Tag: Naomi Watts

“The Impossible” (review)

December 30th, 2012

(also reviewed for Creative Loafing/Tampa; click here to read)

Stars Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland. Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona from a script by Sergio G. Sanchez. 114 minutes. Critic’s grade: B-

Does “The Impossible” count as disaster porn, as some observers have suggested? The film, based on the true story of an upper-class Spanish family’s efforts to survive the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that struck South Asia, killing 8,000 people in Thailand (and 250,000 in the region), indeed feels a bit voyeuristic at times.

Viewers are asked to thrill to the chills of a horrifying onrush of water, headed straight for a luxurious tropical resort, knocking over palm trees and dwellings as if they were matchsticks. It’s an absolutely frightening moment, stunningly assembled by Juan Antonio Bayona, the Spanish-born director of underrated horror chiller The Orphanage. Onlookers notice a distant rumbling sound, and birds suddenly fly away. Then comes a disturbing silence and a brief sound of rushing wind, and the massive wave strikes hard. Hurts so good?

Potentially troubling, too, is the question of focus, as the story centers on the struggles endured by wealthy British couple Maria Bennett (Naomi Watts), her husband Henry (Ewan McGregor) and their three sons, who had been enjoying an extended Christmas holiday in Khao Lak. Left untold are the stories of those Thailanders, many quite poor, left behind to search for missing family members, tend to their injured, bury their dead, and find somewhere to live after their homes were suddenly destroyed.

Does that oversight amount to exploitation? Not necessarily. For starters, as mentioned, the inspiring tale actually happened; it’s not strictly a made-for-Hollywood product, endowed with its own agenda. And, just as importantly, Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez, rather than simply asking filmgoers to marvel at the horrible carnage of it all, emphasize the strength of familial bonds, the sheer determination of Maria, Henry, and 11-year-old son Lucas (Tom Holland) to leverage all of their physical, mental and emotional resources in order to reunite with their loved ones. By dint of sheer will, they are bent on achieving what looks like a miraculous feat, a task that seems all but impossible. Yes, it’s triumph-of-the-human-spirit time — sounds corny, but rings true here.

The Bennetts’ prospects of coming home alive at first look quite dim, to say the least. Following the initial impact of the tsunami, Maria wakes up in churning water, and, after screaming for Lucas, locates him within shouting distance. Bayona and cinematographer Oscar Faura effectively place us inside the swirling confusion, as mother and son cling to one another, and manage to stay together despite the deadly obstacles in their path. Eventually, roles are reversed, and Lucas takes the lead, becoming his mother’s champion, striving to ensure the survival of a wounded woman so bedraggled and discolored that she appears to be knocking at death’s door.

Meanwhile, Henry and the family’s two youngest sons, Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) and Thomas (Samuel Joslin), are in another location, furiously searching for their counterparts. A large part of the film is set at a makeshift hospital, teeming with the wounded. There, Maria may or may not get the help she needs. Near-misses and mistaken identities — was that dad, or merely someone with a striking resemblance to him? — drive the tension during the latter moments of the story.

It’s to young Holland’s credit that the film holds together as well as it does. While the script doesn’t dig deep into how and why Lucas is able to do what he does, the actor is an appealing, sympathetic performer whose transformation from whiny kid to invaluable protector is believable. At the same time, it’s surprising that an actor as capable as McGregor isn’t given more to do; Henry’s story is truncated. The Impossible, while exhilarating and admirably inspiring, ultimately feels incomplete.
BFI’s Sight & Sound Really Liked The International?

March 11th, 2009

Sight & Sound, the monthly published by the British Film Institute, generally speaking is an erudite and reliable source of essays and reviews on world cinema.

I usually pick up the mag at my local Borders Books & Music (909 N. Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa), but Sight & Sound, along with Film Comment and Cineaste, have gone missing the last few weeks. Nobody there can tell me why, except to say that recent magazine shipments have been unpredictable.

So, perusing the S&S online site (wisely, it offers only bits of the content available in print), I came across Samuel Wigley’s review of The International, the wannabe thriller directed by German-born filmmaker Tom Tykwer (read my review).

Aside from a few spectacular Hitchockian set pieces, including those set at Milan’s town square, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and a mock-up of Manhattan’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum, there’s very little notable about Tykwer’s movie.

Stars Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, as an Interpol agent and a U.S. district attorney, respectively, investigating the criminal activities of a global bank, appear to be merely going through the paces. These otherwise resourceful actors offer facial expressions and body language as fixed and monotonous as the character development is undercooked and the dialogue is clumsy.

Really, Tykwer’s movie is one of the least intriguing and most bland international-conspiracy thriller flicks I’ve seen in a long while.

And yet the S&S reviewer (sorry, not trying to pick on this particular critic, just saying …) calls it “one of the most entertaining espionage dramas in an age.”

