Tag: Casey Affleck

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A Ghost Story

Telling a horror story from the point of view of the monster is a time honored method that has produced good results. Think of the endless slate of vampire stories we’ve seen that used this trick, beginning with Ann Rice’s Interview With The Vampire and including the much lamented Twilight saga. Stop motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen once said that his films were “shrines to the monster”. The best movie monsters, like King Kong or The Creature From The Black Lagoon, aren’t evil, per se, but innocent, untamed, and backed into a corner.

David Lowery’s new film, A Ghost Story, makes the monster the protagonist. The big question it puts forward is, what does a haunted house look like to a ghost doing the haunting? Lowery’s answer is: It looks pretty darn sad.

It’s not fair to Lowery or the film to reduce it to the terms of genre, which it resembles only superficially. But it does serve to highlight the depth of Lowery’s achievement. A Ghost Story is not a Paranormal Activity parade of jump scares and spooky sound effects. It is, instead, a meditation on deep time, on the impermanence of all things that seem permanent, and the recurring cycles of human experience that ultimately connect us all.

Our two nameless protagonists are Casey Affleck, a musician struggling to write the perfect song, and Rooney Mara as his wife, a young professional paying the couple’s bills. Like any couple, they have their ups and downs, but they seem genuinely happy with each other. Rooney wants to move out of their cozy but aging suburban home for something nicer, but Casey wants to stay. He feels a sentimental attachment to the old place where they had so many great memories. But before their conflict can be resolved, Casey dies suddenly, leaving Rooney on her own.

To his presumed shock, Casey comes back as a ghost. And we’re not talking about a CGI-heavy Pirates of the Caribbean ghost. Affleck spends the bulk of the movie under a long sheet with eyes holes cut out of it. That’s the kind of conceit that could either instantly crash and burn or elevate the project. In this case, it is the latter.

Casey’s ghost is trapped in the house he didn’t want to leave. He watches his wife intently until she moves on. Then, he watches the long, long years roll by as new families move in, live their lives, and leave.
Stuck under the sheet, Affleck becomes a figure model, little more than a prop for the rest of the film to revolve around. But it’s brilliant and poignant. Mara does most of the dramatic heavy lifting, including a virtuosic performance in an excruciating, long scene in the kitchen that has been dividing critics since A Ghost Story’s Sundance debut. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo proves a perfect fit for Lowery’s lyrical vision. Emotionally, A Ghost Story is a raw and unguarded. It’s only 92 minutes long, but it’s an extremely intense viewing experience that will stick with you (dare I say, haunt you?) long after the sheet drops.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Finest Hours

They say on the internet that excessive use of sports metaphors is the sign of a weak critic. That’s why the best thing about The Finest Hours is that it allows me to unleash a torrent of nautical metaphors while retaining my final sliver of self-respect. Fortunately for everyone, sailors have many words for failure.

The Finest Hours is becalmed from the beginning, when we see Coast Guard sailor Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) meeting cute with Cape Cod hottie Miriam Pentinen (Holliday Grainger), 1952-style. The movie wants you to believe they’re instantly falling in love, but the two actors mix like oil and water, so the clumsy sequence is just the first of many slow boats to China director Craig Gillespie books us on.

Chris Pine in The Finest Hours

Storm clouds, both real and metaphorical, start to gather about the time Miriam breaches Eisenhower-era patriarchal protocol by asking Bernie to marry her at an especially boring dance. He feeds her a line about asking permission from his commanding officer before a lucky nor’easter blows up and throws our young hero and his crew of misfits into action on the high seas.

A slow boat to boredom

The Finest Hours is based on a true story about the rescue of the crew of the SS Pendleton, an oil tanker that broke apart and sank off the coast of Massachusetts during a powerful storm. In the long history of movies about military heroes, very few, if any, concern the Coast Guard. So it’s kind of a shame that the film adaptation of the service’s bravest exploit is so dreadfully boring and uninspired.

The film’s most compelling moments come onboard the Pendleton, a rusting hulk of a tanker run into disaster by an unseen captain who goes down with the first half of his ship. The group of scalawags trapped in the stern of the broken ship find their reticent leader in engine man Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck), whose ingenuity and resolve in keeping half a ship afloat makes him a more compelling character than our alleged hero Webber. Affleck’s performance is this imperfect storm’s sole ray of light, but Pine is the one with the functioning boat, so he gets top billing. The young, untested Bernie’s mad fight through the storm should be the story’s dramatic heart, but it turns into a repetitive slog through the dark waves. There are a few good shots, such as when the tiny boat with the catchy name CG-36500 plunges underwater through giant, pounding waves, but director Gillespie spoils the fun by recycling them too often. For an $80 million Disney production, The Finest Hours‘ effects look singularly unconvincing. The men of the CG-36500 are clearly on a soundstage getting buckets of water thrown on them. Despite the hurricane force winds blowing blinding snow and freezing spray in their faces, they never look cold. Nor do they take common-sense precautions like wearing goggles, or, in Pine’s case, a hat. The one thing they do remember to bring along are clichés, so you won’t be at all surprised when Pine proclaims “Not on my watch!”

