Tag Archives: Sienna Miller

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Lost In Love

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Wander Darkly

by George Wolf

At this point, there’s nothing surprising about a terrific performance from Sienna Miller. The really curious thing is why she still seems to fly so far under the radar.

Maybe it’s the knack she has for adopting unrecognizable looks and unique personalities from role to role, making it harder to tie her to an easily recalled resume. Whatever the cause, the effect Miller has on Wander Darkly is seismic, with an award-worthy turn that gives the film much of its emotional pull.

Miller is Adrienne, a new mom who’s starting to question her relationship with Matteo (Diego Luna, also stellar). Despite a child and a new mortgage, the couple hasn’t married, and as a rare date night out turns disappointing, they’re involved in a nasty car accident.

Dazed and disoriented, Adrienne believes she has died. While her parents and friends whisper “psychiatry,” Matteo tries to convince Adrienne that she is indeed still alive and recovering in the real, physical world.

Writer/director Tara Miele’s narrative is ambitious, surreal, touching and at times even terrifying, but it’s ultimately the sheer talents of Miller and Luna that keep the film from falling prey to gimmickry.

We re-live the couple’s journey together as they do, visually drifting through transfixing waves of history where both Adrienne and Matteo pepper the flashbacks with hindsight benefitting from their current perspectives.

As they make new admissions and wonder about who may be guilty of misremembering, the couple is reminded of why they first committed to each other, even as they search their respective memories for the exact moment it started to go wrong.

Whether or not you sniff out what Miele has in mind, where the film lands doesn’t quite deliver on its promise of profundity. But the cascade of emotion required to manifest this trauma is beautifully realized by Miller, and her chemistry with Luna makes it inviting to become invested.

You care about these characters, and that opens the door to care about Wander Darkly.

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Blue Wave

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21 Bridges

by George Wolf

Okay, huddle up.

Sometimes, your team comes in the underdog. They run the same old plays we’ve seen so many times, it’s not hard to figure out the game plan. But stack that team with enough talent, and it just might succeed anyway.

Hut 21, hut 21…Bridges!

That’s a cliched analogy, perfect for a cliched film. 21 Bridges lives in a familiar world of drug deals gone bad, hero cops who might be crooked, damaged cops who might be heroes, ticking clocks and killers on the run.

Chadwick Boseman stars as Andre Davis, a NYC detective with “cop in his DNA” since his father was gunned down on duty years ago. Andre has a reputation for being quick with the trigger, which is why Captain McKenna (J.K. Simmons) is happy to see him at a bloody Brooklyn crime scene.

Eight of McKenna’s cops are dead, after surprising two drug runners (Stephan James, Taylor Kitsch) during a botched cocaine robbery. McKenna is confident Andre will enforce their right to remain dead, but the Mayor’s (“he eats pizza with a fork!” – nice) flunkies make it clear hizzoner wants the perps alive for a campaign-friendly show trial.

But first, they have to find the two cop killers. Forced to accept help from narcotics officer Frankie (“fight me or use me”) Burns (Sienna Miller), Andre is granted a five hour window to shut down every possible avenue out of Manhattan, flood the island with blue, and get his men.

Director Brian Kirk, a TV vet helming his second feature, has clearly seen a crime thriller or two. The aerial shots of the city and shaky cam pursuits are standard moves, but Kirk manages to add his own layers of grit and intensity without ever letting the pace bog down.

One half of the writing team, Matthew Michael Carnahan, has some impressive credits, and about half the time, it shows. But even when the dialogue reeks of recycled cop drama, the talent of this cast manages to put a shine on it.

Simmons adds his usual mastery to a role that could have easily been one-note, and Miller again proves how good she is at morphing into completely different looks and personalities.

But this is Boseman’s film to carry, a nice break from his run of biopics and superheroics. The film’s success at exploring the paradoxes of a life in law enforcement is due mainly to Boseman. He finds a mix of outrage and conscience for Andre that feels true, often when the story around him doesn’t quite keep up.