Really? How about the Bourne movies? How about, for a more intimate, non-globetrotting spy movie, Billy Ray’s underappreciated Breach, released in 2007?

Wigley adds, “Keeping a lid on comic-book excess, rooted in a cogent if run-of-the-mill intrigue and concentrated around plausible yet still astonishing set pieces, the result plays something like the idealised back-to-basics Bond film that Fleming fans carry around in their heads.”

Click here to read the entire review.

By the way, the March issue of S&S, the one I’ve been scrambling to find, has a cover story and several accompanying pieces on one of my favorite filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick. On offer: “… a critical account of sex in his films, alongside a look back at the exquisite Barry Lyndon and an interview with the Wilson Twins about their exploration of the director’s unmade project Aryan Papers.”

I just may have to break down and subscribe.
The International (review)

February 12th, 2009

The International (opens Feb. 13)

Stars Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl.

Directed by Tom Tykwer.

Rated R; 118 minutes.

The time is just right for a thriller centered on a global bank caught in the act of extreme power mongering, with sidelines in arms dealing, extortion, political machinations and murder.

Because, after all, isn’t it at least somewhat comforting to imagine that the economic meltdown is due to evil conspiracies by extraordinarily wealthy businessmen crossing and crisscrossing international datelines, rather than just, you know, standard-issue greed and poor decision making and clueless money management?

Unfortunately, timing isn’t everything, even for Tom Tykwer, the German director whose breakthrough film, Run, Lola, Run, released in the U.S. a decade ago, demonstrated a real knack for adrenaline-rush cinema (if little feel for character development).

The International boasts plenty of exhilarating forward motion, including foot chases and a spectacular shootout and blow-it-up romp through New York’s Guggenheim Museum — or, rather, a superb mock-up of the spiraling Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building. The American-German coproduction looks fantastic, with a fit if grizzled Owen and icy blonde Naomi Watts pursuing men in expensive blue suits, shuttling from stunning steel-and-glass office buildings to exotic locales.

Missing in action, though, is the human element: Viewers may discover that they’re just not into the protagonists, created by rookie screenwriter Eric Singer, whose script is informed by the real-life criminal misdeeds of the Pakistan-based Bank of Commerce and Credit International, shuttered in 1991.

Events zip by from start to finish in the big-budget film, which, at just under two hours, feels like about 90 minutes, thanks to Tykwer’s gift for cinematic momentum. At the story’s start, in Berlin, two men meet in a car and try to hammer out a deal. One of them exits the vehicle, motions to his across-the-way partner, Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Owen), and in short order vomits, doubles over and dies.

Salinger reconnects with his American counterpart, New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Watts), and the two subsequently do battle with a steadily thickening plot and a bewildering array of accents — Italian, French, German, American, British, Libyan and probably a few others.

The International, pumped with the rhythms — rolling percussion, a single piano key struck repeatedly — of an effective score to which Tykwer contributed, roams around the world, true to its title.

Salinger and Whitman (was Singer intending literary allusions?), separately or together, carry on their investigation into the I.B.B.C. at the bank’s headquarters in Luxembourg; a political rally at a plaza in Milan; the streets of mid-town Manhattan; and, in the finale, a Byzantine cistern, bustling bazaar and orange-tinted Mediterranean rooftops in Istanbul.

Along the way, Salinger hints that he’s plagued by demons from his past; this plot strand, like some others, isn’t fleshed out.

The cinematography, by Tykwer regular Frank Griebe, is quite stunning, more frequently than not. Among the particularly dazzling sequences are that massive and very long shoot-out at the Guggenheim, where baddies and their pursuers make their way around video installations; an overhead shot, framing people streaming, antlike, away from the scene of a tragedy; and the passage in Istanbul.

The film, too, offers at least two intriguing villains, in Brian F. O’Byrne (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) as a coolly efficient assassin with a leg brace, and screen veteran Armin Mueller-Stahl (Eastern Promises, Shine, Avalon) as a former hard-line communist, now profiting from his role as a deadly “adviser” to the bank. The latter, prone to philosophical rationalizations of his work, explains to Salinger that “at last, everything comes between you and the man you wanted to be.” Far less interesting is the bland bank CEO played by Ulrich Thomsen (Hitman).

Tykwer, in his use of suspense sequences played out on grand sets, seems to want to reference Alfred Hitchcock, and even Hitchcock acolyte Brian De Palma. And the man-against-the-system storyline hints at themes coloring the films of Sidney Lumet.

Ultimately, though, The International comes off as empty motion, albeit empty motion that’s smartly photographed and expertly paced, blazing style without the substance of superior films in the same genre, like the last two, Paul Greengrass-directed installments of the Bourne series, or Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton. Tykwer’s movie doesn’t even come close.

Tag: Naomi Watts

“The Impossible” (review)

BFI’s Sight & Sound Really Liked The International?

The International (review)