Tag Archives: Gore Verbinski

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Cure for Insomnia

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A Cure for Wellness

by Hope Madden

Not too far into The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter suggests that Buffalo Bill’s behavior seems “desperately random.”

Director Gore Verbinski’s latest, A Cure for Wellness, feels desperately creepy – and far too random.

His film is a little bit Kubrick, a little more Cronenberg, a touch Scorsese and an awful lot Burton. Maybe that’s why it’s so long – it takes Verbinski a while to squeeze all those other people’s vision into his movie.

What’s it about? How avaricious humanity’s lost its way, how an ambitious corporate cog travels to a spa in the Swiss alps to retrieve his boss, and eels.

All of it amounts to a bunch of nothing, but man, the package is great.

Dane DeHaan plays Lockhart, relentless executive headed for the top. When the firm sends him to a “wellness center” in hopes of retrieving a missing CEO, Lockhart sees his chance for the big time. But, like Scorsese’s Shutter Island, things are not as they seem.

Verbinski hasn’t been as visually unleashed in years, and his picture is very pretty, very creepy and endlessly stylized.

Beneath that distracting layer of polish is a hodgepodge – a mainly incoherent assortment of unrelated ideas. A Cure for Wellness slides images at you, each of them meant to conjure a particular feeling, but it never lays out any cohesive narrative to bring them together.

And, my God it’s so long.

On the surface is a familiar story of a man who is not a patient at a sanitarium becoming a patient against his will. And then, of course, is the mystery he must solve concerning his CEO – unless he’s going mad in the process? Mwa ha ha ha ha….

Plus some confluence of vaguely Nazi imagery (this is the whitest film you will ever see), a bit of a creature feature, odds and ends that feel like folklore horror, flashbacks and/or dream sequences, and a dance scene that could be straight out of Harry Potter. (The fact that Lucius Malfoy – Jason Isaacs – plays the villain doesn’t hinder that notion.)

Random creepy images grow tiresome after 80 or so minutes. Unmercifully, A Cure for Wellness has another sixty minutes to go, without a coherent thread or satisfying payoff. Or any payoff, really.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

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Depp and Hammer at Home on the Range

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The Lone Ranger

by Hope Madden

Back in 1995, I watched Johnny Depp in a Western of sorts that paired a supposedly dead white man with an outcast Indian on a journey through the wild west. There were trains and bad men. Iggy Pop co-starred. I’m not sure what else a person could want in a film.

This was Jim Jarmusch’s wondrous Dead Man, and I was reminded of the film repeatedly as I watched its super-mainstream Disney counterpart The Lone Ranger. In case you’ve missed the typhoon of advertising, Depp plays Tonto to Armie Hammer’s masked do-gooder.

Iggy Pop is nowhere to be seen. Pity.

The  handsome pair (although one is caked in mud the entire running time – if it’s not giant teeth or Eddie Munster make up it’s mud with this one) are flung together quite against either’s will, but a shared desire to bring down Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) binds them.

This is the Lone Ranger’s origin story, told mostly for laughs, but director Gore Verbinski and his team of writers hope to stir a bit of historical context into the mix.

If you’re going to resurrect the culturally insensitive figure of Tonto for a modern film, it’ll be important to address the racism of the time head on. But, if you’re bringing the Lone Ranger back to life, clip-clopping action and fun are requirements. How to balance?

Well, for the fun and excitement, Verbinski reteams with the writers of his other Depp adventures, the Pirates of the Carribbean franchise (Ted Elliott and Terry Rosio). Indeed, The Lone Ranger has far too much in common with Verbinski’s Pirates series – down to one sparsely blond outlaw sporting a parasol.

For the serious underpinnings of genocide –  a tough topic for a family adventure film – Verbinski nabbed Justin Haythe, who’s penned two pretentious dramas (The Clearing, Revolutionary Road) and a Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson film (Snitch).

The socio-political context is mishandled, is what I’m saying, and the drama feels wildly out of place in a film that puts a hat-wearing horse on a tree limb.

The tonal mishmash hampers everything about the film. In fact, though he tried for a full 2 ½ hours (good lord, Verbinski, give it a break!), the director simply cannot find an acceptable tone. Depp and Hammer generate an immediately likeable odd couple chemistry, buoyed immeasurably by Fichtner’s gleefully unseemly bad guy, but the movie remains a slapped together mess.

Plus, no Iggy Pop.

Verdict-2-5-Stars