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It
burns: Murphy in Sunshine.
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Trippy
Physics
By
Ann Morrow
Sunshine
Directed
by Danny Boyle
In his latest film, Danny Boyle, the inventive director of
Trainspotting, Millions, and 28 Days Later,
applies his intensity to the sci-fi genre. An update of 2001:
A Space Odyssey, Sunshine is about a manned space
mission to the sun. Like Kubrick’s space mission, Sunshine
is mostly montage, using imagery, music, and often-incomprehensible
dialogue to create a meditation on technology in which the
visuals are more important than the actors. Unlike Kubrick’s
film, it’s difficult to follow (at least on first view), though
the welcome inclusion of an Alien–like subplot provides
an element of suspense.
The eight-person crew of Icarus II includes Cillian Murphy
as Capa, the physicist; Rose Byrne as Cassie, the pilot and
his confidant; Chris Evans as Mace, the engineer and his antagonist;
and Michelle Yeoh as Corazon, the ship’s botanist (all excellent).
Icarus II’s mission is to launch a “stellar payload” into
the sun to reignite its core before it dies out. Instead of
apes with a monolith, the atmospheric opening is composed
of Capa’s sister and her child standing in a frozen wasteland
while Capa sends them a good-bye message via satellite. The
scientifically dense screenplay (by Alex Garland) is a reversal
of current concerns about global warning that makes little
concession to audiences who don’t have a working knowledge
of astrophysics. The mission itself is onerously convoluted
and grim. While encountering difficulties with their trajectory,
the crew members discover that the previous rescue mission,
Icarus I, may still have life aboard. This causes a philosophical
debate—should they risk saving the earth to rescue any possible
survivors?—that intensifies their near-panic over having enough
supplies to get themselves home should the mission succeed.
The artificial environment causes psychological tensions for
the crew that drives one of them to attempt suicide. Though
masterfully imagistic, the relentless interplay of personal
conflicts, astronaut jargon, and the ship’s emergency status
is a daunting amount of information to process, especially
against its setting of grayish-blue light and wall-to-wall
monitors broadcasting live feeds of the exterior that wall-off
the ship’s claustrophobic interior. And within its murky chambers
and banks of intimidating machinery, the crew must contend
with zero gravity, an effect that is just as disorienting
for the audience. In contrast, their spacesuits appear to
be made of molten gold.
As the mission gets closer to its target, the film’s montages
widen in setting and color, with spectacular CGI shots of
the sun. As an arthouse, sci-fi tone poem, Sunshine
succeeds. As a movie, though, it doesn’t quite achieve liftoff.
Indigestion
No
Reservations
Directed
by Scott Hicks
For those of you who were gen- uinely charmed by the German
film Mostly Martha, or, for that matter, for those
of you who thought that the more recent Ratatouille
simply rocked, be forewarned that just because a movie combines
verve and good storytelling with a gourmet inclination does
not mean that it will succeed. Case in point: No Reservations,
the Hollywoodized version of Mostly Martha, in which
frosty chef Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones) runs her kitchen with
an iron spatula, refusing to allow for improvisation at the
job or in life, until the cockles of her heart are warmed
by the more winsome, less technique-centered chef Nick (Aaron
Eckhart). The fact that true love will succeed is, of course,
an obvious given, so the point of this exercise would seem
to be to give the audience a funny, sexy romance, throwing
in for good measure moments that glorify the sensuality of
food, its cooking and eating. In the hands of director Scott
Hicks and screenwriter Carol Fuchs, however, this is not the
case.
From the get go, we are fully cognizant of the fact that Kate
cannot brook any deviations in her complete and utter control.
Her rage directed at a customer who complains about how his
steak is done is nearly insurmountable, so much so that her
boss (Patricia Clarkson) orders her to seek therapy, or loose
her job. While on the couch, Kate talks fairly nonstop, only
instead of revealing the secrets of her childhood, she regales
her psychiatrist (Bob Balaban) with detailed recipes, sometimes
even going so far as to make him succulent dishes. Everything
changes, however, when her sister is killed in a car crash,
leaving Kate to raise 11-year old niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin).
For a while, the movie does something interesting, indeed,
cinematically rare: It provides a glimpse of how hard it is
for a successful career woman to combine a demanding job with
family. Kate is forced to contend with babysitting issues,
and when that doesn’t work out, resorts to taking Zoe to work
with her, a temporary solution upon which the devastated Zoe
thrives, but which wreaks havoc with her schoolday. Making
matters worse for Kate is the fact that her boss, while Kate
was out burying her sister and moving in Zoe, has hired a
second chef, Nick, to assist. Despite the fact that it’s clear
that Nick took the job only so that he could learn at the
master’s—that would be Kate’s—feet, our prima donna is none
too pleased. She hates his opera, his loud chef’s pants, the
easy camaraderie he shares with her staff. Of course, Zoe
takes to Nick like a duck to water.
