Tag Archives: Robin Wright

Anywhere But

Here

by Hope Madden

At what point did Robert Zemeckis stop making movies and start executing gimmicks? I suppose all of his films have begun with a gimmick—as so many movies must. What if a kid goes back in time and accidentally keeps his parents from meeting? But at some point, the gimmick—often mistaken for artistic experimentation—overtook the story. Was it Polar Express? Was that the tipping point?

Here sees Zemeckis pointing his unmoving camera toward one single spot for one hour and 44 minutes.

That sounds like a stage play, doesn’t it? It’s actually Zemeckis and Eric Roth’s adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel. Zemeckis breathes some cinema into the static experience with artful cutaways to overlap time with place and spin the story of thousands of years of history taking place in this one single spot.

The bulk of that time is spent in a living room, camera pointed toward the picture window out of which we see the house that once belonged to Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son, of all things.

Though we travel back and forth through time, we sit mainly with one family. Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly) buy the place with what Al received from the GI Bill after his stint in WWII. One moment they’re perching their baby Ricky for a Christmas photo, the next it’s Ricky and his baby sister by the tree, then a baby brother, and so time flies until finally Ricky brings home his high school sweetheart, Margaret.

High school Ricky and Margaret are played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright (for all those who pined for a Forrest/Jenny reunion). They do not look like high school kids, and their voices are even less convincing.

As Zemeckis takes us forward and back through time, the fact that both leads always look like middle aged people does cause some confusion. But the two veteran actors are reliably great, as is Reilly and sometimes Bettany.

The rest of the ensemble doesn’t fare as well, often because the dialogue is so forced and stilted. Most scenes do little more than ensure that we recognize the important historical moments we’re witnessing: Covid lockdown, the Revolutionary War, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, the comet that killed the dinosaurs (I swear to God). It’s like Zemeckis took the worst part of Forrest Gump and shoehorned it into this movie.

Like nearly everything the filmmaker has made in the last two decades (at least), Here feels hollow and slight, an experiment in technological execution rather than artistic experimentation.

Forest for the Trees

Land

by George Wolf

After directing one short film and ten episodes of her House of Cards TV series, Robin Wright makes an assured feature debut with Land, mining one shattered life for graceful insight into healing.

Wright also delivers a touching and understated performance as Edee, a woman who clings to grief as her closest connection to the husband and child she has lost, and who can no longer bear any expectations that she will “get better.”

Moving alone to a remote cabin in the Wyoming wilderness, Edee ignores advice to at least keep a vehicle at her disposal and settles in, wanting nothing else to do with anything or anyone.

No surprise, but Wyoming winters are harsh for the inexperienced. Eventually, it is only the aid of a passing hunter named Miguel (Demián Bichir, also terrific) that saves Edee’s life.

Miguel is carrying emotional scars as well, and the two strike a deal. He will teach her the survival skills she needs, and when the lessons are done, she will never see him again.

The screenplay from Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam may not blaze any thematic trails, but it does resist following the roads most expected. Of course Edee begins to feel a human connection again, but this point isn’t exploited for a cheap and easy narrative out.

The performances from Wright and Bichir make you care about pain even when you haven’t glimpsed it, giving director Wright a solid emotional base to lean on while deftly unveiling the different lives Edee and Miguel used to lead.

Edee’s memories of her family are brought to the screen with a tenderness from Wright that is both touching and well-played. Woven through the beautifully framed and intimidating Wyoming landscapes are wonderful sketches of visual storytelling.

Yes, we’ve heard Land‘s lessons before, but Wright’s feature debut behind the camera impresses through her fine instincts for subtle over showy, paring those lessons down to an essence as timeless as the majestic skyline.

Big, Messy Ideas

 

The Congress

by George Wolf

 

Tired of the same old girl meets boy stories? How about girl meets a digital version of herself, loses many years in a cryogenic state, and then travels between realities in an effort to reconnect with her son?

Welcome to The Congress, a flawed but often fascinating work inspired by the 1971 novel The Futurological Congress, Stanislaw Lem’s darkly comic allegory of life under communist rule.

Writer/director Ari Folman (the Oscar-nominated Waltz with Bashir) sets his sights on the Hollywood regime, where veteran actress Robin Wright, playing a fictionalized version of herself, has reached a critical point in her career.

She’s years removed from being America’s sweetheart, she’s been branded as “difficult,” and she’s on the wrong side of forty. But now, there’s a curious career opportunity…

After much soul-searching and a big paycheck, she agrees to let the film studio create a digital copy of herself. Once completed, the new Robin will have a busy career doing, in the words of the studio boss (Danny Huston), “all the things your Robin Wright won’t do” while the old Robin never acts again.

The ironic part is that the real Robin’s acting has never been better, and her touching performance anchors the film even when it threatens to skid completely off the rails.

Folman has big, ambitious, eccentric ideas, but things get a bit messy once the film makes the shift to animation. Unlike Bashir, where clashing styles of animation only accentuated the different memories of war, the animated portion of The Congress sometimes struggles to find a tone worthy of the strong live action opening.

It becomes a mix of Heavy Metal, Pink Floyd The Wall and Cool World, leaving some interesting issues hanging as dots that are never fully connected. Folman -who has said he got his first inspiration for the project in film school-seems so invested in the overall concept that he can’t resist the urge to explore every idea, no matter how tenuous.

Good thing, then, that Folman’s explorations are more interesting than most, leaving The Congress as a visionary, frustrating, extraordinary head trip.

 

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