Movie Review: "Martha Marcy May Marlene" (B)

Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin’s new film, is at once startlingly assured and remarkably frustrating. Elisabeth Olsen, in a brave, star-making performance, plays Martha, a troubled cast-off who reunites with her sister (Sarah Paulson) and her husband (Hugh Dancy) at their swank Connecticut lakehouse after her escape from an abusive cult in upstate New York. Much of the film centers on the tension resulting from Elisabeth not knowing the whereabouts of the cult members. Did they follow her to the house? Are they coming to take her away? She hears stones being thrown on the roof in the middle of the night, which she knows the cult members do in order to gauge whether a family is home before they rob their house. Do the noises really exist, or is the traumatized Martha imagining it all?

Much analysis of Durkin’s film has focused on the notion that it is difficult to decide at any point in time what is real and what is imagined. This is undoubtedly Durkin’s aim; our main protagonist is, it seems, supremely unreliable. But the film’s problems have less to do with its supposed abstractness and more to do with its structure. Rather than trying to discern dream from reality, a more pertinent question seems to be this: if you reassembled Martha Marcy May Marlene to run in chronological order, would the film lose any of its impact? The question may not be entirely fair, as it is true that the film is what it is, and should be judged as such. And the choice to fragment the story arguably plays to the film’s strength, which is establishing an emotionally claustrophobic environment for Martha. But there is something to be said for the practice of attempting to wring extra meaning from a story simply by cutting it into pieces and rearranging the fragments to induce fleeting confusion. It is clear that Durkin looks to achieve a sense of alienation, loss, and emotional disconnect by using this technique, and at times, he succeeds. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the film is particularly skillfully assembled. It simply means that the audience takes a little longer than usual to figure out when and where a scene is happening. Once that recognition sets in, Durkin tends to settle into fairly conventional thriller rhythms. Nevertheless, the filmmaking here is effective. Durkin has an eye for composition, and the way some of his scenes seem improperly exposed or underlit seems evocative rather than amateurish (much of the film looks like a half-exposed Polaroid picture, a clever play on the elusiveness of memory). He clearly has talent, and this is one of the more assured debuts of recent memory.       

There is a shot somewhere toward the end of the film in which we see Martha wandering in a daze outside her sister’s house. The picture is bleached out and she walks back and forth, in and out of focus, for twenty seconds or so in front of a static camera. It’s a standout moment of aesthetic uncertainty, shot through with undertones of the same kind of paranoia and confusion that is often elucidated too explicitly in other spots by the omnipresent pulsing score or the constant shrieking of Martha’s sister. Durkin would have done well to infuse the rest of Martha Marcy May Marlene with the kind of vitality and abstractness in this shot; simple fragmentation of narrative can only go so far, and in the end the film settles for being more of a conventional thriller than Durkin would have seemingly liked it to be.

Movie Review: "Drive" (A)

There has been a trend lately in action cinema which says that more is better. More cuts, more sound, more plot. More, more, more. Some films have been more successful in employing this method (the Crank and Bourne films come to mind) than others, but Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which won him the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, refutes all of that by being tremendously exciting on its own stripped-down merits, without resorting to forced freneticism.

Drive’s plot couldn’t be more boilerplate. Driver (Ryan Gosling) is a soft-spoken Hollywood stunt guy who doubles as a getaway man. He lives a simple life, spending his days in a garage for his boss (a wonderful Bryan Cranston) and his nights running thugs through the streets of Los Angeles. Things get a bit complicated when he agrees to do a favor for the partner of the woman he loves (Carey Mulligan), and gets a bit too deeply involved with a high-ranking L.A. crime boss (played with a devilish insouciance by Albert Brooks). Double-crosses and explosive violence ensue.

So far, so familiar. But Refn, a polarizing Danish director whose previous films have been preternaturally brutal investigations into the most violent, cavernous recesses of man’s collective conscience, inflects what little of Hossein Amini’s script there is with a pulsing, monumentally cosmic style that makes the action meaningful while sacrificing little intensity. Drive most obviously diverges from its overly energized action-movie brethren through the expert staging of its car chases and gunfights, which are brutally violent and geographically consistent in ways that afford the mayhem a tautness so often missing amid the quick cuts and whipping cameras of other films. And Gosling, an indispensable presence and a born movie star, guides us through it all without saying more than a few sentences at a time. He’s comforting, confident, and subtly menacing, sometimes within the same scene.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Drive is that Refn has directed it in such a way that it seems like a part of a much larger universe. His vision emerges relentlessly and triumphantly from the many renditions of L.A. we have seen on film to give the city a thrillingly ambient beauty that seems almost otherworldly, and Cliff Martinez’s throbbing, Tangerine Dream-esque synth score makes the film seem like such a deeply felt retro throwback to the measured crime films of the 80s that it becomes positively new again. Few action films (or just films, for that matter), are more evocative; from each of Drive’s many inside-the-car POV shots, the lights outside flitter ominously, the engine revs, the dashboard gleams, and all the while we get the feeling that it all has weight, that it means something. For Refn, every frame is a force.

