Daily Archives: November 7, 2008

Linewatch

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

It might not be saying much, really, but Linewatch, an especially attractively shot and generally well made Southwestern border drama, could be Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s best leading role since at least Men of Honor and possibly even Boyz N the Hood — certainly better than the claptrap like Dirty and Hero Wanted that’s cluttered up his recent filmography. It’s been a strange, prolonged post-Oscar debasement for Gooding, Jr., and there’s a melancholic depression that’s blanketed many of his performances in the last half dozen years, all but eradicating memories of his ebullient turn in 1996’s Jerry Maguire. This film, while still finding Gooding, Jr. in more or less down-shifted mode, has enough character shading and other things going for it to strike a chord for patient filmgoers willing to give him another chance. It may ultimately not be the type of showy fare to lift him up out of Actor Jail, but it does work well for what it is.

Linewatch centers around Michael Dixon (Gooding, Jr.), a father and border patrol officer in a small, dusty New Mexico desert town who, in quick order, discovers nine dead illegal immigrants stuffed in a van, suffers the shooting of his partner, and tangles with a group of rogue, militia-style border roamers who make it their business to round up Mexicans in brutish, bounty-hunter-esque fashion. If all that’s not bad enough, Michael’s secret past also catches up with he and his wife Angela (Sharon Leal), in the form of his old Los Angeles gang leader, Kimo (Omari Hardwick, of Gridiron Gang). After a shipment of drugs is accidentally disrupted by Michael’s actions, Kimo tracks Michael down and blackmails him into helping smuggle goods across the border. Further complicating matters is the fact that Michael finds his nephew, Lonnie (Evan Ross), under sway of these negative influences, which awakens a latent sense of responsibility.

Yes, the drama here is all of a relatively familiarly milked variety (a reformed man’s choice between “the life he swore to leave behind” and his threatened young family), but David Warfield’s script is above average in dialogue and plotting, and director Kevin Bray locates the truthfulness in his actors and a similar honesty in the staging, not aiming for amped-up theatrics just in an effort to make an impression, and book his next gig. There’s a pinch here (just a pinch, mind you) of the same forelorn undercurrent on display in last year’s Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, but also enough tension and thrills to service fans of Walking Tall-type vigilante tales like Conspiracy.

Working with cinematographer Paul Sommers, Bray also shoots a gorgeous film; not only are the natural landscapes and Southwestern magic hour captured with grace and beauty, but there’s an unusual care paid to the composition for a straight-to-video thriller of this nature. All of these things help give Linewatch a bump in production value and watchability… and bring Gooding, Jr. himself into focus a bit, too.

Housed in a regular Amray plastic case stored in a cardboard slipcover with slightly raised lettering, Linewatch is presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, and mastered in high definition. It comes with an English language Dolby digital audio track, a wide array of subtitles, and alternate language audio options are also available. The disc’s sole supplemental element is a 19-minute making-of featurette; though rife with intercut film footage, it does include on-set interview snippets with all the principal players, on-screen and off-, and plenty of anecdotes, including producer Reuben Liber talking about Bray showing up with two duffle bags full of books that formed the inspiration for his visual approach to the movie. Rounding out the disc are previews for Tortured, Felon and eight or nine other Sony home video releases. To purchase DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Vera Farmiga Talks Fall Two-Fer, Indie Film That Started It All

Interviews



After years of hefty television work and playing ruinous indie film heroines, Vera Farmiga is now the definition of an in-demand actress, with more than a dozen films in the last four years, including memorable turns in Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared and the Oscar-winning The Departed. She’s back this fall with roles in two high-profile dramas, Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and writer-director Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth. In the former she’s a German wife and mother who unravels as she finds out more about her husband’s complicity in prosecuting Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution; in the latter, she’s an undercover CIA agent who gets outed in the press, and is none too happy about it. I spoke one-on-one recently with Farmiga, almost seven months pregnant but still in great spirits, about her work, the little indie film that jump-started her career and how happy she is not to be living in New York City or Los Angeles. For the full Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

Doubt

Film Reviews

A performance-centric adaptation of a powerhouse piece of stagecraft about a potential case of child abuse, John Patrick Shanley’s big screen translation of his own 2005 Tony Award-winning play Doubt is an effectively ambiguous, high-pedigree adult drama that entangles viewers in slow, sure-handed fashion. Intimately constructed, tightly wound and above all trusting of an audience’s appreciation for textual subtlety, the film is sure to be short-listed in several top-shelf categories this awards season.

Steeped in implied emotional blackmail, Doubt is thematically reminiscent of David Mamet’s Oleanna, another streamlined, muted, character-focused piece hinging on variable audience interpretation of a charged interpersonal (though in this case offscreen) event. Peddling as a grander, more bitterly personalized conflict the moral inscrutability at Doubt‘s center might help expand its box office prospects beyond the otherwise core constituency of upscale drama fans. Regardless, considerable critical and awards attention will power mid-level box office when it releases Stateside on December 12, and international interest should be fairly strong as well given the film’s heavy religious overtones.

Set in 1964, the film unfolds at St. Nicholas, a private Catholic academy in the Bronx where all the middle school students cringe at being sent to the imperious Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the principal who believes in the power of fear and discipline. Much more sympathetic to the difficulties of adolescence is Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the relatively new parish priest who seems attuned to the waves of societal change spreading across the country.

When Father Flynn seems to take a special interest in the school’s first African-American student, Donald (Joseph Foster II), it triggers suspicion in history teacher Sister Marie James (Amy Adams), who reports her concerns to Sister Beauvier. Despite a lack of any firm evidence other than her own surging sense of moral certainty, Sister Beauvier becomes convinced of Father Flynn’s inappropriate sexual advances upon young Donald, and ignites a battle of wills in an effort to oust him from the school. Is he guilty, and will he confess?

In adapting the material for the screen, Shanley neither tries to greatly expand the scope of the story, nor fetishize or inflate the narrative with fancy directorial tricks. Quite to the contrary, in fact; shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins in muted tones that seemingly convey the autumnal chill of the air, even indoors, the movie frequently feels as if it takes place in its own sealed snow globe, in the best possible sense. In keeping with the piece’s theatrical roots, Shanley also uses weather cues, both onscreen and in the sound mix, as signifiers of mood or emotional gravitas.

The centerpiece is a fabulous sequence between Flynn and Sisters Beauvier and James, in which tea and the pretense of a discussion about the coming Christmas play give way to a much more direct confrontation than we’ve seen coming. Shanley directs notably this extended scene, but also a few others, essentially as chess matches — letting the audience observe characters feeling out one another, deciding how much to say, and when to finally flash their swallowed irritation or indignation. Given that so many films trade in only the quick turn of emotion necessary to immediately advance plot, it’s a rare treat to watch the full arc of an emotional reaction in several self-contained scenes. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Miramax, PG-13, 104 minutes)