There’s not much freshness to be found in 21 Bridges, just the visceral satisfaction and forgettable fun of talent winning out.

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Take Me Out to the Spy Game

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The Catcher Was a Spy

by George Wolf

The Catcher Was a Spy features a surprisingly impressive lead performance from Paul Rudd. It’s not his talent that surprises, but rather the role as enigmatic baseball player turned wartime spy.

This isn’t what we’ve come to expect from the always welcome Rudd, which makes him that much more appealing for branching out.

Dammit, Rudd, you likable rogue!

He stars as true life legend Moe Berg, who spent fifteen years as a Major Leaguer in the years before WWII. Though never a superstar, he was a well-respected and durable catcher with many other talents that proved useful.

A Princeton grad with multiple degrees, Berg spoke several languages and was fiercely private. With his playing career over and a war raging, Berg’s intellect, discretion and communication skills were valued at the O.S.S., where he was trained as a spy and tasked with assassinating the German physicist (Mark Strong) getting dangerously close to developing a nuclear bomb.

Woah.

Director Ben Lewin (The Sessions) fills his throwback yarn with the requisite newsreel voiceovers and shadowy set pieces for a satisfactory spy thriller, but makes more of a mark through the intimate workings of Rudd and the supporting cast.

We’re told Berg is an enigma, but Rudd makes us feel it. From his blunt honesty to his sexual history, Berg’s nature always seems a bit out of step with the crowd, and Rudd provides the humanity to get us on his side while he stokes our curiosity.

Supporting players, including Jeff Daniels, Sienna Miller, Paul Giamatti and Guy Pearce, are equally strong, cementing the relationships that elevate the adapted script from writer Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan).

As a spy drama, The Catcher remains fairly routine. Its power comes from its intimacy, getting just close enough to a mysterious, fascinating figure without disrespecting that figure’s commitment to mystery.

 





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Cruel to be Kind

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Live by Night

by George Wolf

The jury on Ben Affleck’s skills as a filmmaker came in about one and a half films ago. After Gone Baby Gone and halfway through The Town, it was clear this guy can direct. Argo hammered that point home but good. And don’t forget that Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting.

But after all that’s good about Live by Night, seeing Leonardo DiCaprio’s name in the producer credits instantly makes you wonder how much more effective he might have been in the lead role.

Instead, Affleck casts himself as Joe Coughlin, an “outlaw” in prohibition-era Boston who runs afoul of the local crime boss after getting cozy with the wrong dame (Sienna Miller). A few years and double-crosses later, Irish Joe is working Florida for the Italian mob, cornering the rum market and laying complicated groundwork for a sprawling casino.

Give Affleck credit for challenging himself with a big slice of genre filmmaking, and he comes close to pulling it off. In adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane (Gone Baby Gone), Affleck pens a smart script that’s full of juicy twists, satisfying callbacks and requisite noir touchstones that never feel overdone (though the questionable voiceover pushes it). We also get consistently interesting characters brought to life by a stellar supporting cast. Through Brendan Gleeson and Zoe Saldana to Chris Cooper, Elle Fanning and beyond, we see soul after soul facing serious moral compromises, and, to the film’s detriment, all resonate more deeply than Affleck.

This is Joe’s journey, rife with sin, judgement, hypocrisy and redemption, but Affleck never makes Joe worthy of being the center of all this gravity. Though the character isn’t that far removed from the outlaw Affleck played effectively in The Town, his move to genre actor, classic jawline aside, is clearly unnatural.

The film often looks fantastic, with nifty period details, sweeping panoramas, nicely backlit interiors and exciting shootouts, but Affleck’s incessantly gradual pace eventually takes a toll. In reaching for a sweeping gangster saga, Affleck includes too much plodding exposition that makes the film’s just-over two hour running time feel a good bit longer.

Though Affleck makes sure his film pushes all the genre buttons, Live by Night ranks as an ambitious overreach, never quite finding the right mix to make it truly memorable.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 





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High Society

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High-Rise

by Hope Madden

Set inside a skyscraper in a gloriously retro London, Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise is a dystopia full of misanthropic humor.