Drive is, in so many ways, the direct antithesis to what we have become conditioned to seeing when we go to big studio action movies. It is careful, calculated, and slow. The violence, when it comes, is unfetishized and meaningful, every shot has purpose, and every cut is fluid and sensible. It retains a thematic bluntness that is as evocative in its guardedness as it is refreshing in its simplicity, and it never sacrifices its pointed humanistic nuance in favor of a needlessly convoluted narrative. Drive is a symphony among cacophonies.

Breaking Bad 4.11, "Crawl Space"

“Crawl Space,” while not an airtight episode by any stretch, is probably the best example of everything Breaking Bad has been capable of up to this point in its run. What this show does well, what it has always done well and what it does exceptionally well in this outing, is building continuous tension on an episode-by-episode basis, and then exploding that tension quickly and ferociously. I can’t think of any other show on TV right now that is telling such a focused, tightly knit story from episode to episode, one which leaves so little time for diversions and gets down to brass tacks in every single episode. There are no extraneous side stories or characters on this show; everything, right down from the acting to the editing and sound design, serves the story in a way that provides for a constant but almost inconceivable ratcheting up of tension.

A lot of people were complaining about the languid pace of season four up until about “Hermanos,” but it is now apparent that that this year’s seeming lifelessness – a quality which is admittedly pronounced, at least when compared to the breakneck, visceral intensity of nearly all of season three – had a purpose after all. Breaking Bad has an uncanny way of not letting the audience fully grasp just how much shit these characters have gotten themselves into until it’s much too late for them to extract themselves from those shitty situations; at least not without doing great harm to themselves and the people around them. This show, in ways unlike any other show out there, effectively conveys both a feeling of powerlessness in the face of the relentless kineticism of its narrative, and a helplessness to overpower the all-consuming sense of doom which paints that narrative. These qualities pervade nearly every frame of Breaking Bad, to such a degree that watching the show at its tensest moments is almost suffocating.

None of this is new. This sort of nihilistic suffocation has been around since somewhere near the middle of the first season, and there have been explosive moments on Breaking Bad throughout its entire run. But each new one consistently feels more unexpected and world-transforming than the last, because Vince Gilligan and his writers are astoundingly good at carrying tension through multiple episodes, building that tension to its snapping point, and then going beyond anything the audience was expecting to put the characters deeper and deeper into a seemingly inescapable situation. It’s almost like the writers are daring themselves to sensibly – but not without logical harm done – get Walt out of what they’ve gotten him into. Somehow, it all works. They haven’t failed yet.

I’m going to smooth over a lot of summary here. Last week’s cliffhanger is resolved surprisingly easily; Jesse takes Gus and Mike to a paramedic tent at the lab, where Gus is quickly patched up and Mike, whose injuries are more serious, is left alone to mend (“This man pays my salary,” a paramedic explains to Jesse when Jesse asks why they aren’t paying more attention to the bleeding Mike). As Gus and Jesse make the trek back to New Mexico, Jesse reiterates his support for Walt, even after all their differences. “You got a problem,” he tells Gus, if Gus expects him to cook with the knowledge that Walt is going to be killed.

Back at the New Mexico lab, after having been gone for a few days, Walt notices that someone else has been cooking while he was away. He deduces it was Jesse, and realizes that Gus is in the final steps of his replacement process; if Jesse doesn’t protect Walt, Walt is dead, and he knows it. Thus begins a series of events that eventually takes Walt to Jesse’s house to plead with his former partner to continue espousing his worth to Gus. Gus doesn’t like Walt interfering with Jesse, who he now sees as his partner, not Walt’s. So Gus takes Walt out to the desert and fires him from his cooking job, while simultaneously presenting his plan to kill Hank. If Walter interferes with that, Gus says, he and his family will be dead.

Now, as for those final ten minutes: Breaking Bad has always been able to pull things off stylistically that no other show would even dare to attempt, but the details in these final scenes are some of the most indelible this series has provided. Walt’s demented cackling over the relentless phone-ringing, his helpless scream (a scream that felt like it had been coming for three and a half seasons), the slow dolly out from the hallway as Skylar approaches the phone, dreading what will be said on the other end; it was all staged and executed perfectly, in a fashion so harrowing and unnerving that it could have been a scene in a horror film. And the visionary final shot is as thematically dense as it is beautiful: We see Walt directly below us, cobwebbed, hysterical and framed through the cellar door in what could very well be his grave, lying on the crawl space floor as the camera creeps upward. The laughing slowly softens, the walls shake, the soundtrack drones lowly, and we cut to black.

