The Reader

Review in a Hurry: Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) has a torrid affair with thirtysomething Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) but then finds out she’s a Nazi. You too will be seduced by Winslet, who certainly displays the Reich stuff.

The Bigger Picture: There’s plenty of aging in this curious case of Michael Berg (promising, fresh-faced Kross), as he tries for decades to reconcile his relationship with a former SS guard. There’s also plenty of time-jumping—hey, what do you expect from the same team that gave us The Hours? But The Reader remains riveting as long as exquisite Winslet stays on screen.

The unlikely lovers hook up in postwar Germany, and for a summer, teenaged Michael reads aloud to Hanna—everything from The Odyssey to Lady Chatterley’s Lover—as a form of foreplay. Haunted and world-weary, she bares her body but never her soul, and then one day…disappears. It’s only 10 years later, while a law student, that Michael learns of Hanna’s Nazi past, coincidentally attending her trial for war crimes.

In the mid-1970s, Michael becomes Voldemort, er, an attorney (same thing?) played by Ralph Fiennes, who unfortunately looks little like Kross. He reaches out to Hanna, now serving a life sentence, by recording and sending her books on tape. It’s a beautiful sequence, but the pacing in later scenes gets uneven, especially an unnecessary framing device involving Michael in the ’90s with his adult daughter.

Wonderfully acted and gracefully directed, The Reader tackles the challenging subject of a nation’s guilt by portraying it on an intimate level, its characters scarred by secrets and shame. Though Hanna herself is an enigma, Winslet allows so much to be revealed—her steeliness, vulnerability, self-loathing and longing. She makes this “monster” accessible and even sympathetic—and makes The Reader an affecting experience for the viewer.

 

Notorious

“Notorious” gives the Hollywood superhero treatment to the rapper Notorious B.I.G. For hip-hop partisans, watching Christopher Wallace become Biggie Smalls, then the Notorious B.I.G., must be what it’s like for comic-book fans to see Tony Stark become Iron Man. Biggie’s hard-knock life and premature death (he was shot in 1997 at age 24) have been repackaged into an enjoyably ridiculous entertainment about a pursy young man with mysterious sex appeal who turns the rap world on its ear.

Built around a relaxed but vibrant performance by the rapper and first-time actor Jamal Woolard, “Notorious” is part melodrama, part bullet-riddled cautionary tale, all nostalgic trip back to the mid-1990s. I left the movie more desperate for a Coogi sweater than I ever was when it was appropriate to want one.

“Notorious” was produced by Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace, and Sean “P Diddy” Combs, his close friend and producer, which is to say it’s predictably protective of the rapper’s legacy. (Biggie’s son, Christopher Jordan Wallace, plays him in a few early scenes.) Excepting some dirty business with the California rapper and actor Tupac Shakur (more about that in a minute), the movie’s not a total whitewash, either. It hits many of the high notes of Wallace’s life and some sour ones, too.

It’s true that Voletta Wallace has paid herself quite a compliment by having Angela Bassett play her in this movie, but the relationship the film depicts between mother and son isn’t simple. Even though Voletta, a Jamaican immigrant, gives him lots of love and a stable home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, her son is drawn to the instant financial gratification of dealing drugs. (She thinks the white stash under his bed is mashed potatoes.) But mother evicts son, and son eventually gets busted for possession and winds up in jail.

He has a daughter with his high-school girlfriend (Julia Pace Mitchell), but his life doesn’t really begin to turn around until he meets “Puffy” Combs, a big-talking recording-industry upstart, played as a dancing exclamation point by Derek Luke. (To see Luke, in track suits and an S-Curl, expertly re-create Comb’s shuffle-stutter dances and to hear him chronically over-inflect his words is to witness heavenly comedy.)

Puffy is prone to offering Biggie ultimatums – “the studio or the streets” – and making dreams come true. (“By the time you’re 21, I’ll make you a millionaire,” he promises.) Combs didn’t write the script – that’s credited to Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker, who’s also written a book about the Notorious B.I.G. – but one imagines he had the opportunity to do some polishing.

Not everyone who pops up in the film is so lucky. “Notorious” offers up a feisty young sales clerk named Kimberly Jones (Naturi Naughton) who after a few afternoon trysts with Biggie, explodes into the lascivious rapper Lil’ Kim. The movie suggests that her signature look was Biggie’s idea (“Keep the suspenders, lose the shirt”) and that installing her in his Junior M.A.F.I.A. collective only led to headaches since she was so viciously hung up on him.

Things only get worse after he starts dating and marries a half-white singer named Faith Evans (Antonique Smith). “What’s she got that I don’t?” cries Kim. Where to start: blonder hair, lighter skin, decorum.

Even with Faith, monogamy doesn’t come easy to Biggie, if it comes at all. And the movie, directed by George Tillman Jr., has a good time showing the blowups and meltdowns in the rapper’s relationships. It’s all overblown, and yet in these entanglements, you get a nifty convergence of pop folklore – Ray Charles’s love life in Fatty Arbuckle’s body. Despite Bassett’s steeliness, few people come to a movie like “Notorious” for acting fireworks, but some of the performances are strong, especially Smith’s. She finds the wounded warrior in Evans more dramatically than any of Evans’s music.

