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Reviews - Moon & Whatever Works
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It is an invigorating feeling to watch a first time director make bold decisions and come into his own in front of your eyes. Duncan Jones does just that with his debut feature Moon, a remarkable, confident sci-fi story that is sure to be the start of a strong career.
Sam Rockwell stars as Sam Bell, basically a cross between astronaut and construction worker. He is near the close of a three year long job on Earth’s little neighbor, mining for Helium 3, one of the world’s most wanted energy sources. He does all this alone. His communication is limited to brief video chats with his wife and baby, plus the occasional conversation with home base computer GERTY, voiced with mock sincerity by Kevin Spacey. When not working, Sam builds models, watches old television series, runs on a treadmill and grows a mighty beard. He’s a blue-collar man in the vein of the doomed travelers in the original Alien. All is copacetic. Sam is a few days from finally heading back to his family when an accident occurs while mining, leading to a series of twists and turns that the trailer for Moon gives away but will not be revealed here.
Jones’ film, which he cowrote with Nathan Parker, is a claustrophobic, dense one. Shades of Solaris, Silent Running and 2001: A Space Odyssey all linger but are not merely copied and pasted. Jones takes a minimalist approach, spending the entire picture with Sam’s lonely, detached spaceman, sucking one into the madness. The boredom and danger of his life is ever present. Isolation isn’t the only idea at play. Who is god and how we define ourselves are both discussed with precision, aided of course by Rockwell’s fantastic performance, amongst the best of 2009.
Rockwell has often played eccentrics, from the absurd (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) to the scary (Snow Angels). His Sam is carved from the same material, which is not to say this is a repeat performance, merely that Rockwell’s knack for portraying the unhinged is continued and expanded in Moon. He is a man questioning his mortality and humanity. Rockwell’s mind is visibly simmering, the weight of his daily routine and the picture’s latter surprise racks his thoughts and movements. Sam’s fear and confusion unravels into sweaty shouts and manic energy. It is genuinely a solo performance and it takes an actor of significant talent to keep an audience engaged without help, no matter who is behind the camera.
Enhancing the picture is the production design, astonishingly impressive given its miniscule $5 million budget, pennies for a film of this scale. The world Jones crafts is a mundane, gray prison. Amplifying matters is Clint Mansell’s delicate, vertigo inducing score. A soft, small array of instruments sucking in the surroundings without overemphasizing the drama.
Moon opens exclusively at Landmark’s Metro today.
Woody Allen and Larry David are certainly not for everyone and their appeal repels you, you’re worst nightmare has come true for two of comedic histories greatest complainers have combined their talent for Allen’s 40th feature, Whatever Works.
David is Boris Yellnikoff, a grumpy, grouchy, nearly Nobel Prize winning physicist, divorced and relatively content to spend his remaining days deriding humanity and everyday life to his buddies around the corner. To Boris, people are a “failed species” full of nitwits, idiots and nearly every variation on the insult. Coming home one evening, Boris meets Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) on his door step, a Southern Belle homeless in New York, who our hapless leading man begrudgingly takes in. Boris can’t really stand Melodie but her warmth and optimism slowly eats away at him, while equally his hatred of society does the same to her. Over time, the two begin a bizarre relationship, Melodie’s mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) and father John (Ed Begley Jr.) eventually show up and Boris’s once simple routine grows complicated.
It is hard to judge Allen’s work without comparing it to his other works. After all, the man did have nearly two decades of making fantastic films on a yearly basis. Now, though the output is the same, the quality varies. Allen isn’t pushing himself here, using a script he originally wrote in the 1970s for Zero Mostel, so the freshness of Vicki Cristina Bacelona or Match Point isn’t anywhere to found. Whatever Works is much more akin to 2006’s Scoop, a straightforward comedy with inklings of other ideas but more or less a laugher. The laughs are readily apparent in the picture’s first half, with David bringing his bewildered, berating style of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to Boris. He dumps chess pieces onto the heads of his young students, questions the whereabouts of a husband allegedly on a business trip. Each annoyance he finds, Boris rips into with a mash-up of Allen’s sharp wit and David’s unrestrained ego.
Too bad in the latter half of the film David all but disappears. Evan Rachel Wood’s Melodie becomes the prominent figure and it is a thinly drawn, dull one. Allen’s perspective of the American south is simple, tedious and, perhaps the worst offense of all for this type of movie, just not particularly funny. Everyone from under the Mason-Dixon Line is a god-fearing, uneducated cretin, easily wowed by the big city’s draw, eventually embracing its Bohemian virtues. Even the marvelous Patricia Clarkson, who is traditionally able to not only rescue bad parts but elevate them to a splendid level, is lackluster. Little in the latter acts of Whatever Works is intriguing, not helped by Wood’s overly goofy, ditzy performance.
If you’re a Larry David fan and you haven’t seen much of Allen’s work, go rent the superior Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters, two classics featuring the filmmaker’s knack for neurotics. If you’re an Allen fan and haven’t seen much of David’s work, que upon some “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” perhaps the third season where Larry’s failed attempts at opening a restaurant carry many of the same confusion’s Woody’s leads usually meet. If you’re a fan of both and have seen all of these, Whatever Works will be the equivalent of going out for a meal where you know the entree will be delicious but its sides stale, seeping into the good stuff.
Whatever Works opens at Landmark’s Seven Gables, the Regal Meridian 16 & The Historic Orchard Theater today.
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