Colette Arrand

Tag: James Spader

  • Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

    Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

    Avengers

    I remember spending a lot of time in my local library as a kid. It was close, within safe walking distance from my house, and beyond a few people who hung out and read magazines they didn’t want to subscribe to, it was just me, the librarians, and a whole lot of books. Browsing the stacks one day, I found these gigantic treasury editions of 60s and 70s Marvel Comics, which I checked out and read every week for three years. My favorite of them was Marvel’s Greatest Superhero Battles, its cover promising an epic clash between The Hulk and The Thing, my two favorite characters in the yet cinematically undiscovered country that was the Marvel Universe. This was the 1990s, and, say what you will about Stan Lee, but the way he wrote his superheroes (and the way Jack Kirby, Herb Trimpe, Sal Buschema, and John Romita (among others) drew them) still had a way of speaking that appealed directly to this very particular sense of selfhood I was developing. Bruce Banner was a quiet man, Benjamin Grimm a soft-hearted lunk. One wanted to be left alone. The other was doomed to be forever unhappy with his body. I got that. I identified with it. And, sealed away in these treasury books, they belonged to a world that only I had access to.

    Had you told nine-year-old me that The Hulk would be a cornerstone of one of the world’s most successful film franches—man, I don’t even know. 27-year-old me can hardly believe it, and I have lived experience of summers spent in multiplexes that weren’t showing a superhero of some kind. Sitting in the dark waiting for Avengers: Age of Ultron to start, there were three trailers for upcoming superhero films, and I was late. The next in Disney’s Avengers sequence, Ant-Man, is coming out in July. We barely get a month to rest up between episodes now, such is the cultural demand for city-destroying bacchanalia. I was tired. I was restless. I wanted to shove nine-year-old me into a locker for liking this stuff. And when the film started, I was largely still exhausted. Joss Whedon’s latest venture into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is overstuffed and overlong, struggling to contain itself, even at two-hours and 20-minutes. A lot of the bloat, at this point, must be attributed to the fact that an Avengers movie isn’t just a movie—it’s part of a cycle, and, as such, is part of a feedback loop that looks back as far as 2008 and looks forward as far as the heat death of the universe. Around that, Whedon, admirably, is going for something more here than in Avengers. Meglomaniacs get smashed-up real good and the physical and psychic trauma of 9/11 is exported to a countries real and imaginary, but it’s clear at this point that Whedon is most in his element when the world is quiet and his team has divested itself of their spandex.

    Then, he can get down to the real meat of Marvel Comics, which is that beneath the spectacle and muscle, superheroes are really just damaged human beings who are very uncomfortable with their bodies. This has been a sub-plot of most MCU films for awhile now, the whole “He’s just a man, but I’ve got an army!” deal, but Whedon’s script ventures beyond that, ruminating on the fallibility of flesh. His villain, Ultron (James Spader), a malevolent, sassy robot whose AI bears a striking resemblance to Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), sees the body as a necessary step forward in his evolution. Stark knows he will die, leaving his project of world peace unfinished. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is just a regular dude with a bow and arrow. Captain America (Chris Evans) is still acclimating to a world where most of his friends have died. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is doomed to be ashamed of his monstrous, green alter-ego, and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) has a past that involves bodily disfiguration. Where a villain like Ultron (or Loki, or the assembled horde of Hydra bad guys, or men in knock-off Iron Man gear) see this as the team’s weakness, it’s the axis upon which the whole thing spins—there aren’t many people who could understand their individual circumstances, but they’re all here in a room together, drunkenly trying to lift the hammer that lets Thor (Chris Hemsworth) lay claim to the throne of Asgard.

    But at this point, it’s not enough to truly satisfy. MCU films are, like a hang-out sitcom, an excuse to sit around and chuckle with a group of favorite characters, mind turned off. Battle sequences are well-executed, if perfunctory and consequence free. If you don’t check in on Marvel’s televised output, it’d be easy to assume that the fallout from any given fight is a paycheck from the Stark Relief Fund (which, man, that name) and a new life in a city that maybe won’t host a rampaging Hulk. I feel like complaining about the lack of stakes after eleven Marvel films, far from being a fruitless endeavor, reveals something about the limits of popcorn filmmaking, or at least the men responsible for making them. The Avengers: Age of Ultron can be nitpicked to death or praised for things that happen or are imagined to have happened at its fringes, but at heart this is a big, dumb action movie trying a little too hard to sound smart. This, in general, works for me. I am, if anything, overly enthusiastic about The Fast and the Furious‘ focus on makeshift chosen families, and am still fascinated with The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises‘ attempt and failure to engage with philosophical theory and political science. Whedon does the same here, toying with ideas of fatherhood, Catholicism, and ruined women, but all too frequently it feels like he’s wrestling a Wikipedia page and not the idea itself. The drama will continue in the next wave of Avengers movies, we’re promised, but just once I’d like to see a Marvel movie that is a movie first, rather than an advertisement for an upcoming slate. I’d like something real to chew on. I’d like to go home not dreading the prospect that, someday soon, it will not be enough for a comic book movie to merely entertain me for three hours. Like the villains of these pieces so frequently say, it’s time to evolve. If only the folks behind the camera were listening.