The film’s dramatic crux, of course, is Biggie’s relationship with Tupac, whom a shameless Anthony Mackie plays as a kind of thrill-seeking nutcase. The Biggie in “Notorious” admires Tupac, who is already a rap star while Biggie’s on the rise. But after a shooting in the lobby of a recording-studio building wounds Tupac, the relationship is strained. “Notorious” suggests that a delusional and paranoid Tupac thought Biggie and Puffy set him up and never dropped his grudge. Biggie, meanwhile, has no idea what went wrong and sits home watching old footage of him and his buddy with tears in his eyes. (I said it wasn’t a complete whitewash!)

While dropping some funny datelines (“The Source Awards,” “The Soul Train Awards”), Tillman effectively captures the resulting East Coast-West Coast furor that culminated in Tupac’s death in 1996, then Biggie’s six months later. The drama around these two men riveted the nation for over a year. This version of the relationship may even stoke new debate since it tells one side of two unsolved mysteries. Yet “Notorious” doesn’t aspire to be a work of journalism. Nick Broomfield’s 2002 procedural documentary “Biggie and Tupac” boldly went down that road and turned up only more speculation.

While Woolard doesn’t try to fully imitate Biggie’s distinctive slurry sound, he captures just enough of its essence. The revelation is how with a little crisper diction, Woolard tips Biggie’s raps from the blues to rock ‘n’ roll – there’s fresh anger in this music. Otherwise “Notorious” is only loosely interested in Biggie as a creative artist. The movie stints on any psychological connection between Biggie and his songs, instead using the rapper’s life to teach lessons and to offer its audience reassurances (the sky, for instance, is the limit).

After 110 minutes of the “n” word being deployed with abandon, Biggie vows to renounce it. And just like that a deluxe episode of “Behind the Music” turns into an evening at church.

 

Revolutionary Road

Maybe it’s a cheap shot to call “Revolutionary Road” “American Beauty” without the laughs, but it gets to the heart of the problem. The British director of “Beauty,” Sam Mendes, has returned to probe the existential angst of American suburbia, but this time he has a great novel at his back, and he’s weighed down with his responsibility to literature. This film isn’t told, it’s Told. There will be a quiz.

After decades of John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, and “Mad Men,” the film’s story line is familiar to the point of cliche. There’s a vast, gnawing unhappiness behind the picture windows of the middle class, or didn’t you know? Published in 1961, Richard Yates’s debut novel came at the end of the genre’s initial post-WWII cycle, and the book has lasted only through the awesome surgical relentlessness of its prose. The marriage of Frank and April Wheeler is described in passages that peel apart layers of truths, half-truths, lies, and self-deceit; the book is intensely depressing yet incandescent. Rarely has a writer shot fish in a barrel so brilliantly.

Less than half of this makes it to the screen, and most of it is brought there by Kate Winslet. She plays April with so many buried reserves of anger, sorrow, and self-loathing that it hurts to look at her, yet the surface is chic and artful. (She makes the desperate housewives on TV look like mannequins.) Her neighbors in late-1950s Connecticut, a lumpy suburban couple played by David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn, have placed her on a pedestal. Her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), is torn between climbing up there with her and pulling it down.

The drama of “Revolutionary Road” isn’t much, which is to say it’s the stuff of “real life”: the Wheelers fight like alley cats, decide to relocate to Europe, get bogged down by inertia and Frank’s confused ambitions. Some in the audience may object to paying for what they can get at home for free. In the book, the couple’s very ordinariness was a secret they withheld from each other and themselves, and that was the tragedy as Yates saw it: We’re never the stars of our youthful dreams, and it hurts like hell to admit it. Where the novel had a cold (and elitist) empathy, though, the movie is merely cold.

Part of the problem is DiCaprio, who seems too callow for his role even at 34 (Winslet looks like she could lick him with one hand tied behind her back). Without Yates dissecting his inner motivations into their constituent molecules, Frank is a much thinner character. When he drifts into an affair with a secretary at his office (Zoe Kazan, herself less interesting than on the page), he seems merely caddish. Mendes can’t locate the visual equivalents of the book’s unsparing psychology, so he embalms it with pristine cinematography (by Roger Deakins), costumes (Albert Wolsky), and score (Thomas Newman). There’s a splash of blood toward the end of “Revolutionary Road,” and it was so perfectly beautiful I wanted to scream.

One of the characters that survives this funeral march is John Givings (Michael Shannon), a mentally disturbed man whose mother (Kathy Bates) brings him over to the Wheelers on his days off from the institution, to give him someone “interesting” to talk with. He functions (rather baldly) as the book’s jester, saying all the cruel things the others can’t bear to blurt out, but Shannon’s performance is so angry and unpredictable, so weirdly mouthy, that “Revolutionary Road” jerks briefly to life in his scenes. Here at last is the scorn both Yates and Mendes work so hard to conceal; the movie, at least, might have been more honest to let more of it show.

