Sunday Review: Potpourri of year-end films

Interstellar, The Theory of Everything, Diplomacy, & St. Vincent

By Jonathan Price

In the last month and a half there have been a flurry of films worth seeing, though of varying degrees of excellence and certainly varied in genre and subject.

Interstellar (directed by Christopher Nolan) is undoubtedly the most touted and advertised of the group and features, as the title suggests, a journey among the stars to a distant planet, since earth itself is in a death spiral of negative food production, and humanity needs a new home. The best parts of the film, sad to say, are on stable surfaces rather than the depths of space. But I suspect this is because of the defects of this particular science fiction genre: once launched, the action is limited to a very few characters, and the challenges and outcomes arrive from a predictable and truncated list.
    Consider, in this regard, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gravity. Once in space, the crews of all of these are either 5 or 2, rapidly diminishing in number for a variety of plot reasons. In Gravity it’s all about whether the neophyte space astronaut played by Sandra Bullock can deal with her personal demons and somehow land on earth. This is essentially a one-woman show with stunning visuals, where the technique is the star and the outcome is totally predicted by the title.
    Kubrick’s classic was far better, though I think there are only three people on earth who understand the murky ending, where the lone survivor (Dave, played by Keir Dullea) somehow makes it to the distant astronomical site with the echoing obelisk and apparently is transformed to a baby. This is sci-fi crap and mediocre filmmaking; the best part of the film is where Kubrick perfects his art as a satirist (remember Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb?), when the computer, HAL, essentially a patient, disembodied, gentle (and homicidal psychopathic) voice goes crazy and Dave is forced to dismantle it and return it to its childhood.

    Interstellar’s starry visuals are often stunning and the landscapes of the distant planet, apparently filmed in New Zealand, are startling, but its plot depends on the theoretical new physics of wormholes and string theory. The scene where he stares through an interior stellar bookcase locked in space-time into his daughter’s bedroom many years ago becomes ultimately tedious and a bit ridiculous. Matthew McConaughey’s frantic attempts on earth to discover NASA’s secret program and rescue his family are the film’s most compelling elements.

Probably this takes us to The Theory of Everything (directed by James Marsh), which is actually about the physicist some of whose theories generate the plot of Interstellar: Stephen Hawking. Luckily, this film is not about his theories, but is a love story about his astounding marriage, most of which began in the shadows of his diagnosis, at age 24, of motor neuron disease, which led to the physical limitations of the wheelchair and the computer voice synthesization with which most of us who read newspapers and pay attention to current events are familiar.
    Eddie Redmayne is masterful as Hawking, both as an exuberant, if slightly obstreperous undergraduate at Oxford and graduate student at Cambridge – when he was still healthy – and also later, with his twisted body and comic and inviting leer.

    It is hard to view the film without being touched by Hawking and his wife (Jane Hawking)’s initial devotion and dedication to addressing the limitations of his illness. The film also traces the gradual deterioration of their relationship as Hawking becomes more interested in his nurse and she in her choir director, with Hawking’s encouragement. Though this pattern, under the strain of their situation, is predictable, the couple’s long years of unity and devotion and three children remain remarkable, especially since Hawking was given an estimate of two more years of life (at 24) when he was diagnosed, and remains alive at 72.
    Though the film is based on Jane’s memoir, occasionally the script must condense and conflate many years; I remained especially puzzled by Hawking’s journeying solo to mainland Europe to attend a concert and then requiring emergency medical care (i.e., a plane to fly him home). Other sources make clear that he was attending a continental conference on physics and, after a certain point in his life, has always traveled by private charter jet.

Diplomacy (directed by Volker Schlöndorff) is recommended for its minor key and its sidelight on history as well as its paean to often faceless and little known diplomats who have, as the film would suggest, often saved humanity from great terrors. The film is in French with English subtitles and is essentially a canned drama (a stageplay transferred to film), though the director has made this transformation work. He intersperses the modern acting with black-and-white footage from the actual siege, and with varied locations across Paris where key events of sabotage are due to take place.
    The film is set in Paris in mid-1944, as the Allies advance and the Germans prepare to depart, but only after first destroying every major monument in the city – The Opera, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and all the bridges crossing the Seine – in order to flood the city, killing and isolating many civilians – and presumably humiliate their long-term enemies, the French.
    As the film, and history, have made clear, this was gratuitous violence without much military purpose, but the German general in charge of the city sees it as orders which must be obeyed and cannot be questioned, until he is confronted by Raoul Nordling, a Swedish (hence, neutral) diplomat who knows a secret passageway to the Nazi headquarters and suggests such acts would only cause needless suffering.
    The General, seeming at first adamant and unyielding, recognizes the moral power of Nordling’s arguments but wants to protect his family in Germany, threatened with unspeakable treatment should he disobey orders. Given Nordling’s skill in argument and suasion and the results, the film is appropriately dedicated to one of director Schlöndorff’s friends, the late American diplomat Richard Holbrook, whose negotiations with Slobodan Miloševićh helped to end the war in Bosnia. Perhaps intriguingly, Schlöndorff is a longtime personal friend of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany.

It’s hard to leave the review of year-end (last three months’) films without mentioning and commending St. Vincent (directed by Theodore Melfi), a sleeper and tearjerker of a profile starring in one of his late-reblooming roles, Bill Murray as Vincent, the aging, seemingly cantankerous Vietnam war veteran and neighbor to a youngish single mother with a son in need of a role model. Vincent is always backing his car into his driveway irregularly, progressively damaging his picket fence and fenders, smoking pot, and entertaining at-home visits by his seemingly loving and opinionated whore, played comically and effectively and endearingly by Naomi Watts.
    Everyone in this movie seems to be playing against type, from the comic Watts to the relatively serious Murray, to the neighbor played by the now-harassed and relatively realistic and non-outrageous Melissa McCarthy.

    But it is her son (Oliver) who steals the show as he gradually begins to appreciate Vincent and his border-challenging behaviors of pot-smoking, foul language, racetrack-betting, and whoring. Even though he is Jewish, the son does a presentation for his Catholic school on a local “saint,” and he nominates Vincent and offers a PowerPoint presentation detailing how this seemingly ordinary person qualifies for sainthood.
    It’s a bravura performance by Jaeden Lieberher, which, even in the rose-colored glasses of satisfying Hollywood endings, rings true, and made me (and others) cry longer than any adult likes to do in public, and raised echoes of the respect for the virtue and generosity and decency and suffering in ordinary humans that is a subtheme of Joyce’s Ulysses and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Price