Singing, Dancing, Dying

[December 19th, 2007]

Ah, the holidays—that time when our thoughts naturally turn to slashed throats, drug addiction, child rape and putting dad in a nursing home. Four of the major Hollywood releases this Christmas are in just this festive spirit. (A fifth, Charlie Wilson’s War , looks lighter but wasn’t screened by press deadlines; look for a review on wweek.com.) Three of these movies are treats, while one is a leaden fruitcake. Our critical team has pondered them all—and, following the Festivus tradition of the airing of grievances, we’ve even allowed N. P. Thompson to express his long-standing hatred for Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

It’s not a Christmas movie, but Sweeney Todd is nonetheless a gift, a grisly musical confection wrapped in a blood-splattered package. Adapting Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp each turn in their best work since Ed Wood . Burton has disappointed in recent years, but with Sweeney the director displays new bravado with his trademark gothic style, sculpting a 19th-century London seething with malice that penetrates even good men.

Said good man is barber Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp), whose wife catches the eye of Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who then falsely imprisons Barker, ravages his wife and takes his young daughter prisoner. Years later, a gnarled Barker returns looking for blood, taking the name Sweeney Todd and enlisting the help of equally whacked-out Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who runs the worst meat-pie shop in London. It’s a match made in hell—Sweeney has bodies to dispose of, and Mrs. Lovett needs ingredients for her pies. With the flash of a razor, the Demon Barber is cutting a swath through London’s scumbags on his way to the Judge, and Mrs. Lovett’s pies are the most popular in the city. (“Try the priest,” she croons.)

Depp and Carter (neither experienced singers) dig deep into their characters, and Depp’s voice—a gravelly, cockney baritone—is perfect for the part, striking a believable balance. Rickman (who does evil with the best of ’em) plays Turpin with perverted glee. Timothy Spall, as Turpin’s crony, personifies sadism and arrogance, while Sacha Baron Cohen makes a hysterical turn as a flamboyant rival barber. Burton took a gamble in tackling Sondheim’s musical—gorehounds have to sit through a musical, musical fans are asked to endure unflinching, if cartoonish, gore. Neither should be disappointed, save Sondheim devotees miffed by song cuts and some slow moments. Sweeney is the blackest sort of comedy, one that asks audiences to laugh at mutilation, child abuse, cannibalism and seas of crimson. But it’s also a heartbreaking tragedy, a tasty piece of horror and a miracle of set design, acting and direction—simply put, one of the year’s best movies. R. AP KRYZA. Opens Friday, Dec. 21, at Cedar Hills, Eastport, Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place.

The Kite Runner

Due to sweeping establishing shots and earnest performances—most impressively from the child actors who were infamously manipulated into filming a rape scene—Marc Forster’s adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner , can rightly be categorized as “epic.” The coldly beautiful Afghan landscape (in reality, China) is deftly paired with euphoric, handheld montages of Kabul street life, and devastation—which happens at least once in every act of the film—is handled with visual ambiguity nothing short of poetic. But aesthetics and acting aside, the film comes across as a true translation of the source material: heavy-handed.

Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) is a weak-willed boy of privilege who is raised with servant’s son Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada). Steve McQueen fans both, they play out their fairly idyllic—though motherless—childhoods in the streets of late-’70s Kabul, engaging in the distinctively Afghan sport of kite-fighting. But when Amir fails to save Hassan from bullying that is beyond the pale, childhood effectively ends for both boys—just in time for Amir to be ushered out of the chaotic country by his father, played with quiet nobility by Homayoun Ershadi. Multiple book deals and an American citizenship later, Amir (played in his 20s and 30s by a striking Khalid Abdalla) is handed an opportunity to set things right, at the considerable cost of navigating the treacherous land of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Hosseini’s tale weighed itself down with death-knell chapter endings that made it a natural for Oprah’s venerated book club. What salvaged it—just enough to put it on display beside Starbucks’ bags of free-trade grounds—was its detailed pre-Soviet occupation, pre-Taliban perspective of the worldly society that was Kabul. Little of this is lost in the screenplay, and the final product makes the transformation from “painful histrionic tale” to “recommended holiday viewing” by way of compelling performances. PG-13. SAUNDRA SORENSON. Opens Friday, Dec. 21, at Fox Tower.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