Things are bad out on the ocean, but they’re worse on the shore, where Grainger gives the worst performance of the young year. Her character Miriam is a poorly written, off-the-shelf “strong woman,” but Grainger walks her off the plank into harpy territory. Her lame subplot, which involves forgetting her coat and getting stuck in a snowbank, hits low tide when a single tear rolls down her face as she stares, bored, off into the middle distance. For that fleeting moment, it seems that she and the audience are in the same boat.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Man Who Shot Brad Pitt

When Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) first appears onscreen in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he looks the part of the cold-blooded killer. With his stovepipe hat, silent-film villain’s whey-faced complexion, and seamlessly mortared, predatory row of top teeth, Ford evokes the angel of death so strongly that you half-expect the film to end before anyone has finished a plate of beans or saddled a horse. But soon it’s apparent that Ford would have trouble killing a fly; he’s actually the meek, overenthusiastic specter of celebrity worship — just a drooling, dream-addled fan of the outlaw Jesse James (Brad Pitt) who has come not to bury the gunslinger but to join him in one last midnight ride.

Eventually, Ford joins the James gang, and after following James around much of Missouri, he ultimately fulfills the duty implicit in the film’s title. To his credit, though, writer/director Andrew Dominik takes his slow, sweet time getting there, and that’s one of his film’s many triumphs. The Assassination of Jesse James is both a meditative, haunting Western and a smashing example of inspired genre work.

Dominik’s wordy screenplay, which achieves a kind of mock-Cormac McCarthy eloquence, enhances the humdrum story’s pulpy, mythical qualities. Dick Liddle (a superb Paul Schneider), one of James’ hoodlums, avers that “You can hide things in vocabulary,” and unusual words such as “vouchsafe,” “palaver,” “auguries,” and “personage” tumble from Hugh Ross’ narration. This imaginative diction spills over into the characters too. When Liddle is shot in the leg, he describes his wound to Ford as “full of torment, Bob. Thanks for askin’.”

This ornate vocabulary does indeed hide the basic emotion that unifies all these characters: fear. Worn to the stumps by bad weather and paranoia, these men feel exposed everywhere. As Pitt plays him, Jesse James is little different from his bumbling cohorts. He’s scared and hunted. However, he’s a much more experienced and merciless killer and that is a significant asset.

Jesse James‘ photography is also a significant asset for the film. Camera man Roger Deakins, who shot several of the Coen Brothers’ films, achieves some magnificent pictorial effects by shooting many scenes with the most meager light sources — lanterns, candles, sunlight, stars, reflected snow. In one ironic lighting decision, a single outhouse candle dwindles to blackness as Liddle prepares to dip his wick in a willing adulteress (Kailin See).

The last 20 minutes of the film explore the much larger irony of Ford’s own fate after he shoots James in the back (an act played out in the film like a staged ritual even when it happens the first time.) As the years go by, Jesse James, bandit and murderer, is fondly recalled as an American hero, while Ford grows more reclusive and insecure as his hate mail piles up. Ford’s cruel destiny is thus to live out a genre axiom. The success of the film is the failure of Ford’s own life: the how is much more important than the what.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Opening Friday, October 26th

Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Affleck rebounds with genre flick that’s more than a mystery.

A butt of cinematic jokes because of his roles in Michael Bay flicks and his disastrous on-and-off-screen fling with Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck has always seemed smarter as himself than in movies. (Few recent celebrities have seemed brighter or more decent during election season.) It’s refreshing then — and not really surprising — that Affleck’s best film work since his affable, believable turn in Chasing Amy comes in this directorial debut.

Affleck and screenwriting partner Aaron Stockard adapt Boston crime-fiction writer Dennis Lehane’s finest detective-series title in Gone Baby Gone, the story of a young couple hired as private investigators to assist the police in the search for an abducted 4-year-old girl.

Affleck took a big risk in the central casting of his younger brother, Casey, as private investigator Patrick Kenzie, a hardened Boston product able to get information from people who won’t talk to the police. The younger Affleck looks too callow for the part, something the script acknowledges by stating the character’s age of 31 and allowing that Casey Affleck looks younger.

But the director’s younger brother pans out, making the character believable while shrewdly underplaying around a strong, more ferocious supporting cast, led by Ed Harris as a cop also looking for the girl and Amy Ryan (Beadie Russell on HBO’s The Wire) as the missing child’s negligent mother.

It helps, also, that Affleck — a Boston native — does right by the movie’s low-rent Beantown setting and characters. The Dorchester denizens in Gone Baby Gone feel less like a romanticized working class than the round-the-way Bostonians of, say, Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, another Lehane adaptation.

Gone Baby Gone seems extremely faithful to Lehane’s novel (from what I remember — it’s been a few years since I read it), so much so that cramming the book’s plot contortions into an under-two-hour movie makes the big reveal at the end feel even more contrived. That there’s a limit to the damage done by this is because Gone Baby Gone, much like the novel, rises above its genre. It’s true concern lies beyond the plot mechanics of a mystery or police procedural. It’s a story about moral ambiguity amid societal decay and about the utter sadness that inflicts the lives of too many kids.

Affleck never loses sight of this, with a series of small touchstones — the deftly heartbreaking cut to the girl’s aunt holding a picture of the missing child; the film’s title uttered by a bit character; Kenzie’s work and life partner Angie (Michelle Monaghan) pleading to decline the case because she doesn’t want to be the one to find a baby in a dumpster; a deflating, perfectly framed final shot — making more of an impact than the twisty storyline that would be the emphasis of a lesser film. Gone Baby Gone is a mystery in which solving the case is easier than deciding what actions to take with the information.

Gone Baby Gone

Opening Friday, October 19th

Multiple locations