Laing (Tom Hiddleston) narrates his own story of life inside the “grand social experiment” – a high rise where the higher the floor, the higher the tenant’s social status. Laing lives keenly alone, somewhere in the middle floors. Socialite Charlotte (a fantastic Sienna Miller) lives one floor above; put upon wife and philandering husband Helen and Wilder (Elizabeth Moss and Luke Evans, respectively) live near the bottom. And at the tippy top, The Architect (Jeremy Irons, magnificent as always).

The film treads some of the same ground as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, only Ballard’s feelings were less respectful of the lowly. The author’s interest was always in peeling that last layer that separates civility from savagery in every member of every class. No one is blameless, no one is incorruptible. It can make his material difficult because no character is entirely sympathetic, which is certainly the case in High-Rise.

Our protagonist holds himself at a distance from all tenants, seeing himself as that singular soul that can fit almost anonymously within every strata, when, in fact, he fits nowhere. And as chaos descends and carnality and carnage, it’s very hard to decide whether anyone is worth rooting for.

The film brings to mind David Cronenberg’s gem, Shivers. The Canadian auteur’s first film saw a high end high rise taken down from within by a parasite that turned its victims into voracious pleasure seekers. Always the Ballard enthusiast (Cronenberg adapted the author’s Crash into a chilly NC-17 adaptation in 1996), the filmmaker’s 1975 flick eerily predicted the British cult novelist’s plot of the same year.

High-Rise’s performances range from slyly understated (Hiddleston, Moss) to powerful (Miller, Evans) to alarmingly hammy (James Purefoy), but each contributes entertainingly to this particular brand of dystopia.

Ballard’s prose is tough to bring to life on the big screen. While Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation breathed the author’s chilly, disgusted detachment, Wheatley’s version mines Ballard’s humor in a film that is wildly alive but terrifically flawed.

The class war has not waned since Ballard set its microcosm inside his London skyscraper. Its flame burns as bright and toxic today as it ever has, but somehow Wheatley’s film lacks that heat. It’s a fascinating mess without the punch of relevance.

Still, the wicked humor and wild chaos will certainly keep your attention.

Verdict-3-5-Stars





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Not the Same Old Grind

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Mississippi Grind

by George Wolf

Two gamblers – one a smooth talking charmer and the other a desperate loser – team up for a high stakes road trip to New Orleans, taking all the action they can along the way.

It may sound like a cliche waiting to happen, but if you think you know where Mississippi Grind is heading, think again. Filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson, Sugar) don’t do same old same old. The writing/directing team is more interested in slowly immersing you in a new environment, letting simple truths drip from the intimate details of their characters.

Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) has a growing list of gambling debts and a daughter he never sees, but things might be looking up. The high-rolling, confident Curtis (Ryan Reynolds) sits down at Gerry’s card game, buys him a drink (“not the cheap stuff, either”) and suddenly Gerry thinks he’s found a lucky charm.

Curtis agrees to Gerry’s idea for the road trip, but questions linger. Sure, Curtis can work a room with the best of them, but is it all just to find his next hapless mark? The film wouldn’t work without two sublime performances to drive it, and there’s no question it works.

Reynolds has never been better, keeping just enough of his usual smirking smart ass persona to give Curtis an extra layer that makes him hard to pin down. Mendelsohn is less of a surprise, as he might be the most consistently great actor that nobody knows. He keeps Gerry a constantly evolving work, equal parts thieving liar and gold-hearted schlub who just needs a break.

Sienna Miller and Analeigh Tipton both make effective use of their limited screen time as working girls who get a visit from the southbound duo. They not only give us added glimpses into the souls of Gerry and Curtis, but they’re also real characters unto themselves.

Boden and Fleck introduce each new locale with postcard perfect shots free of almost all life, another reminder our interest is Gerry and Curtis and where they are going, both literally and figuratively.

With enthralling characters, mesmerizing performances and filmmakers confident enough to stay their own course, it’s a hugely satisfying trip.

Verdict-4-0-Stars