Reviews: December 2007 Archives

There Will Be Blood, a nerve-racking American epic written and directed by P.T. Anderson, is so remarkably self-assured, so fully realized -- hell, it's such a flat-out masterpiece -- that it's surprising to think that this Anderson, this ferocious, uncompromising genius, is the same pastiche artist who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia. I preferred his grittier debut, Hard Eight (well, it was gritty as any movie that stars Gwyneth Paltrow as a cocktail waitress can be) partly because it was more vague in its numerous antecedents. What it didn't have was any indication of Anderson's ambition, which started to bubble up through the ersatz Scorsese set pieces in Boogie Nights and the character-driven melodrama of Magnolia, which culminated in a galvanizing meteorological event that stretched too far to infuse the film with a literally Biblical gravity. Punch Drunk Love, casting Adam Sandler in a semi-serious role, seemed at the time like an Altmanesque trifle (the soundtrack presence of "He Needs Me" making the reference explicit) but in retrospect it's the work of a director who hooked up smartly with an expert cinematographer (Robert Elswit), developed chops in both story and character, and started wrapping eager fingers around his own newly developing voice.

There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is, the last 20 minutes of Beowulf contains maybe the best, most spectacular action scene of the year -- it must be the most excitingly realized man-on-dragon beatdown in the history of fantasy filmmaking. The bad news is you have to sit through the rest of Beowulf to get to it. It's not all terrible -- the story by Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman is an exceptionally playful reworking of the source material -- but there's a tension between the film's epic ambitions and its awkward, dead-eyed, computer-generated-zombie protagonists that's only resolved when it kicks into full action mode. Director Robert Zemeckis adores the freedom of his virtual camera, sending it swooping and zooming vertiginously through the animated world at the slightest provocation, but -- like the 3D gimmick -- the technical grandstanding only distracts momentarily from the film's problems. Happily, the voice performances are first-rate, and Crispin Glover's weirdo performance as the monster Grendel deserves some kind of special Oscar consideration. C+

This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.

Half of Atonement is a great tragic romance set on a sizable English estate on the eve of World War II. Poor little rich girl Cecilia Tannis (Keira Knightley, lean of body and full of lip) briefly consummates a love affair with sweet-faced son-of-a-groundskeeper Robbie Turner (James McAvoy, coming on as a cross between Brendan Fraser and a more boyish Russell Crowe) as Briony, Cecilia's teenaged sister (Saoirse Ronan, with pinched, choirgirlesque good looks) watches, appalled and uncomprehending. The other half of Atonement comprises a highly routine men-at-war effort that follows a trio of soldiers trying to make their way out of occupied France during the Dunkirk evacuation as well as narrative bits showing the Tallis sisters (Briony is now played by Romola Garai), now nurses, tending to wounded soldiers.