By creating Walk Hard —a parody of musical biopics in general and James Mangold’s Johnny Cash film Walk the Line in particular—producer and writer Judd Apatow has gathered his stable of performers from Knocked Up and Superbad and declared, “We can make whatever the hell kind of movie we like, and it will be funny.” Which would be a disturbing development if not for the even more frightening fact they’re basically right.

If the test of satire is whether its targets can ever be taken seriously again, director Jake Kasdan’s work is a resounding success. It is now impossible to watch Walk the Line ’s childhood sawmill accident without thinking of young Dewey Cox slicing his brother in half with a machete. (“You’ll never be half of what he was,” Dewey’s father rages. “Hell, you’ll never be half of the half of what he was after you cut him in half!”) It’ll be even more difficult to sit through the addiction-and-recovery fables of Ray without thinking of 14-year-old Dewey—already played by swarthy John C. Reilly—getting introduced to the joys of reefer by bandmate Tim Meadows. And no inspirational ghost is safe after Dewey’s brother reappears...as Jonah Hill, still in obscene Superbad form.

The only reason Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There survives is that it wasn’t around for the mocking when Kasdan was shooting—though Bob Dylan and Don’t Look Back certainly take it on the chin, as do the Beatles (with Paul Rudd delivering what is simultaneously the worst and best John Lennon impression in history), Elvis and, in a particularly inspired bit, Brian Wilson. Walk Hard flies gleefully off the rails in its second half, often abandoning any pretense of narrative in favor of chasing the best jokes. (The faux-country songs, which are startlingly tuneful and include the unforgettable lyric “In my dreams you’re blowing me/ Some kisses,” are sometimes all that glues the project together.) This means that the movie, despite Reilly’s sincere performance, is the first Apatow production since Talladega Nights not to bother with a soft, poignant center. It’s sheer Hard candy. R. AARON MESH. Opens Friday, Dec. 21, at Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Sandy, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

The Savages

Scarcely have we recovered from his obscene performance in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead , when who should come galumphing along but Philip Seymour Hoffman? The single most unprepossessing and overrated actor of his generation has been granted yet another starring role in which the camera pulls in tight to his doughy cheeks and multiple chins.

Hoffman’s on-screen persona has never varied much—even his Elmer Fudd meets Carol Channing caricature in Capote wasn’t a stretch. In The Savages , Hoffman stars as Jon, a bearded and burly drama professor who looks as if he rightly belongs at a truck stop. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins inherently grasps Hoffman as a cartoon, purveying him as a buffoonish “intellectual,” as befits the received wisdom engulfing the actor off-screen. Jon’s elderly, estranged father (Philip Bosco) has begun to show signs of dementia, thus Jon and his sibling Wendy (Laura Linney), a struggling playwright, squabble over the “correct” nursing home for dear old dad.

Linney, wearing a brown fright wig that makes her resemble a Medusa with dead snakes, has been given a homely married lover who sports a comb-over, lest we miss the point that Wendy has low self-esteem. Alexander Payne executive-produced this outing from Jenkins, and the Payne-ful touch is evident: condescension as a substitute for humor, cheap irony as a stunt-double for insight. Jenkins, who writes pauses around her dialogue (she believes gales of laughter will accompany her deathless one-liners), doesn’t know whether she’s satirizing white liberal guilt or perpetuating it. Slicing through The Savages ’ phoniness, Bosco screams at his children, in response to their eggshell-sticky questions on what to do after he dies, “BURY ME! WHADDYA, IDIOTS?” Splendid advice. R. N.P. THOMPSON. Opens Tuesday, Dec. 25, at Fox Tower.