But, again, it’s Winslet – Mrs. Mendes, by the way – who shoulders the emotional burden in the film’s final scenes. This actress is so good, so sure of herself, that she makes you ache for April’s descent into bourgeois hell. The Wheelers have young children who, as in the book, are unimportant stick figures – both book and film have a terror of parenting that is left unexamined – but in April’s frozen smile you can sense the selfishness that’s both monstrous and noble. Winslet gives a fearless performance here. It’s not her fault her husband has shrouded it in Taste.

 

Gran Torino

 

In the context of Clint Eastwood’s career as a star, an actor, and a filmmaker, “Gran Torino” is an endlessly fascinating movie. If only it were a good one.

Eastwood, of course, has long since reached the point where he can do as he damn well pleases, and one of the things that has pleased him in recent years is to drop a movie at the very end of the Oscar season and thoroughly reshuffle the field. “Million Dollar Baby” was one such movie; this awkwardly conflicted drama about inner-city racism, struggle, and redemption is not. Still, if you want to see Dirty Harry collide with Eastwood’s idea of the real world, “Gran Torino” is something to see.

In what he has announced is his final acting performance, the star plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War vet and retired Detroit auto worker who has watched his inner-city neighborhood dwindle away until he’s the last white man standing. The film opens with his wife’s funeral – Walt’s dutiful, blobby sons (Brian Haley and Brian Howe) drive in from the suburbs with their nasty little children – after which the widower retires to his front porch like an old soldier surveying the battlefield.

Down the streets ride the gangbangers, cruising like complacent sharks; the surrounding houses are filled with an influx of immigrant Hmong, the mountain people of Southeast Asia. Walt looks at the mess the newcomers have made of their properties and growls. Really: He growls, like a cartoon dog.

“Gran Torino” shifts into gear when Thao (Bee Vang), the shy teenage boy next door, is bullied by a Hmong gang into trying to steal Walt’s prize possession, a green Gran Torino that sits shining and undriven in the old man’s garage. Walt brought it off the factory line himself, and so it stands for an entire vanished world – not to mention a vanished economy – that’s well worth protecting at rifle point.

To atone for Thao’s shame, his family orders him to help Walt out around the house, whether Walt wants the assistance or not. (He doesn’t.) The scenes in which the two come to know each other form the heart of “Gran Torino,” and the scenes between Walt and Thao’s sister Sue (Ahney Her, giving the film’s breeziest performance) are the film’s brain. Upwardly mobile and brutally illusion-free, Sue patiently instructs the retiree in the ways of her people and the ordeal of climbing up America’s ladder.

There’s sentimentality to this story, and it’s honest enough, but Eastwood has decided to keep it at bay by making his hero an unapologetic, venom-spewing racist. In part, this keeps the audience off-balance, because we’re never sure when and if Walt will disappear down the Korean foxhole in his mind. “Gran Torino” is alive to the web of racial and ethnic discontent in this country, but the script by Nick Schenk and Dave Johannson has a tin ear. When Walt and a barber friend (John Carroll Lynch) try to teach Thao how to cuss like a real man, the humor of the scene works but the language is dreadfully forced – a screenwriter’s conceit of how “real people” talk.

So much of “Gran Torino” plays like this – heartfelt and smart but with fatally off-kilter rhythms and thin, unbelievable characterizations. (Would suburban parents really let a teenage girl wear a belly shirt to her grandmother’s funeral? I don’t think so.) Eastwood is consciously playing with stereotypes here, up to and including a callow young priest (Christopher Carley, doing what he can with a thankless part), but he only brings them partway into the modern world. Tonally, the movie’s a botch – a melodrama that wants to be a work of realism but can’t figure out how.

One of those stereotypes, obviously, is the urban avenger Eastwood spent much of his early career establishing (with a lot more complexity than most critics credited him with at the time). Walt probably saw “Dirty Harry” more than once back in 1971, and it’s certainly how he thinks the world should behave. The real drama of “Gran Torino” lies in watching the character’s black-and-white mindset melt away under a steady diet of Hmong home cooking, replaced by a starker sense of duty.

It works and it doesn’t. The scene in which Walt faces down a group of street toughs harassing Sue is both gloriously funny and suspenseful, because this old, unbreakable man so completely crosses these bad boys’ wires. Yet as “Gran Torino” builds toward its conclusion, everything Eastwood is trying to stuff into one simple movie – justice, revenge, melting-pot America, career summation, religion – topples over into something much too close to camp. Are we ready for the Last Temptation of Clint? That’s what we get here.

Your reaction may depend upon how much affection you bring to this film, for Eastwood the ornery, intelligent movie icon, and for Eastwood the questing filmmaker. Some people have come out of early screenings intensely moved, others shaking their heads. The man has made the movie he wanted to, so the only question remaining is whether you feel lucky. Well? Do you, punk?