'Thor': A Vehicle of Low Norsepower
'The Beaver,' a hand-puppet tale that overexplains itself, still fits Gibson like a glove
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| Chris Hemsworth and the mighty hammer of 'Thor.' |
Like Thor's hammer, this ersatz epic bludgeons its victims into submission. What's more, it requires them to stare at the source of their punishment through 3-D glasses.
No need for submitting blindly to that. The 3-D process in question is one of those aftermarket fakes that enhances mainly mid-distance bodies and structural elements within the frame, so you can take the glasses off during most of the close-ups—and much of the movie is shot in pitiless close-ups. I saw it in IMAX, which made everything bigger and louder, and therefore worse, except for some impressive images of Asgard. That's the bronze-tinted celestial realm where the young God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) struggles against evil forces and his own impetuousness. The movie itself struggles against all-encompassing ponderousness. When Thor is exiled to Earth, cosmic bombast gives way to the terrestrial banality of his romance with Natalie Portman's astrophysicist, Jane, who talks earnestly about resolving her particle data and knows about Einstein-Rosen bridges, the fanciful wormholes through which bad guys and good guys alike shuttle between realms like Metro North commuters.
If this is a harbinger of the season to come, may heaven and its suburbs help us. Last week the surprise was "Fast Five," the enjoyable product of a presumably extinct summer franchise. This week the surprise is that Marvel Studios, which did brilliantly with "Iron Man" and not disastrously with its sequel, has brought forth a concatenation of oafish action sequences and narrative fragments in search of a lighter tone.
The actors can't be blamed, considering what they've got to work with. Mr. Hemsworth is a commanding physical presence, and a likeable one whenever he's given a chance. (In certain scenes he seems to be reaching for the state of comedic grace that Amy Adams attained in "Enchanted.") Ms. Portman's character is barely sketched, let alone fully drawn. Her intern/sidekick, played by Kat Dennings, is a cipher. Ditto for the Warriors Three (do you really want to know their names?) and the warrior-maiden Sif (Jaimie Alexander), who, on their sojourns to Earth, look like refugees from "Galaxy Quest." Only Thor's evil brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), gets to declaim any flavorsome lines. They're not really good lines, since they're all about being bad, though they're better than the Olympian drivel that Anthony Hopkins must intone as Asgard's aging King Odin.
All of this leads to the subject of the script, for which three writers get final discredit. (No, that's not a Writers Guild term.) And the subject of the script leads to the luckless director who had to stage it, Kenneth Branagh. Mr. Branagh is an accomplished filmmaker as well as a fine actor; his production of "Hamlet" is a model of what filmed theater can be. But what possessed Marvel to hire him? Did they think the celestial conflict between Asgard and the Frost Giants had a Shakespearean dimension? If so, the studio's decision had a delusional dimension. Mr. Branagh isn't an alchemist who might have turned this dross into gold, and he's certainly not an action director, though how much that matters is open to question, since the action sequences bear all the earmarks of studio-imposed, computer-generated (and fuzzily photographed) frenzy. Bodies hurtle, armor clanks, force fields spark, vortexes swirl, oceans roil, warriors freeze and defrost, and none of it conveys a scintilla of feeling.
'The Beaver'
Bizarre and belabored, yet grimly fascinating, "The Beaver" opens on Mel Gibson looking anguished while a narrator who sounds a bit like Michael Caine says "This is a picture of Walter Black, a hopelessly depressed individual." That doesn't seem promising, but the film, which was directed by Jodie Foster, delivers more than it promises—namely a performance that draws on exceptional skill as well as what one irresistibly takes to be the real-life anguish of a movie star whose own life has come to ruin.
The narrator, as it develops, is Walter himself, and the toothsome rodent of the title is a glove puppet that he wears on his left hand. Through the beaver Walter suddenly, and almost exclusively, begins to express himself—in an English accent—to his worried wife, Meredith (who is played by Ms. Foster), his dismayed teenage son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), and to startled colleagues at work. I'm not telling you anything you can't find in the trailer, and that's part of the problem with Kyle Killen's screenplay. It's a drama that not only depends on a single device—artifice being the writer's glove puppet—but deprives us of any sense of discovery by spelling out the device's meaning in a card that Walter gives to everyone he meets: "The person who handed you this is under the care of a prescription puppet designed to create a psychological distance between himself and the destructive aspects of his personality."
