Half man, half beast, half measures: The Wolfman

The family has already suffered the untimely demise of its beloved, beautiful matriarch and the institutionalization and exile of one of its boys for mental illness. As our story begins tragedy strikes once more with the gruesome slaughter of another Talbot son on the eve of his marriage. He’s cut down one night along the moonlit moors by something that seems both beast and man. When Laurence Talbot returns from years abroad to find out what happened to his fallen brother, he’s reunited with John, their father, still lurking in the gloom of the family’s decrepit rural mansion, who advises Laurence to forget the past. It is a “wilderness of horrors,” he says, and best left ignored. Of course we know Laurence will do no such thing, since gothic tales such as this feed on obsession with the echoing creaks of old traumas that never die.

The Wolfman is itself an exercise in looking back, referencing a long tradition of lycanthrope flicks, mostly notably Universal’s own 1941 classic The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. This latest entry isn’t set in the present or even in 1941 but rather in 1891, setting it just a few years after the Jack the Ripper murders. It doesn't really set out to renovate any aspect of the werewolf legacy but rather subscribes devoutly to the established rules and tropes of the familiar myth. Yet it feels uncertain as to how fully it wants to surrender to the spell of old things. Victorian England is made to look artificially caked in soot, and while early scenes thrive on the anxiety of the unseen, such as one riveting sequence that plays out in the terrifyingly insufficient firelight of a fog soaked gypsy camp, the movie, helmed by Jumanji director Joe Jonston, gradually makes concessions to contemporary demand for souped-up gore, offering flamboyant decapitations and buckets of organ spillage. The Wolfman boasts make-up design by the legendary Rick Baker, yet its transformation scenes, heavily accentuated by smooth and slick CGI, have nothing on the ferocious tactility of Baker’s precedent-setting work on 1981’s An American Werewolf in London. (You just don’t squirm the same way watching this newfangled stuff, perhaps because the horror isn't located in the body or even some likeness of the body but rather in some hovering screen of synthetic imagery.)

So I’m going to have to go with what seems to be the critical consensus on The Wolfman as a movie that can’t quite make up its mind about what it wants to be, a moody and mysterious homage to the subtler chillers of old, or an iconoclastic, bracingly modern monster mash. It shifts uneasily from sinister to silly, from brooding to camp, especially once we’re thrown into one of these insane asylums where the torture treatments are administered by drooling, grinning maniacs. Yet for all that I was still pretty engaged with and entertained by The Wolfman. The perfectly cast Benicio Del Toro, who also produced, is arguably a bit wasted on Laurence for lack of rigorous character development, yet the character is just inherently interesting. Laurence is an actor, known for his Hamlet. He's perhaps psychologically unstable, and bears a confused but deeply-rooted Oedipal grudge against his father, played for kicks by Anthony Hopkins; he's drawn to his dead brother's fiancée, played fairly straight by Emily Blunt, who's made to resemble the brother's dead mother; and the hairy situation he finds himself in may be as much the product of repressed rage as a disease contracted from a particularly nasty animal bite. It just goes to show that certain monsters endure for a reason. No matter how often they’re overwhelmed by kitsch, no matter how often we recycle them, they still maintain the power to fascinate us by virtue of their primacy. You might chuckle at the conceit of a werewolf running loose in London, but it’s no great leap to buy into the metaphorical potency of the beast within.

Royal chore: The Young Victoria

“Do you ever feel like a chess piece yourself, in a game being played against your will?” Posed to rabbity and moustachioed Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Rupert Friend) by soon-to-be teen Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt), it’s a sort of trick question, what with Albert being a thus-far fumblingly ingratiating suitor.

The question’s also intended as an indicator of Victoria’s inner turmoil—on the cusp of attaining unfathomable power, she’s still required to hold someone’s hand every time she mounts a staircase—yet like so much of what’s said throughout The Young Victoria, it hardly needs to be spoken aloud. Victoria’s sense of entrapment has been made abundantly clear in the scenes that preceded this one, which literally transpires over a chess board no less, with each of Victoria’s key oppressors, including mom (Miranda Richardson), looking on.

But it also feels like a trick question posed from one actor to another. Friend and Blunt were surely perfectly willing and handsomely remunerated participants in this lavish costume ball in search of a durable narrative thread, yet regardless of their individual merits as actors there’s no mistaking their ultimate usefulness as pretty objects to be played with and re-positioned in one terribly fraught and over-calculated scene after another. There is after all much history to plow through here, and the filmmakers don’t have time for such unruly forces as spontaneity, tension or nuance to get in the way.

