One wouldn’t have necessarily been able to predict it based on his rakish, smirky turn in Barry Levinson’s 1999 coming-of-age dramedy Liberty Heights, but courtesy of roles in films like 3:10 to Yuma, Hostage, Alpha Dog and 30 Days of Night, Ben Foster has evolved into his generation’s go-to guy for brooding, disarmingly packaged menace. Meeting him in person, it’s easy to see why; though he stands only 5”’9″, he has the same piercing eyes, and not much of a need to please. Foster, who just recently moved to New York, has a well-chronicled affinity for meditation and a perhaps less well known appreciation of tattoos, which he characterizes as “body mapping.”
He also has a moving new film, Oren Moverman’s The Messenger, underscores the fact that the psychological tolls of war don’t expire at our borders. On loan from filming a remake of Charles Bronson’s The Mechanic, which he describes as “good, old-fashioned assassin entertainment,” opposite Jason Statham, Foster is an uncommonly thoughtful and intelligent, if reserved, interview subject. We chatted at a Beverly Hills hotel suite recently; for an excerpt of the conversation, from H Magazine, click here.
It won’t be for this pleasant bauble — and there’s no way to tell exactly for what it will be, given his varied filmography — but Richard Linklaterwill eventually win an Academy Award. The Texas-born indie auteur brings to bear his characteristically spry touch to yet another very different sort of movie than he’s done before in the lively Me and Orson Welles, a romantic coming-of-age story set in 1937.
Rooted in real theatrical history, the film is about a fictionalized teenage actor, Richard (Zac Efron, a bit out of his element), who lucks into a small role in a re-imagined Julius Caesar being helmed by a brilliant, impetuous young director named Orson Welles at his newly founded Mercury Theater in New York City. The rollercoaster week leading up to opening night has the charismatic but frequently cruel Welles (an amazing Christian McKay, above) staking his career on this risky production, while Richard mixes with everyone from starlets to stagehands in behind-the-scenes adventures bound to change him. Caught up in an unlikely love triangle is Sonja (Claire Danes), the unapologetically ambitious assistant to Welles whom Richard tries to woo.
The fast-moving screenplay is adapted from Robert Kaplow’s meticulously researched novel of the same name, and it offers up plenty of towel-snapping dialogue and amusing details, like Welles using ambulances as taxis, just because they’re able to navigate through traffic faster. Meanwhile, McKay nails Welles’ sonorous voice, as well as his seductive charm, humor and ego. When he first appears on screen you’re struck by the feeling that he’s too actively playing a capital-C character, in forward-leaning fashion. Then one comes to slowly realize, well… that’s exactly what Welles was doing, for much of his public career, and certainly here, in his early days. So that’s part of the genius of McKay’s performance — the sense that he’s an actor playing another actor who’s playing always another character, and then sometimes also a role in his own staged play. The only nagging problem is that the film’s Richard-Sonja romance utterly doesn’t play. Much more intriguing is Zoe Kazan as an aspirant writer whom Richard haphazardly befriends; you wish she’d wander into the Mercury Theater and boot Danes’ character to the side.
Welles at one point delivers a soliloquy in which he comments on someone’s “bone-deep understanding that existence is so without meaning that one must reinvent self,” and while Linklater’s canon is anything but nihilistic, his credits are so diverse as to seemingly underscore an offscreen appreciation of that sentiment. (Freestyle Releasing, PG-13, 113 minutes)
Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel forms the basis of fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut, an exactingly constructed, mostly well acted period piece drama about a broken man who, in the wake of his longtime companion’s death, can scarcely see any sort of future on the horizon.
Set in Los Angeles in 1962, A Single Man, centers on George Falconer (Colin Firth), a 52-year-old British college professor struggling to find meaning after the sudden death of his boyfriend Jim (Matthew Goode). George is consoled, if rather brusquely, by his closest friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a 48-year-old Tanqueray depository wrestling with her own questions about the future. As George ponders suicide, a young student coming to terms with his own true nature, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), feels in George a kindred spirit, and makes it a point to reach out to him.
On a certain level, A Single Man seems to posit that isolation and loneliness is an inescapable and inherent part of the human condition, which makes the performance of Hoult (About a Boy), who communicates in batted eyelashes and seems a little too cutesy-pinup to pull off the necessary emotional maturity required in his increasing flirtations with his teacher, additionally problematic. Kenny comes across as an idealized angel ripped from the pages of some Calvin Klein ad, and not someone that George would be interested in, particularly given what we see of his relationship with Jim.
There’s also a bit of fussiness in some of the art direction, and by the time the third symbolic underwater sequence comes along, it feels a bit much. Still, Firth is absolutely excellent, and deserving of a Best Actor Oscar nomination, which should be a mortal lock. In almost single-handed fashion, he makes A Single Man worth seeing. (The Weinstein Company, R, 99 minutes)
It’s rare, the film so perfectly bittersweet that it can put a smile on your face even as it simultaneously puts a lump in your throat or a pang of wincing recognition on your face, but that’s the case with Up in the Air, which exists at the perfect intersection of snappy fun, modulated gravity and sociocultural relevance, in addition to being anchored by three of the year’s best performances. A terrifically funny and poignant work that arrives at all its emotional moments honestly, director Jason Reitman’s third film is a shoo-in for a Best Picture nod and many other Oscar nominations, and should solidify his position in the industry as one of the most sought after young directors working today.
Up in the Air stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a corporate hatchetman who flies from city to city handling layoffs for other companies. Ryan loves his road-warrior business life, and the massive accumulation of airline miles and hotel rewards program points that it affords him. When his company downsizes its travel budget and makes plans to switch over to a computer conference-call firing system, however, Ryan is forced to take upstart protégé Natalie (Anna Kendrick) under his wing and on the road for one last demonstration of how things work in person, just after he’s seemingly met his perfect mirror-image love match, Alex (Vera Farmiga). Also looming on the horizon for Ryan is the wedding of his younger sister Julie (Melanie Lynskey), to a groom (Danny McBride) he has yet to meet.
Up in the Air most readily recalls two Alexander Payne films, Sideways and Election, in that those movies dealt with, broadlyspeaking, male midlife crises in love and lust, as well as the at-odds interaction of a teacher and pupil. The barbed, sometimes dark humor that marked Reitman’s previous work in Thank You For Smoking and Juno is also seeded into the movie, and the banter, adapted by Reitman and Sheldon Turner from Thumbsucker author Walter Kim’s novel, is top notch. Clooney, Farmiga and Kendrick (the latter so fantastic in the underrated Rocket Science) make for a wildly appealing trio, and the film as a whole leaves marks both light and dark. Book your ticket now. (Paramount, R, 109 minutes)