Lest that be insufficiently diagnostic, the point is emphasized in a pair of parallelisms. Porter writes term papers for other students but can't express himself, and Porter's artistic girlfriend, Norah, has given up painting because…did you think I'd spell everything out?
So what's to recommend in "The Beaver"? First but not least, Jennifer Lawrence playing Norah. I wish this hadn't been her first released film since "Winter's Bone"; the role doesn't deserve her. Still, she fills every moment of it—even a manipulative graduation speech—with warmth and graceful intelligence. Then there's the man to the right of the puppet, by turns tortured, morose, animated or charming. When I first met Mel Gibson in Sydney almost 35 years ago, he was a handsome young actor with an open face, a winning smile, an abundant gift and a bright future, although no one could have imagined the extent of his success, or the depth of his fall. The gift remains.
'Passion Play'
Every now and then a movie's awfulness rises to the level of mystery. How did it get produced? Did anyone try to save the filmmaker from himself? Given the gloppily sentimental substance of "Passion Play," didn't anyone find the title ever so slightly grandiose? This film brings us the resistible pairing of Mickey Rourke and Megan Fox. He's Nate, a battered and lugubrious trumpet player who's down on his luck. She's Lily, an angel with wings—very nice wings with fluffy feathers—who works as a side-show freak in a seedy carnival. "Do you wanna see my wings?" Lily asks in a girlish voice. "If you wanna see them just ask me." Anyone with any sense would wanna see them, so it's easy to understand Nate's pleasure when she unfurls them, and hard to understand the displeasure of a plastic surgeon when Nate nixes the idea of clipping them. "Amazing as she is," the surgeon says tartly, "it's not normal."
No, it's not, but then neither is a movie so consistently drained of energy that its dialogue is delivered at a steady-state mumble. (The only relief is provided by Christopher Doyle's cinematography, which fills the turgid stretches with striking images.) This is the directorial debut of Mitch Glazer, who worked from his own screenplay. Back in 1988 he and Michael O'Donoghue wrote "Scrooged," the wonderfully funny update of "A Christmas Carol" that starred Bill Murray. This helps to explain Mr. Murray's presence in "Passion Play," where he, too, mumbles his way through a mournful performance as Lily's tormentor, a gangster named Happy Shannon. As for Ms. Fox, she may have seen the movie as a chance to spread her wings in the dramatic realm, but it's a no-fly zone for all concerned.
DVD FOCUS
'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers' (2002)
Instead of the low-rent adventures of "Thor," treat yourself to Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings." Any one of the three films will do, but this wondrous, thunderous spectacle is my favorite. The forces of evil are in the ascendancy during most of the three-hour running time, but you can bet the shire on the forces of good—and not just J.R.R. Tolkien's desperate alliance of Hobbits, humans and elves. An army of filmmakers led by Mr. Jackson has made the trilogy's central section a ringing testament to the power of movies.
'Magic' (1978)
The notion of a hero possessed by a puppet, or a dummy, has long been a horror mainstay in the movies and on TV. I wouldn't be surprised if Kyle Killen had seen "Dead of Night" before writing "The Beaver." The 1945 English film stars Michael Redgrave as a schizophrenic ventriloquist tormented by his dummy, but it's unavailable on American home video. A good and creepy alternative is "Magic," with the pre-Hannibal Lecter Anthony Hopkins as a ventriloquist whose dummy has a vicious mind of its own. Richard Attenborough directed from a novel by William Goldman.
'Brewster McCloud' (1970)
Bud Cort, who has a small role in "Passion Play," plays the title role in Robert Altman's eccentric—and by now almost unknown—fable about a loner who lives deep below the Houston Astrodome and dreams of flying inside it with a pair of strapped-on wings. Not even the most ardent fans of this seminal American filmmaker—and I count myself among them—would represent "Brewster McCloud" as a successful film, but it's certainly an interesting one. Sally Kellerman is a woman of mystery who may be, yes, Brewster's guardian angel.
—Joe Morgenstern
Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com
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