. All these gun-firing, car-chasing, Scar-fu scenes, however, are essentially beneath Lucy, much like they would be beneath anyone possessing the power of telekinesis, but they are also beneath their leading lady, and that’s the whole damn point.

The film itself begins as dumb as the protagonist, contrasting images of a cheetah stalking its prey with Lucy herself being stalked. That would suggest its own capacity for intelligence intensifies along with the character, but all of Besson’s commentary on mankind’s aversion to growth and knowledge as well as stabs at “Tree of Life”-esque ruminations on existence come across blockheaded, less Plato’s Dialogues than a long form essay in Vanity Fair with lots of chic pictures. But then that’s all just window dressing for his central contention.

To call Ms. Johansson an actress in this context is simply not doing her justice. This is not suggest she isn't acting, which is ridiculous, because she understands that in this era of sensory cinematic overload it is smarter to downplay. Still, what she achieves here is something much more rarefied. “Lucy” opens with an image of a cell dividing into gigantic silvery, shimmery block lettering bearing our leading actress’s name. A Star Is Born, and she is a Movie Star whose charisma and presence render pyrotechnics and plot machinations pointless because the Movie Star is the main attraction. The thrill of the chase is simply to see Johansson in the midst of it, her persona coalescing with her characterization, and when she dispenses with a whole row of antagonists by lifting a finger it speaks directly to the spell a Movie Star can hold. Any time Jean Harlow appeared on screen in a movie the What, Where, When, Why and How all melted away because of the Who – that is to say, Her. And in "Lucy", Johansson, striding through the proceedings like an alien unfit for this asinine world, is truly Her. 

She is everything, and all the rest of Besson’s phantasm melts away.