The Tourist: Searching for Mr. Wrong

The movie opens with all these guys following Angelina Jolie around with cameras, scrutinizing her every move, so you could be forgiven for wondering if you’re watching a documentary. But no, this is Paris, Jolie speaks with an English accent, she receives an envelope with cryptic instructions, and we get about 40 different camera angles just to cover a half-minute of action—and if those clues don’t assure you that we’re in the realm of pure hokum, the deliriously fussy, overbearing, almost instantly annoying James Newton Howard score will. The director is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who helmed The Lives of Others. Like that earlier film, this one is heavy on surveillance. Consequence, not so much.

You could shave off the first 15 minutes of The Tourist and just start the thing with Jolie’s expensively tailored mystery vixen approaching Johnny Depp on a train, since he is, I think, our protagonist, or at least steals every scene from Jolie. She’s given precious little to do aside from look gorgeously worried; Depp, bearded and slightly husky-looking, at least gets to be funny and bumblingly charming. He’s terrific in their early exchanges. If only he and everyone else didn’t have to speak so many of their thoughts aloud. Redundancies accumulate, the bloat becoming near-palpable by the movie’s mid-point. I haven’t seen Anthony Zimmer, the French film The Tourist is based on, but if nothing else the original was at least shorter.

So Jolie uses Depp, a Wisconsin schoolteacher meandering through Europe on holiday, to mislead British fuzz and some nasty thugs led by a billionaire Steven Berkoff. The heavies all want to track down Jolie’s ex-lover to collect some six-figure debts—could Depp be that rascal in disguise? The Tourist is a Wrong Man movie, playing like Polanski Lite or neo-Hitchcock, with its doubles, snarling villains and chase scenes through the lovelier canals of Venice. If I sound grumpy it’s only because the movie had every reason to be fun, if forgettable. Unfortunately it’s far too dumb to generate suspense, and the deeply predictable “unpredictable” ending is wildly nonsensical. The movie also fails to offer us a single truly compelling character, one we can believe in, even on the story’s own flimsy terms. Jolie’s character wears this medallion on a bracelet that features the two heads of Janus. She says her mom gave it to her to remind her that everyone has two distinct faces. But after watching The Tourist, two sounds luxurious. Me, I would have settled for one.

Defiance: saving lives, forest wives and reversing stereotypes in this untold tale of Holocaust survival

The title sounds like some vehicle for Stallone, or maybe the Rock, but Defiance in fact belongs to the new crop of revisionist WWII/Holocuast movies, an epic of resistance, survival and self-determination. It’s based on an astonishing and largely unknown true story, astonishing in part because its portrayal of the abysmal suffering of Europe’s Jews is given fresh dynamic in the shape of Belarusian brothers Tuvia, Zus and Asael Bielski, three handsome boys of durable Jewish peasant stock who lose everything in the German invasion save their lives and dignity. You have to marvel and just how rare it is in movies to find such a characterization of the Jews, not as a mass of helpless victims, but as tough motherfuckers.

Having fled their homes, the Bielskis original plan was, understandably, founded in self-interest. But their encounters with other Jews hiding in the Belarusian woods tugs at their sense of solidarity and purpose. Surrounded by trembling, dirt-smeared faces gnawing on scraps of petrified bread, Zus (Liev Schreiber) wonders: “So many dead. Why not us?” The movie is of course one long answer to this question. Where Zus believes the only viable moral option is to fight as partisans alongside the Russians, Tuvia (Daniel Craig) resolves to stay hidden and build a community where every last Jew, from the able-bodied to the infirm, has some chance at survival, however remote. This theme of aggression versus seclusion is given its boldest dramatization in a sequence that shifts back and forth between a Russian-Partisan ambush on a German convoy and a wedding ceremony held in the forest enclave, both effectively staged and given engaging visual arcs by director and co-scenarist Edward Zwick, who previously helmed such like fare as Glory (1989), Legends of the Fall (94), The Last Samurai (03) and Blood Diamond (06).