It's a remarkable ending that is as hauntingly unexpected as it is fitting. Once again, it is obvious now that the season has been building to this one breaking point. A good way to look as this is to, as stupid as it may sound, imagine Breaking Bad as the dramatic-television equivalent of Jenga. At the beginning of each season, we start with a full tower (or relatively full, I suppose, as season begins with our characters worse off than the last season’s beginning), and as we gradually remove block after block, the tower becomes less and less steady. The tower always falls; we know this, it is inevitable. It simply a matter of when. And this is why what the writers of Breaking Bad have done to condition us is so goddamn brilliant: the show’s unpredictability has itself become its only predictable aspect. And this is why the last ten minutes of “Crawl Space” are not only the greatest ten minutes Breaking Bad has so far produced, but also the greatest ten minutes of TV I’ve seen in quite some time. Gilligan has been building (or perhaps “destructing” is the better word) toward this all season. We knew the breakdown would happen. We just didn’t know when. It happened in “Crawl Space,” and the most beautiful thing about it was that it felt not simply like the apex of a season, but the apex of a series. And the best part is, we still have two episodes left in this season that are chock-full of potential for further game-changing apexes. That Gilligan is able to reliably produce these moments, time after time, without fail, bodes well as we push into the final stretch.

A-

Other thoughts:

·         I didn’t mention anything about the Ted/Skylar subplot because, frankly, it seemed a bit more disconnected than usual from the main action, at least until the final moments. The whole Huell/Redhead house invasion scene felt a bit awkward and flat, but then again, that was probably the point. It’ll be interesting to see where the Ted storyline goes from here. I mean, presumably he’s dead, but we never really heard definitively, so who knows? Point is, unfortunately for Walt and Skylar, the check to the IRS in the mail. It doesn’t look like they’ll be getting that money back anytime soon.

·         Shot of the week (besides the final one, because that’s too easy): the long shot of Walt kneeling before Gus in the desert as a cloud passes. You never see a shot held that long on TV. Simply incredible.

·         Gus’s pronunciation of the words “I will kill your infant daughter” was one of the most quietly menacing moments I’ve ever seen on this show.

·         “What did you expect, Hadji’s Quick Vanish?”

Breaking Bad 4.8, "Hermanos"

One of the most exciting things about this season of Breaking Bad has been watching the transformation of Walter White from formidable drug lord to stooge. It would seem that the transformation is nearly complete, as is made bracingly evident in “Hermanos” in what has to be one of the best cuts the show has ever done: a straight-ahead close-up of Walt getting into his hospital gown just before he’s about to be tested (we find out later his cancer is still in remission), juxtaposed later with a shot from the same angle of Walt donning his lab gear, about to go to work in Gus’s lab. As much as he doesn’t want to admit it, Walt is owned – by his cancer, and by Gus. No matter where he goes or what he does, he’s not in control of whether he lives or dies anymore.

But “Hermanos” isn’t really about Walt. It’s about Gustavo Fring, and the bulk of the episode sets us up for exactly the type of set piece this show has always done so well – a tense, dialogue-heavy confrontation between opposing parties that may or may not end in a moment of explosive violence. This one does, and as a result we now have knowledge of part of the reason Gus is such a fastidious and seemingly unfeeling man: he’s been through a lot. A lot more, in fact, than we’ll probably ever be fully let on to. But what we do know is this: the only reason Don Eladio didn’t kill him along with his partner Max was that he knew Gus’s name from his days in Chile, which would seem to mean that he was involved in some pretty serious stuff. We don’t find out what kind of stuff, and I would be surprised if we ever do.

What this flashback to Gus’s pre-America (and, interestingly, pre-methamphetamine) days tells us is twofold: that his tensions with the cartel go much deeper than simple territory warfare, and that he knows the ins and outs of how to make a drug dealing and manufacturing partnership work better than Walt or Jesse could ever hope to. The relationship between Gus and Max, even when glimpsed for a few minutes, is obviously light years ahead of Walt’s and Jesse’s in terms of productivity and friendliness and, conceivably, this is part of the reason he has seized the opportunity to drive a wedge between Walt and Jesse: he knows a weak partnership when he sees one.

