Joy a holiday also-ran

There’s no question that David O. Russell’s Joy has a great deal going for it. It sports an incredible cast, including key members from previous efforts Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle (both of which topped my 10 Best Lists in 2012 and 2013 respectively) and a fascinating based-on-a-true-story plot about a young woman who reinvents herself through hard work and unwavering perseverance. This Mildred Pierce for a modern age has all the trappings of a winner. Yet my initial response to Joy was one of indifference, not so much that my time had been wasted, but that an opportunity for Russell and company to produce something truly special had passed them by.

Beginning with one of many ideas that aren’t fully developed, Russell opens with a scene from a fictional soap opera (starring Susan Lucci and Donna Mills), one that comes to reflect Joy Magano (Jennifer Lawrence) and her family, a group of eccentrics, far from charming. While her agoraphobic mother Terry (Virginia Madsen) stays secluded on the side porch, her ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez) lives in the basement, while her grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd) and her two kids round out the household…that is until her father Rudy (Robert De Niro) is dumped on their doorstep by his second wife. Yes, it’s crowded and dysfunctional in the best Russell tradition as the strong cast succeeds in bringing the characters to life when the script falters.

Through poignant flashbacks we see that Joy was an imaginative young girl whose spirit was gradually crushed by her parents’ divorce as well as her getting wed too young, another union that ended in disaster. She skipped going to college in order to help her father run his business and rues that her parents did not patent a reflective dog collar she invented as a teen. But for her grandmother, she gets little in the way of encouragement.

This everywoman feminist role is tailormade for Lawrence, who imbues it with the sort of sincerity, passion and strength that’s made her the premiere actress of her generation. Lawrence needs no grand moments to show us the determination Joy has in creating a miracle mop that will be her salvation – she tells the story with her eyes and through them we come to see her character and ourselves. As is often the case, without her on board, the film would simply have floundered.

That’s not to say she isn’t given ample support. De Niro has excelled in each of the films Russell has cast him and this is no exception. Isabella Rossellini as Rudy’s new partner and Joy’s main investor crafts a sympathetic character out of what could have been a throwaway role. Bradley Cooper as the exec at QVC who takes a chance on Joy proves he can play nice and sympathetic when called on to do so. He and Lawrence rekindle some of their Silver Linings magic when they’re on screen together. As sales of Joy’s invention go through the roof, the film finally hits its stride.

However, it proves too little too late.

While the work on the screen is solid, the fault lies in the structure of the film. Russell’s use of flashbacks and flash-forwards prove distracting, preventing the movie from gaining any real traction or momentum, while key plot points go unexplained. (After Joy sells millions of mops, she’s still in debt. How did that happen?) While many of Russell’s films benefit from a steadily increasing editing rhythm that winds up propelling them, Joy is wildly uneven, at times threatening to soar, at others nearly moribund. There’s a genuinely inspirational story at the core of Joy – it simply needs to be uncovered.

Danish Girl – A long road to martyrdom

As one would expect from a Tom Hopper film, The Danish Girl is a stunning production, one that’s as beautifully composed as the paintings done by its two protagonists. At times, it’s also as stiff and stagnant as a still life. It tells the story of Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), a successful Danish artist who specialized in landscapes and was the first person to undergo sexual reassignment surgery in the early 1930s. Hopper’s movie is as staid as befits its subject manner, but so much so that it nearly grinds things to a halt.

Married to Gerda (Alicia Vikander), a fellow painter who has yet to have the same success as her husband, Wegener begins to have an identity crisis when his wife asks that he help her complete a portrait. Requesting that he don the clothes of a dancer she’s rendering on canvas, Wegener responds to the feel of the silk stockings he slips on and the dress he wears in a way neither of them could predict. Feeling far more at home in this garb, the artist soon begins to raid his wife’s wardrobe as well as that of a theater he’s affiliated with, wearing women’s clothes whenever he can. Soon, he insists that he be called Lili and he appears in this guise on a permanent basis, insisting that Einar is dead and that his true self has finally emerged.

What began as a lark for Gerda becomes a double-edged sword for her. Using Lili as the subject of a series of paintings, she suddenly achieves success in the art world, going so far as being feted and honored in Paris. However, in finding her muse, she loses her husband, a reversal in fortune that causes feelings of alienation. Ironically, this is the only thing Lili and Gerda share as the former finds herself adrift in a world that labels her “insane,” while the latter begins to question her own sexuality and attractiveness.

Einar’s transformation is meticulously rendered, allowing Redmayne to prove his Oscar win for The Theory of Everything was no fluke. The actor uses every tool at his disposal to convey feelings of ecstasy, confusion and relief, both from a physical and emotional perspective, as he struggles with his transformation. By slight gradations, Redmayne slowly changes Einar’s gait, the way he holds himself and his ability to meet another’s gaze with confidence, until Lili appears before us. The actor is never less than captivating. His turn here will be recognized as a high-water mark in his career.

Vikander is equally arresting, as her own transformation is just as compelling. Initially seen toiling in anonymity in her husband’s shadow, Gerda runs the emotional gamut from reserved to confident to confused and finally heartbroken. Vikander is more than up to the task, displaying the necessary range with a confidence usually found in a far more seasoned performance. With solid work this year in such disparate films as Ex Machina, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Burnt and now here, there’s no question the young actress is a formidable talent to watch.

While the performances, suffused against a stunning aesthetic, are arresting, Hopper’s sense of pacing nearly undoes it all. Though it is vital to go into great detail regarding Einar’s transformation, it’s rather slow going before we reach the scenes dealing with his surgical procedure. There’s nothing wrong here that a bit of careful editing couldn’t fix. Still, even the tepid pace can’t obscure Redmayne and Vikander’s fine work, which is well worth taking in.