     

    The Avengers: Age of Ultron. With Robert Downey, Jr. (Tony Stark/Iron Man), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/Hulk), Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Jeremy Renner (Clint Barton/Hawkeye), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Quicksilver), Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch), James Spader (Ultron), and Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury). Directed by Joss Whedon from a screenplay by Whedon, based on the Marvel Comics characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

  • Movie Review: Lincoln (2012)

    Movie Review: Lincoln (2012)

    Lincoln begins in full Spielbergian splendor, capturing the smoky, mud-caked futility of full-scale war. It pulls back quickly and returns to the battlefield only to survey a battle’s aftermath, as the purpose of this film is not to document the ebb and flow of a costly, generation destroying war, but the effect of that war on one man: Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States. As played by Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln is a troubled man. His limbs creak. His mind races. The Civil War is nearly at an end, but its major undertaking remains unfinished.

    The passage of the 13th Amendment is paramount to Lincoln’s second term as president, and the line he walks to get it passed in the House of Representatives is perhaps the thinnest in American political history. The South, buckling under the weight of Sherman’s march to the sea and Grant’s pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia, is ready to capitulate. The North, having seen tremendous losses on both sides, is ready to hear terms of surrender. It is widely thought that the Confederacy will put down their guns if the Union allows them to keep their slaves, but, however much that would please a wounded nation, it is not good enough for Lincoln that so many men die to maintain the status quo. According to Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn), there exists a chance for the passage of the 13th Amendment. It requires two concessions on Lincoln’s part: the continuation of an all-but-concluded war, and the extension of bribes to those members of the Democratic Party who could be convinced to change their vote.

    To anybody with even a minute knowledge of American politics, that Lincoln would bribe the opposition in order to get a bill passed will not come as a surprise. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing to see him portrayed as something deeper than the simple, sainted American politician who saved the country and freed the slaves. His decision to push for the 13th Amendment had real, horrifying consequences, and it fell on his shoulders to spin that decision to a country that didn’t so much care if the right thing got done. In one of the film’s best sequences, Lincoln meets with a husband and wife who are disputing with another party over the rights to a toll road. Seward, fuming in the corner, takes the opportunity to ask the pair if they support abolition. Supposing it ends the war more quickly, as the president has promised, then yes, they do. And supposing it doesn’t? Well, better to end the war now than waste the lives of more white boys on the behalf of another race.

    In sticking to candlelit meeting rooms and harrumphing  political chambers, Steven Spielberg’s film takes on overtones of a Shakespearian tragedy. Lincoln is not without its comedic elements—William Bilbo (James Spader), a Republican lobbyist, finds that his particular brand of salesmanship doesn’t work with every Democrat, even those who stand to gain plenty from his propositions—but, when it wanders off from the main narrative, is mostly taken by melodrama. Given the various tragedies that befall the Lincoln family, a preoccupation with doom and gloom is perhaps understandable. Squeezed in here, Robert Todd Lincoln’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) preoccupation with joining the Union war effort, Tad Lincoln’s fascination with daguerreotype images of slave children, and Mary Todd Lincoln’s (Sally Field) stormy, madwoman-in-the-attic private mannerisms seem like loose threads from a much longer cut of the film. Compared to a shot of Lincoln juxtaposed against flickering candlelight or the decision to keep going past the film’s logical endpoint to squeeze in as much of Lincoln’s assassination as possible without making it interesting, these are minor trespasses.

    The resulting film is sloppy and frustrating at times, but fitfully as inspired as anything Spielberg has made. He manages to bring together melodrama, comedy, political tension, and baiting, crowd-pleasing performances like Tommy Lee Jones’ radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens in a way that’s rarely insulting, and manages to wring a good amount of drama to one of the most written about eras of American history. Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is sharp and precise. Lincoln’s backwoods lawyer persona comes across in the many parables he tells, but these stories are more important to Lincoln than to those gathered around him. Wrestling with the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation, debating the merits of sending his son to war, the president spends as much time trying to convince himself that he’s taking the proper course of action as he does anybody else. No wonder the war looks to have crippled him. It’s not just the soul of the country he’s gambling on, but his own.

    Lincoln.  With Daniel Day-Lewis (Abraham Lincoln), Sally Field (Mary Todd Lincoln), David Strathairn (William Seward), Tommy Lee Jones (Thaddeus Stevens), Hal Holbrook (Francis Preston Blair), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Robert Todd Lincoln), James Spader (William Bilbo), John Hawkes (Colonel Robert Latham), and Tim Blake Nelson (Richard Schell). Directed by Steven Spielberg from a script by Tony Kushner, based on the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodman.