Sunday Review: A Most Wanted Man, Lucy, and Begin Again

2½ summer films worth seeing

By Jonathan Price

My last summer film review [July 20] apparently was a downer for some readers, who concluded I was turned off on the films I saw, and that none of them were worth seeing, which was not my point, but I’ll try not to be so opaque in this review of three films that opened recently, and each of which is definitely worth seeing, with some minor reservations about the third: A Most Wanted Man, Lucy, and Begin Again.

First comes last. Begin Again (2013, directed by John Carney), as its title – two 2-syllable, 5-letter words perhaps echoing the two paired characters at its center – suggests, is about that great American – or perhaps human – theme: renewal. Dan Mulligan (Mark Ruffalo) is an alcoholic down-at-his-heels music executive; Gretta (Keira Knightley) is the female accompaniment to an on-the-verge-of-fame rock singer, who has just been romantically abandoned. Their chance encounter as Gretta sings her lugubrious folk dirge with guitar at a Manhattan bar leads to a musical collaboration that reveals hidden depths and possibilities in both of them.
    The film’s structure suggests how key this encounter is by beginning with it, then looping back through the backgrounds of both Dan and Gretta to explain why the moment is so transformative. Dan is entranced and pitches Gretta with the possibilities of a singing and recording career, even though he has just been fired from the company he helped found and has to borrow the money to pay for their beers. As she sings, solo and lonely and tentatively and unheralded on what is barely a stage, Dan can envisage and we can see full-range accompaniment to her singing with bass, drums, and other instruments: he can see (and hear) how to produce her. He imagines an album based on a series of outdoor Manhattan locales where each song is recorded, without the benefit or encumbrance of studio or civic approval.

    That’s the premise, and it’s pretty much the story, and we’re encouraged to believe it’s beneficial for them both. Dan and Gretta collect an enthusiastic near-volunteer group of staff and accompanists and we see them play with the Empire State Building and other iconic Manhattan landmarks as background. We see Gretta charm Dan’s rebellious and lonely daughter, and Dan even talk to his ex-wife. We see Gretta’s former boyfriend write a new song to entice her back and plead for reunion, after he realizes American stardom and a flaky American mistress don’t solve all his problems.
    Begin Again has beautiful moments, as in Gretta’s instrumentalist friend who supports and accompanies her, as in Dan’s now exceedingly successful rapper friend CeeLo Green (Troublegum), who offers him financial and moral support and hugs and comes up with an impromptu rap, duly recorded by his amanuensis, to explain the ideas working in the collaboration. Dan also begins to drink less. The plot arc is a bit predictable, and Ruffalo’s alcoholism seems canned, and Knightley’s smiles seem ubiquitous and artificial.
    But, admirably, the arc startles us by not leading to the romantic juncture of Dan and Gretta. Dan goes back to his ex; Gretta rejects her former boyfriend’s entreaties to reunite. The renewal and imagination come in the form of their business success: they don’t press the CD or go the corporate route; that seems to have manipulated and squelched both of them; they make the tracks from the Manhattan collaboration available free on the internet through the push of a button. On the downside, the idea of recording each song free in a different New York locale sounds, for the most part, better as an idea than it plays out as reality. Since they’re not making a video, locale doesn’t seem very important. We are told by the film that Gretta’s songs are indelible, but not all of them are particularly memorable or touching. But other attentions to the mechanisms and values of the contemporary music business are plausible and convincing.

Lucy (2014) has three stars – Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, and Luc Besson (the director). And it promotes the idea of using a greater part of human brain function through a visually stunning, if somewhat clichéd plot. Freeman plays a college professor cum neurologist whose lectures are initially interspersed through the plot introducing Lucy (Johansson), also named after the earliest anthropoid currently known to science, since she will become a transformative figure and transcend, apparently, history, time, and space. According to the professor, humans use only 10% of their brain power, but he speculates they could be induced to use far more, and that this would lead to unsuspected connections we could make in understanding and controlling our environment.
    Lucy is at loose ends in Taiwan when she is dragooned by a supposed friend into an international plot involving transportation of a new drug by human mules – it’s embedded by surgical procedure in their abdomens. The owners and transporters of the drug – a ruthless Asian crime ring replete with its own gunmen, prisons, surgeons, and international contacts – are in awe of this drug, though they apparently have little concept of what it may do. Lucy’s surgery leaks, and she becomes super-drugged, increasing her brain employment percentage exponentially. As the film proceeds we periodically see numbers on the screen, as she moves from 10% to 15% to 20% and eventually to 100%. And thus becomes a superhero capable of, eventually, anything: she defeats all her captors with a single gun, and shoots perhaps seven in a room at once; she stops martial arts figures in mid-air or midstride simply via an act of will; she communicates with the professor, halfway around the world in Paris, over Skype and his phone and every electronic device known to a hotel room simply by thinking about it.