There are moments in No Reservations that challenge
the viewer to take notice and to really care about the lives
and situations of both Kate and Zoe, but the movie’s happy
ending is marked by its utter artificiality. The film provides
a pseudo-solution to all dilemmas, but—and, yes, I know this
is just a movie—its pandering to that Hollywood ideal that
you can have it all only serves to underscore the bare reality
that something’s got to give. It’s unfortunate that the filmmakers
couldn’t have been a little more daring in, say, forcing Kate
and Nick to have a serious conversation about division of
responsibilities.
That said, Zeta-Jones plays Kate with a lot of spunk and some
genuine vulnerability, and Eckhart is a real charmer, despite
the fact that the filmmakers have created the perfect male—ruggedly
handsome, humorous, a bit over the top at times, but, hey,
the guy drives a he-man pick-up truck and wears jeans and
boots when he’s not hamming it up in the kitchen. Interestingly,
the American version of this movie takes out a scene in which,
in the original, Martha’s satisfaction over a lovely at-home
meal with German Nick and her niece comes to an abrupt halt
when she happens upon the state in which he left her kitchen.
Apparently, Hicks and Fuchs felt that showing Nick to be a
little bit of a slob in the kitchen would detract from his
better features, or give audiences reason to raise their hands
when the minister asks if anybody knows of good reason why
these two shouldn’t hook up.
For a movie that attempts to use food in ways to entice and
arouse its characters and its audiences, there is little to
recommend No Reservations for devout foodies like myself,
who drool and obsess over the pages of each issue of Gourmet.
This sterility carries through to the depiction of kitchen
life. Strangely, the German movie conveyed a much warmer sense
of relationships between kitchen and dining-room staff, whereas
this version keeps its minor characters isolated (with the
exception of a saucy turn by Lily Rabe, Jill Clayburgh’s daughter,
as a randy waitress). Only Clarkson succeeds beyond the script,
imbuing her character with a mysterious blend of smarts, sassy
humor and brass balls, that has us alternately wondering whether
she’s seeking to undermine Kate’s authority; Clarkson’s delivery,
which would have been great in Mildred Pierce, makes
me wish that this had been a movie more about the difficult
relationship between two women, one the owner and money person,
the other, a huge reason for her success. Only, please, don’t
let Hicks and Fuchs anywhere near the script.
—Laura
Leon
 Big
Screen, Small Subjects
The
Simpsons Movie
Directed
by David Silverman
A colleague asked if I had read New York Times film
critic A.O. Scott’s comments about The Simpsons Movie.
Oddly enough, I had; “oddly,” because it’s usually bad policy
to read another review of a film one is going to be writing
about. (So, usually, I don’t.) But the tone of Scott’s comments
had struck me—and my colleague—as decidedly strange, so there
was little chance it was going to affect my reaction.
Scott, you see, seems to regard The Simpsons, the long-running
animated TV show, as the culmination of Western Civilization.
Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but the Times man definitely
seems to think that it’s one of the great art-and-entertainment
accomplishments of the age.
Well . . . OK. It’s a very funny show that, too often in recent
years, tries awfully hard to be heartwarming. This big-budget,
widescreen movie is much the same: It’s a very funny movie
that, in the final third, tries awfully hard to be sensitive
and heartwarming.
The first two-thirds, however, are flat-out hilarious. The
Simpsons Movie is so assured, so comedically fleet, that
it almost takes your breath away. (That’s how hard you’ll
be laughing.) The jokes are so good, it’s awfully hard not
to spill many of them right here—so I won’t. OK, just one:
Grandpa has a religious fit in church, rolling in the aisle
while relating visions of doom. When Marge (Julie Kavner)
tells Homer to do something, he flips through the Bible fruitlessly,
and makes a comment on God’s holy book that isn’t, well, exactly
Christian. (There’s a gay joke in the same scene that might
be the funniest in the picture.)
The plot is typical: Homer is a moron, and because Homer is
a moron, he causes something catastrophic to happen that ruins
both his family’s life and their hometown, Springfield. The
something catastrophic, by the way, involves Homer’s new pet
pig and a silo full of pig crap, and causes the president
(a certain actor-turned-governor) to bring the iron fist of
the Environmental Protection Agency down on the Simpsons—and
Springfield. (The idea that the EPA even has an “iron fist”
is a good, if painful, joke in itself.) The family flees.
Which brings us back to the aforementioned “sensitive and
heartwarming.” These are not qualities I look for in animated
entertainment—at least not from a snarky sensibility such
as the one that belongs to cartoonist and Simpsons
co-creator Matt Groening. Once the family is exiled from their
hometown, it’s all about them—when it would be much more fun
to spend time with, say, Mr. Burns (Harry Shearer) and Smithers
(also Shearer).
Let me put it another way: I can summon up more real emotion
for the plight of oft-maimed cat Scratchy than I can for little
Bart Simpson’s daddy issues, which, distressingly, take over
the final scenes of the movie. One hopes that the inevitable
sequel will be less caring and more crass.
As my colleague said, “thank God for The Venture Brothers.”
—Shawn
Stone
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