Meanwhile, back in the present, Hank takes matters into his own hands after a dead-end interrogation wherein Gus does his best to convince everyone that he would never have anything to do with drug manufacturing. Hank doesn’t buy it. Walt’s and Hank’s two once very separate worlds keep colliding in increasingly satisfying ways, and this week is no different. Operating under the false assumption that they’re headed to a rock and mineral expo, Walt discovers he’s actually driving Hank to Los Pollos Hermanos, and Hank convinces Walt to attach a low-rent tracking device (“$289 from SkyMall!”) on Gus’s Volvo. He does so, reluctantly and even after Mike pulls up next to them, and in one of the most sad, funny and tense scenes of the entire series, we see Walt as nothing more than a complete pawn. He scrambles inside the restaurant and, with the look of a tattletale child, assures Gus that he would never take such an action; Gus’s fast-food manager façade cracks as he orders Walt to “do it” anyway, and Walt cowers away. What an incredible microcosm of the entirety of season four. Walt has no power to refuse Hank, and neither does he have the resolve to allow Gus to think, even if only for a while, that he has had a hand in assisting the DEA. Pinched between his two worlds that can never collide, Walt can do nothing but obey.

He then speeds to Jesse’s house (newly redecorated) in order to convince him to move up the date of the planned assassination. The matter is dire, says Walt: “Hank catching Gus means Hank catching us.” But, as we saw during the rehab group in “Problem Dog,” trying to convince Jesse that there’s any sort of moral certainty in the world is going to be a whole lot tougher than Walt would like it to be. Jesse remains typically ambivalent about the whole situation, gets up to go to the bathroom. He leaves his phone behind, a text message is received, and Walt reads it, discovering finally that he may have truly lost his former partner. It’s hard to imagine Walt taking this lying down. Will he take out his anger on Jesse or on Gus? What will be his next move? Will he live by his spoken dictum of seizing control and finally become “the danger” he’s already professed himself to be? I can’t imagine the show will devote much more time to Walter trying to convince Jesse to stay out of bed with Mike and Gus. It seems about the time for him to take control.

The possibilities for how all of this is going to dovetail as we near the final stretch of the season are tantalizing. As the past few episodes have progressed, the magnitude to which things have gotten out of control for Walt is staggering: he used to always be two steps ahead of the game; now he’s saving face by trying to callously goad Jesse into taking revenge for the murder of Andrea’s son. He used to dictate his own terms; now he’s prisoner to a security camera. He used to take what he wanted; now he’s back to his days of haphazardly plotting lazy ricin assassinations. The concept of “full measure” seems to have gotten away from him. Sure, he can talk the talk (“I am the danger!”), but when push comes to shove, talk is all it is. He can tell his fellow cancer patient all he wants that the poor man needs to seize the life he has and take control, but Walt knows that he’s not doing any better. Maybe, at this point, what’s driving Walt isn’t even the protection of his family anymore. Maybe it’s just the need to be right. The need to be listened to again. The need to control.

Breaking Bad is now something entirely different from what it was in season one. What began in relatively stark, simple terms – save money to save the family – has morphed into a dicey moralistic cobweb in which not only the show’s main characters but also its ancillary players have become inextricably stuck. In episodes such as “Hermanos,” it has been fascinating to watch the writers relegate characters as gripping and empathetic as Walt and Jesse to the background without losing any of the inherent dramatic tension that has arisen out of their (now more apparently than ever) fatally intertwined situation. Diffusing narrative focus is one of the riskiest things a TV show can do, because it puts the onus on the writers to keep things interesting in the face of expanded stakes. It takes real balls to cut away, albeit briefly, from an interior struggle as heavily weighted with moral consequence as Walt’s (or Jesse’s, for that matter) to a seemingly out-of-nowhere flashback origin story, and to do this while retaining – and in Breaking Bad’s case, even increasing – the tension and tight-knit humanity that have been hallmarks of the show from the very beginning is nothing short of astounding. Well into its fourth season, it’s worth noting that no other show on television is able to provide viewers with such constant and comforting reminders of how it is working toward a conclusion as unpredictable as it is inevitable.

Other thoughts:

·         Every episode of Breaking Bad has at least one shot that sticks with me. This time, it was the handheld tracking shot that followed Don Eladio as he approached the table, the evening sun dappling in and out of his shadowy, monolithic presence. It told us everything we needed to know about the character in just a few seconds. Haunting.

·         It’s nearly impossible to get an episode these days that doesn’t give one or two characters the narrative short shrift, and this week, it was Skyler’s turn. But we still got a great little character moment when she misjudges the weight of the bills. Walt and Gus aren’t the only ones in over their heads.

·         I’m not sure if we’ve ever seen Walt as terrified as he was when Mike pulled up next to him and Hank in the parking lot. Walt realizes more and more every day that the shit is going to hit the fan, one way or another, and soon. To see him practically on the verge of tears while trying to reassure Gus that he didn’t plant the wire was particularly sobering. We’re a long, long way from the ballsy, “stay out of my territory” Walt of season two.

·         Saul’s recounting to young Brock of his tragically lost elementary school crush may have been the funniest and most oddly touching moment of the season so far. Bob Odenkirk is indispensible.