Tim Blake Nelson – Memphis Flyer

When I am called upon to give lectures on screenwriting, one of the things I like to talk about is the Giant Robot Problem. It goes something like this: From Voltron to Optimus Prime to the Big O, everybody loves giant robots — especially the Japanese. What could be cooler than strapping into a 30-story, humanoid mecha and crushing your enemies beneath your giant metal boots? But if giant robots are so cool, why haven’t we built one yet? After all, we can put a man on the moon and take selfies with our lunch — why not Voltron?

The answer is, as cool as they look, giant robots aren’t really good for much. Anything a giant robot can do, you can use a specialized tool to do better. Need an invulnerable war machine? We have those. They’re called tanks. Want to dig a giant hole in the ground? You can either spend billions building a giant robot and give it a giant shovel, or you can just rent a commercial earth mover. Basically, the only things giant robots are good for are fighting giant monsters or other giant robots, and since neither one of those actually exists, we don’t build giant robots. This is why long-running anime series starring giant robots always evolve into soap operas about the people who drive the giant robots, proving that character development is always the most important element.

Director Nacho Vigalondo’s new film Colossal adds new dimensions to the eternal dance between giant monster and giant robot, while reinforcing the principle that character development is everything. Like any great kaiju movie, it begins in an Asian megalopolis — in this case, Seoul — with an innocent child witnessing the arrival of a giant monster. The dark, scaly, hundred-meter-tall creature materializes in a cloud of lightning and mystery, only to vanish again just as quickly.

Fast forward to 25 years later, and we meet Gloria (Anne Hathaway), a magazine writer in New York living with her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens). At least, Gloria used to be a magazine writer. She got laid off a year ago, and now she mostly just parties hard with her semi-glamorous publishing friends while mooching off of the dregs of Tim’s largesse. But Tim’s done watching her drink herself into an early grave, and he gives her the boot from his swank Manhattan apartment.

Thus, Gloria is faced with the ultimate nightmare of every young go-getter who goes to the Big Apple to get her fame and fortune: She has to move back home to the small town where she came from. Living alone in the vacant house where she grew up, she vows to quit drinking and get her life back on track. But her plan, and her sobriety, is instantly undermined in a chance meeting with Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), an old friend from elementary school who, wouldn’t you know it, runs the neighborhood watering hole. Soon, she’s working night shifts in the bar and staying after close to pound beers with Oscar, local loudmouth Garth (Tim Blake Nelson), and the quiet-but-hunky handyman Joel (Austin Stowell).

Around the same time, the mysterious monster reappears in Seoul. But this time, it’s back for all to see, trashing neighborhoods and killing hundreds of hapless Koreans as it rampages through the city. Only it’s not really rampaging so much as wandering aimlessly, seemingly distracted by invisible specters only it can see. The world pays rapt attention to the improbable drama, but Gloria notices something strange about the monster’s behavior. It seems to have the same tics she does, such as nervously scratching at the top of its head, and its uncoordinated ramblings look a lot like her movements when she’s stumbling home drunk every morning. Could she somehow be unwittingly controlling the monster? Meanwhile, her relationship with her childhood friend Oscar is taking an unhealthy, controlling turn — just as the giant monster of Seoul is joined by an equally mysterious giant robot.

Colossal‘s gimmick is gigantic, but the meat of this fascinating little picture is the interactions of a pair of ordinary, down-on-their-luck people just trying to create lives that make sense. Like Being John Malkovich, Colossal uses a fantastical premise to explore real human emotions and psychology. Hathaway and Sudeikis are both brilliant in this psychologically complex examination of how one person’s inner conflicts can ripple outward and affect people who have little to do with the original issues, even if, in this case, those people are being crushed underfoot half a world away.

The American frontier may have closed 130-odd years ago, but in the American mind — especially when it starts daydreaming about the olden days — it remains as open as ever. That’s one reason why, decades after their alleged peak, good Westerns still mosey into theaters every now and then, delighting fans of wide-open spaces, improvised morality, and unpainted wooden outbuildings. The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones’ second film as actor/co-writer/director, is an ornery yet ingratiating straggler in this vein. It’s also a larger, funnier, and altogether sadder affair than his great 2005 debut The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada. There are as many subtle emotional tones at work in a given scene as there are subtle colors visible in its sunrises and sunsets.

Hilary Swank, whose hard, androgynous beauty distinguishes her from safer and more glamorous starlets, plays Mary Bee Cuddy, a pioneer woman from New York whose independence and willpower prevent her from forging the domestic partnership she craves. She remains single at age 31, and in spite of her hard-earned prosperity, nobody in town wants to marry her. Out of either kindness or frustration or some exalted sense of duty, Mary Bee agrees to drive three battered and broken frontier wives from the Nebraska territory where she lives back to Iowa, where they will be packed up and sent back east to recover.

Early in her journey, Mary Bee rescues George Briggs (Jones), a claim-jumping rascal whose personal honor and a $300 payday at the end of the line are the only things that keep him by her side during their brutal, six-week trek. So, off into the wilderness they ride.

The film’s psychic and thematic itinerary is tough to predict. It doesn’t go where you think it might, with the quiet battle between Mary Bee (a reluctantly independent woman who wants to be in a partnership) and Briggs (a reluctant partner who wants to be independent) the most obvious example.

There aren’t many physical confrontations, and what few there are aren’t fair.

The dialogue is rich, direct, and funky (“This is fine cheese, Bob. So why not marry?”). And cameos from reliable miniaturists like Tim Blake Nelson, Meryl Streep and James Spader hearken back to the glory years of character actors compact and skillful enough to spike a film with their own brand of grace or ugliness.

There are audible echoes of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian throughout, from the Indians attired in the clothing of settlers they’ve killed to the strange dance that closes the film, a spasm of drunken movement that ultimately defines Jones’ Briggs as both a vagrant and a gatekeeper.

The Homesman has been praised elsewhere as a feminist Western, but it isn’t, at least not in the long run. It’s something more valuable — a picture of a lost world whose peculiarities still matter. The (mid-)West here is an environment with its own meager pleasures and its own invisible traps. The three crazy women in Mary Bee’s wagon seem to indicate that the biggest enemy is not varmints but a crippling sense of isolation that forces people to stand naked in harsh and howling winds.