Other scenes in Defiance however, ones that require greater reflection, tend to be more ham-fisted. Some are entirely unnecessary, like the dumb-ass scene where Bella (Iben Hjejle) asks Zus why the women don’t get guns. Zus simply assures her that the men will protect her, and this chauvinist brush-off, rather than leading to further discussion, touches Bella so deeply that she lets Zus cop a feel. (Does that mean she's Zus' "forest wife?" Lots of the fellows take forest wives, like participants in some prototype for a Pacific Northwest commune. It might have been interesting to learn more about the postwar fates of these forest marriages.) 

With its overused and overly instructive James Newton Howard score, its declamatory, overstated dialogue—which awkwardly avoids contractions as a way of reminding us that the characters aren’t actually supposed to be speaking English—Defiance sort of plods along, very respectful and workmanlike for the most, yet at heart there remains this iconoclastic appendix to the Holocaust narrative that’s worth knowing, not to mention yet another superbly rich performance from Craig, who swings convincingly between that steely gaze that exudes Bond know-how and a sense of desperation and terrible doubt as to what to do with all these people shriveling up from hunger and despair.

It just ain't Happening: don't look, but the killer's right behind you (and yes, that's sort of a spoiler)

Having made his name—and perhaps exhausted his potential—with The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan became the guy known for the big twist, that twist being the inevitable third act reveal that would invariably blow what was arguably an otherwise absorbing, often marvelously creepy movie. As evidenced in Unbreakable and Signs, the follow-ups to his initial breakthrough hit, Shyamalan’s greatest strength by far has been his control of atmosphere and pacing, a remarkable ability to generate disquiet, to develop an almost hushed air brimming with elements of utter normalcy that made the gradual intrusion of deliciously ambiguous threat that much more effective—and the resolution that much more of a let down. Not one of his movies has an ending worth the name.

The big twist in The Happening however happens right at the beginning, when we quickly realize that Shyamalan’s not even going to bother with building up mood at all—not to mention character development—but rather dive right into the terrible conceit driving the picture. (And yes, I mean terrible in every sense of the word.) It’s as if rather than continue to take his cues from Hitchcock, Spielberg or Val Lewton, Shyamalan decided he actually wants to be Larry Cohen, the marvelous maker of outlandish low-budget hystericals like God Told Me To and Q: The Winged Serpent. Or better yet George Romero, whose legendary apocalyptic zombie movies more or less carve out the turf for The Happening’s scrambling trajectory. Problem is, unlike Cohen or Romero, Shyamalan takes himself so goddamned seriously, even when his ideas are so impossibly lame.

It all starts with crowds of New Yorkers suddenly going catatonic in Central Park before suddenly finding the handiest way to off themselves. The suicidal impulse spreads quickly, soon erupting in other cities dotting the Northeast—though, curiously, the phenomenon never crosses over into Canada—and pundits start guessing it must be the work of terrorists with some new biological weapon that reverses our survival instinct. Along with everybody else, high school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), a veritable cheerleader for the scientific method, grabs his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and tries to escape to Philly, but when their train grinds to a halt in Filbert, the Moores are suddenly put in charge of a friend’s little girl (Ashlyn Sanchez) and must make their way through rural Pennsylvania while trying to figure out just what it is that’s, well, Happening!

Replete with James Newton Howard’s typically overbearing boilerplate score, The Happening is one mercilessly silly movie, which you’d hope would mean it’s also a fun movie, but what fun there is to be had is often had at the expense of the movie’s ostensible integrity. There’s a subplot about commitment anxiety that feels lazily tacked on, with Wahlberg and Deschanel, normally quite charming actors both, making what must be one of the most unconvincing young movie couples in recent memory, though it does arguably allude to Shyamalan’s own inability to commit to making something cohesive. There’s also a big-ass message to be rammed down our throats about environmental decay, yet even on the level of pure propaganda it’d handled clumsily and is devoid of any resonance in the story’s details. Wearing his influences so brazenly on his sleeve anyway, Shyamalan’s a filmmaker who might be best advised to just decide what kind of movie he wants to make—and given his way with exposition, it should probably be a B-movie—and work diligently toward it instead of fighting against it. There are far worse things in this world than a solid genre stylist—and in fact these days there are far too few of them—and if Shyamalan would just apply his talents toward something leaner, meaner and less pretentious he might just have a career yet.