Daily Archives: October 28, 2011

The Rum Diary

Film Reviews

Based on the debut tome of gonzo novelist Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is sort of the filmic equivalent of an unexpected blast of jazz — an amusing slice of tropical noir beholden to little more than its own snappy rhythms. The movie is loosely built around a land-grab plot, but generally three parts soused character study to every one part awakened protagonist ambition, instead just perfectly happy to surf along on the strength of its enjoyably cracked characterizations and rich dialogue.

The story follows Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp), an unhinged functional alcoholic and itinerant journalist who travels from New York City to Puerto Rico to write for a rundown local newspaper that even his new editor, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), admits is a shell of a publication, and likely to soon shutter. Making friends with a pair of coworkers that could be characterized as Drunk and Drunker (Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi, respectively), Paul soon crosses paths with Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), a shady businessman who regards the island’s natural beauty as “God’s idea of money.” Sanderson pitches Paul a sort of “advertorial” deal to drum up phony public support for a massive property development scheme. Paul considers it, but complicating the newly felt pangs of this ethical dilemma is his growing infatuation with Chenault (Amber Heard), Sanderson’s scorching hot but hard-to-read fiancé. Are her flirtations true, or part of some set-up? And does Paul even care?

There’s a pungent aroma that comes off of The Rum Diary, capturing as it does this particular late-Eisenhower era of journalism, with cigarettes in the newsroom and flasks in every jacket pocket. It’s no surprise that the movie is also eminently quotable (“You have a tongue like an accusatory giblet!” rants Paul when he trips on an especially strong drug with a colleague), given that it represents the first film behind the camera in almost two decades from Withnail and I and How To Get Ahead in Advertising writer-director Bruce Robinson, who knows outrageousness well. If you miss the woozy, drunken charm of Depp’s turn in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, before its sequels became bloated special effects reels, this shot of Rum — hardly essential but still a lot of fun — will bring back pleasant memories. (Film District, R, 120 minutes)

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Film Reviews

It’s a shame more people won’t have the opportunity to see Martha Marcy May Marlene, the superb feature directorial debut of writer-director Sean Durkin, completely cold and not impacted by any marketing impressions. For no matter how good a job the crack publicity staff at Fox Searchlight does in highlighting its ethereal and eerie qualities (and the movie’s poster is very good at that), there’s a special add-on value to letting this film just kind of slowly wash over you, so unfussy and assured are its modes of expression.

In a star-making turn, Elizabeth Olsen portrays Martha (the other names come into play), a young woman who flees from a Catskills Mountains cult and its charismatic leader, Patrick (John Hawkes, fantastic), seeking refuge with her estranged older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law Ted (Hugh Dancy) at their Connecticut summer home. Beset with paranoia and delusions, Martha refuses to open up about where she’s been the past couple years, though intercut segments fill the audience in on her time at the commune. Several instances of acting out make things awkward, and sisterly tensions eventually reach a boiling point, as Lucy and Ted have plans to start a family and feel they can’t do so while also tending to Martha.

Durkin’s film is characterized by spare production design and a muted color palette that echoes its lead’s emotional detachment. Martha is best when it stays away from more conventional domestic/familial conflict (a slightly overwritten blow-up regarding adult responsibility feels slipped in from the after-school special version of this same story), and instead slowly unfurls its back story, with tantalizing hints of Martha’s trauma and her and Lucy’s troubled shared past. The directing is superb, and Olsen’s performance a star-making turn; this is a gripping debut, with one of the eeriest, most ambiguous endings of the past couple years. See it with a friend — coffee and conversation is sure to follow. (Fox Searchight, R, 101 minutes)

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby

Film Reviews, Politics

Both individually and collectively, Americans may profess a desire for honesty, but the intrigue of serial deception — as a practiced tradecraft, and almost an art — makes compelling subject matter of state espionage, spies and double agents. So a movie like The Man Nobody Knew, a documentary about former Central Intelligence Agency head William Colby, directed by his son, Carl, would seem to offer a fantastic chance to explore the topic from a unique perspective, to richly plumb that different psychological and ethical space that trickery and lying on such a grand scale requires. Unfortunately, The Man Nobody Knew is neither fish nor fowl, and can’t get off the ground as either a unique familial memoir or a uniquely accessed view of recent world history.

Colby, wiry and discreet, began his career as an OSS officer, parachuting into Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, working behind enemy lines to foster dissent and effect sabotage. Later, rising through the CIA, he helped sway elections against the Communist Party in Italy, and eventually ran the controversial Phoenix Program in Vietnam (tabbed as a “kill squad” by its detractors), which sparked today’s legacy of counter-insurgency. Colby is most well known, however, for defying the wishes of President Ford after rising to the rank of head of the CIA, and opening up to Congress about some of the international spy agency’s most tightly held “extra-legal” operations, including attempted assassinations and coup support in various countries around the world.

Despite the possessiveness of its title, and the way it clutches its now-deceased subject to its bosom, there’s a puzzling lack of commitment on the part of Colby to the personal quality of the narrative. Family photos are aplenty, and William’s long-time wife (the director’s mother) sits for several interviews, which are parceled out amidst much historical footage, and chats with other interviewees. But there are huge gaps in family history, and the filmmaker never never solicits the opinions of his siblings, which would have given the movie crucial, added dimension. Most problematically, though, Colby includes a mess of awkward first-person narration; it pops up at weird times, uncomfortably juxtaposed, and lacks the depth and honesty for which one yearns, since Colby never really wades into the breach and significantly discusses what he knew about his father and thought him to be doing at the time versus what he knows now.

This gives The Man Nobody Knew a quality of fitful engagement. At its core, Colby’s film is seemingly about the blinkered awakening of a conscience, and how his father, after Vietnam and President Nixon’s Watergate disgrace, felt the need to increase transparency, by degrees, while also safeguarding national secrets. This third act revelation, though, gets the bum’s rush at the expense of much historical set-up. Some of these passages — about Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.’s apparently singular role in the overthrow of Vietnam’s President Diem, for instance, three weeks before the eventual assassination of President Kennedy — are shocking, and newsworthy. But other stretches come off as staid, lackluster middle school filmstrips. And Colby, too, brooks no discussion about his father’s mysterious death. These shortcomings make for a movie that dances around intrigue, but never consistently engages it. In death, as in life, William Colby remains something of an enigma. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Act 4 Entertainment, unrated, 104 minutes)