    The visual effects of Lucy’s powers are, of course, stunning in terms of action film effects. We also see computerized visuals of, supposedly what is going on in her brain in terms of stellar fireworks and smoke and various simulations. Some of her reflections apparently transport her back to the beginning of human existence, where she meets Lucy, her anthropoid ape ancestor, and touches fingers. The modern Lucy is also great at high speed car chases through Paris, against traffic and over pedestrian walkways, though as she explains to her cop-protector-guide from whom she’s appropriated the car, she’s never driven before.
    Lucy introduces us to that idealized world where thought not only leads to action but can be transformed directly into action, and of course it’s good that Lucy’s on the side of humanity rather than….But as her brain usage approaches 100% and she’s “winning,” it’s also clear that she’s exhausting her capacity and will die within 24 hours of her initial transformation. As this apocalypse approaches, she is gradually slinking-transforming into a glassy black computer amassing the information she’s intuited and appropriated, until she dissolves, like a figure from The Wizard of Oz, into just a pile of clothes and vanishes, leaving the professor holding what’s left of her: an index drive. Lucy is all concept, all action, all fantasy, and quite a trip. The 10% of brain use is not merely not a scientific theory, however, according to an article in Scientific American, it is kind of a modern urban myth, mistakenly attributed to Albert Einstein or William James; nevertheless, Morgan Freeman is authoritative, and Scarlett Johansson is beautiful and somehow warm, and we believe this myth for the time the film lasts.

The best of these summer three and the one not to miss is A Most Wanted Man (2014, directed by Anton Corbijn), with Philip Seymour Hoffman, touted as his final film. It is a spy thriller, though neither of the James Bond type nor of the Bourne type: there is minimal violence and no shooting. It is derived from a recent novel by John Le Carré, who has renewed his metier, famous from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (TV serial and films and novels from the 60s and 70s), in the milieu of the snooping against modern international Islamic terrorists. As always in Le Carré, the human transgression counts more than the spy craft, and the climax is in minor defeat and suffering. The central figure is often sad and compromised in some way and mistreated by the spy bureaucracy. But it still makes for powerful drama, as it does in A Most Wanted Man. The title is a kind of pun since it apparently refers to two men, Gunter (Hoffman), the German off-the-books counterespionage agent, and Dr. Faisal Abdullah, an Arab in Germany supporting cooperation and charitable operations, but some of whose solicited funds always seem to disappear elsewhere. Both of these figures are wanted by others – by the American CIA chief Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright), by the German police and official spy apparatus, by various agents.
    Gunther is a non-acknowledged agent allowed by the German authorities to stretch or break certain laws, but they regularly contact him suddenly on the street or in various restaurants to suggest they want to end or take over his activities. He’s on a short leash after an embarrassing failure in Beirut several years back. Gunther (Hoffman) is in nearly every scene, speaking English with a German accent (a film convention to avoid interminable subtitles), chain smoking, and often seen with a drink in his hand, though never drunk. He schmoozes with spymasters, with Ms. Sullivan, with his colleagues, talks to informers, encourages, nudges, demands, to get what he wants. He’s a bit rumpled, rarely uses physical force, seems reliable, but not always powerful or totally assured. The one scene where Hoffman throws a punch is to protect an unknown woman in a bar being physically mistreated by her boyfriend. This kind of odd footnote gives Gunther humanity and credibility. The last time we saw this lumpy, overweight actor throw a punch, was at a fellow musician in Late Quartet who had seduced his daughter (and perhaps his wife).

    Though Gunther is the key character, there is a brilliant ensemble cast of suspicious and ambiguous characters: Rachel McAdams as the German lawyer for the Chechen, who is thrown into a car with a mask over her head and told by Gunther she’s essentially a social worker for terrorists; Willem Dafoe as a German banker for dubious depositors who is forced against his work to cooperate with the German spies; and of course Robin Wright as the American connection, an embassy or CIA figure who alternately seems sympathetic and distanced from Gunther and finally betrays him. But betrayal is one of the currencies of the film: the young informer Gunther meets irregularly and furtively in various public places around Hamburg – a cigarette shop, a ferry – turns out to be Abdullah’s turncoat son.
    What Gunther wants is Abdullah, but Gunther is not heartless. The way to Abdullah is through a suspected terrorist, Issa Karpov, a Chechen illegally in the country and with few friends, but Gunther recognizes he is essentially harmless and, through intermediaries, gains his cooperation to get to the bigger fish. The fish metaphor, cliché as it may be, is expanded in a grand scene at the film’s mini-climax, where Gunther must present his case in a stunning conference room in Berlin to about 20 interlocutors. This is a brilliant scene in its distance from the daily machinations and its demands on Gunther and in its evasive corporate atmosphere. Gunther must explain why he seeks Abdullah and won’t give him up: you catch the small fish to get to the barracuda, the barracuda to get to the shark….One of those present professes to be baffled by the fishing metaphor (hard to believe he’s sincere, since we in the audience are way ahead of it). Gunther is asked what we seeks to achieve by his operation; he replies, “Perhaps to make the world a little better place,” an unarguable if vague nostrum which, it turns out, he had elicited days earlier from Martha, and he smirks to her as he says it. Neither really knows where the operation leads; ultimate purpose seems to elude everyone.
    Of course, we don’t know where Abdullah leads, and when the sharks of international intelligence, with the CIA’s knowing nod, swoop in to steal Abdullah from Gunther, who is ready to turn him, we don’t know where they will take him or what they will do to him. We don’t know what’s beyond the shark. The film ends anticlimactically, with Gunther in a rage at his upstaging, and he drives a little distance and parks his car. Has he gone back to work on another case? Is he abandoning his job entirely? We don’t know.
    These may not be the greatest films of the season or even of the year, but they do represent distinct, different, and imaginative worlds and offer strong performances by some of cinema’s gifted actors.

Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Price