Concussion muted in its approach

It’s been awhile since Will Smith has had a challenge on the big screen, so it’s good to see him stretch himself in Peter Landesman’s Concussion. As Dr. Bennet Omalu, he’s the best thing in this well-intentioned but incomplete story, a crusade that only provides one side of what should be a gripping, moral tale. Landesman should have been able to generate a sense of outrage in this David-and-Goliath tale about a forensic neuropathologist who takes on the NFL. But for some reason that’s missing in this regrettably rote exercise.

In addition to being a Nigerian studying and working in Pittsburgh, Omalu is seen as an outsider in a variety of ways. His work ethic puts his coworkers to shame, he’s meticulous to a fault in life and on the job and he has no interest in football. After doing an extensive autopsy on retired Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer Mike Webster (David Morse), Omalu detects a reason for the deceased’s erratic behavior before his untimely death at the age of 50. He posits that he suffered up to 70,000 severe blows to the head from the time he started playing football as a child to the day he retired at the age of 38. This steady stream of abuse released killer proteins to the brain, which ultimately caused Webster to suffer from dementia, mood swings and depression.

Omalu comes to call this syndrome Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) and contends many retired football players suffer from it. This is a theory that gains little traction until other former athletes begin to behave as Webster did and tragically die young. Taking his findings to the NFL, Omalu is ignored and called a quack, though he does gain a valuable ally in Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), the Steelers’ former team physician.

As a medical procedural, Concussion is a fascinating examination of the groundbreaking research Omalu spearheaded. Encouraged by his boss, Dr. Cyril Wecht (a fine Albert Brooks), the doctor continues to uncover recurring patterns in the brain chemistry and make-up in the brains of numerous ex-players that the NFL dismisses out of hand, because to admit they deliberately put them in harm’s way would be bad for business.

While we understand the league’s reaction, we get very little in the way of what was going on behind closed doors. Veiled threats are made towards Omalu, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell (Luke Wilson) comes off as nothing but a dismissive figurehead seen only at press conferences. It’s implied NFL officials used their connections at the FBI to ruin Omalu’s life. Had we been privy to meetings they conducted to address this crisis, this would have made for a far more compelling film. We would have known just what the doctor was up against as well as the extent of the potential damage to the league. The NFL refused to cooperate with the makers of this film for obvious reasons, and their lack of participation does hurt the movie in the end.

Smith is the saving grace here, showing a passion and anger he rarely displays with this kind of sincerity. The mannerisms and distinct speech pattern he masters for Omalu are small touches that underscore the character’s outsider status, as is the confusion he displays when trying to understand the mania that surrounds the NFL. However, Smith’s passion is not mirrored in the film itself. While the story is absorbing, it’s lacking in emotion. Landesman’s film comes off as a piece for “60 Minutes,” rather than the rage-filled cry for justice it should be.

Big Short sheds light on monetary collapse

While Paramount Pictures managed to get The Big Short nominated in the Best Comedy category at this year’s Golden Globes (along with that laugh riot The Martian), it’s rather hard to find the humor in this tale of corporate greed and the ruination of the American middle class. Of course, I’m sure that the execs at the studio were barely touched by the economic collapse of 2008, which suddenly put millions of consumers underwater on their home mortgages and pushed our most venerable financial institutions to the brink of failure.

Based on the book by Michael Lewis, Adam McKay’s film takes on the arduous task of attempting to explain just how this all came about as well as tell how a small number of prescient investors were able to profit from this debacle. While this sounds like the sort of lecture you used to fall asleep to in your introductory economics class, for the most part the director succeeds in keeping our attention. Credit default swaps, collateral debt obligation and mortgagebacked securities, well this is hardly sexy stuff. But McKay manages to explain them in such a way that even viewers who have a hard time balancing their checkbook will be able to grasp what these tools are and how they were manipulated by bankers out to get rich on the sly.

The overall development of the collapse is told via four different perspectives, the first being that of investment banker Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling). McKay has the character break the fourth wall repeatedly throughout the film, speaking to the viewer directly to explain how the world of 21 st century finance works and how he profited from it. This is a clever device as it gives us the impression we’re on the same level as this Wall Street insider and it provides Gosling the opportunity to deliver one snarky aside after another. Vennett catches wind that hedge fund manager Dr. Michael Burry (a terrific Christian Bale) has taken to shorting the housing market. Essentially, this means that he’s taking out huge insurance policies that state if over 50 percent of the mortgages in those that have been bundled by the thousands by certain banks fall into default, then he will be due a payoff in the billions of dollars. Vennett wants to jump on board this as does weary investor Mark Baum (Steve Carell) and young guns Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Geller (Finn Wittrock) with retired banker Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt).

What with all the financial machinations and multiple storylines, the film is incredibly dense and actually proves exhausting in the end. However, this is far more than a simple lesson in shady economics. McKay’s film is a vehicle through which viewers can see their own rage and frustration expressed. While Rickert walks away rich, he reminds his young charges that millions of people’s lives have been shattered so that their pockets can be lined. Baum is the most fascinating of the bunch, an angry man who’s yet to deal with a tragedy that haunts him. While he rails against the corruption around him and the injustice of the system, in the end, he has no problem walking away with millions earned for betting against it.

This underscores The Big Short’s message.

Yes, things aren’t fair where our monetary system is concerned, but complaining about it never got anyone rich. If you have the opportunity to strike it big, take the money and run. After all, isn’t that the American Way?

Contact Chuck Koplinski at ckoplinski@usd116.org.