So much of The Young Victoria is consumed with expository voice-over, expository letter reading and expository dialogue. Exposition usually serves a story, but in this case there’s just as much exposition as there is story. It’s hard to believe that the film, so often stiff, draggy and dull, was written by Julian Fellowes, the same fellow who scripted Gosford Park, a movie characterized by looseness, mischief and misdirection. Of course that movie was directed by Robert Altman, whose special genius incorporated those precise traits. What a different tone we find under the charge of Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée, whose C.R.A.Z.Y. was so plagued with flashy, humdrum set-pieces, and who here seems far less engaged with the material and far less discriminate as to what to do with it. There are a few silly, show-offy effects that recall Vallée’s earlier cause célèbre—a scene where every hair on Miranda Richardson’s arm suddenly stands at attention is distracting mainly because I never imagined Richardson was so hirsute—but mostly this is buttoned-down, business-like, with every event heavily telegraphed, and the evocation of Victoria and Albert’s youthful love so repressed it’s positively, well, Victorian.

The cast is largely quite strong, with Blunt less sexy than usual yet imperious and vulnerable, very good with the small transitions such as the one where she resolves to be less emasculating to her husband—of course that’s after he takes a bullet for her. Paul Bettany as Lord Melbourne, the rejected corner of the movie’s political love triangle, is suitably charming and an intriguingly self-assured presence amidst all the pomp, his posture often less than erect, his hands in search of a piece of furniture to pat as he doles out sound if conservative and slyly cynical advice to the inexperienced new Queen. Jim Broadbent looks ridiculous and is an utter hoot as the outspoken King William, who unfortunately dies pretty early in the picture. Richardson would probably be great if she had more to do. Friend I’m not sure what to make of. He mostly longs for Victoria, then finally gets her and the honeymoon’s over in short shrift and he becomes hard to like. He could surely have been less mousy. But I don’t know how any actors, however talented, are supposed to do their work effectively when every scene in ultimately drowned in a score as buoyancy-sucking as that of Ilan Eshkeri’s. You’d think he’d been asked to compose music for the goddamned coronation.

Make those pesky flights of inspiration disappear: Sunshine Cleaning

It’s indicative of the extent to which gallows humour has been absorbed, commoditized and made cozily “offbeat” by the movies when we see something as essentially unsullied by mortality as Sunshine Cleaning open with a shotgun suicide in an Albuquerque hardware store and almost immediately cut to gags about brain fragments staining the merchandise. The gruesome aftermath of death is incorporated right into screenwriter Megan Holley’s premise, which finds two 30ish sisters entering the local crime scene clean-up industry. This idea of two women whose own lives seem a mess hurling themselves into the grunt work of eliminating the traces of others’ trauma, despair and resignation is a rich one, but don’t let it fool you into thinking that Little Miss Sunshine Cleaning—the film shares more than just producers, “sunshine” and Alan Arkin with that 2006 indie hit—is any sort of comic trailblazer. It’s got just enough quirk to seem an alternative to the most pedestrian mainstream fare, but the familiarity creeps in early, accumulating until the final act assumes the whiff of something cobbled directly from a screenwriting handbook.

Thank goodness for Amy Adams, whose frustrated single mom Rose offers the actress a welcome step toward playing a somewhat less innocent character. I say somewhat because Rose, the high school cheerleader who once dated Steve Zahn’s football captain, now married with children and meeting for quickies in some fleabag called, I kid you not, the Crossroads Motel, is at times forced to behave naïvely just to help grease the gears of Sunshine Cleaning’s wrote trajectories of self discovery. Still, Adams is pretty delightful doing dirty things and her desperation is at times truly touching.

Emily Blunt, who played the reluctant pal to Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada, gets to transgress more interestingly as Rose’s sister Norah, who can’t hold down a job, seems stuck in a pattern of adolescent rebelliousness, and, in the movie’s most intriguing subplot, stalks a woman, marvelously underplayed by Mary Lynn Rajskub, whose photos she finds stashed amidst the belongings of a suicide. But it’s in this storyline that Sunshine Cleaning really reveals its limitations. The consequences of Norah’s genuinely creepy perusal of a friendship—and perhaps more—with this introverted woman nearly approach something resonant, yet Norah ends the movie by suddenly announcing she’s going on a road trip, which reads as lazy screenwriter shorthand for “I’m going to find myself.”

Arkin, charming as always, plays the kooky dad; there’s a tyke that licks things; there’s a requisite absent parent everyone’s still grieving; there’s an almost interesting one-armed man played by Clifton Collins Jr. who really could have spiced things up if given a chance to become a real character. (And I really wanted to know how he braided his hair.) Director Christine Jeffs, who made the not uninteresting Sylvia, seems above all to be trying to remain anonymous, but the result is mostly just further emphasis on the movie’s most un-engagingly generic qualities (not to mention some pretty awkward camerawork just to steer clear of Collins' supposedly absent arm). None of this is to say you won’t have a few laughs, wonder about some of the more potentially interesting subtexts, or feel a little empathy for Sunshine Cleaning’s characters, but neither with their stories stick with you once the scouring is through.