Movie review by Greg Carlson

Waterlogged with the worst clichés of the biopic, not even a committed act of Meryl Streep’s vaunted mimicry can buoy “The Iron Lady.” Skittering over the highlights of Margaret Thatcher’s political career without ever stopping to take intellectual stock of the historical details that undoubtedly required tremendous thought, concentration, and collaboration, Phyllida Lloyd’s film is much like Thatcher’s well-known coiffure: artificially volumized to appear fuller than it really is.

Surprisingly fixated on Thatcher’s dotage, in which the once fearsome leader regularly hallucinates her dead helpmate Denis (embodied by an impish James Broadbent) the elementary screenplay by Abi Morgan makes only vague efforts to frame Thatcher as a symbol of feminist empowerment. Instead, the movie returns again and again to scenes in which a panicky, paranoid, and frankly pathetic old woman struggling with dementia struggles to reconstruct the memories of her trials and triumphs on the world stage.

When Lloyd touches on scenes of Thatcher’s 1980s heyday, the inevitable cutaways to stock footage undermine expectations of quality and do the director and subject no favors. Without exception, Thatcher’s contemporaries and colleagues are indistinguishable from one another, and not a single scene depends on the scripted interplay between two sharp minds grappling with the intricacies of policy-making. Instead, Thatcher is shown repeatedly scolding even her party allies; in one embarrassing scene, the incensed PM gracelessly dismisses a meeting. It’s meant to show how hard Thatcher fought to be respected and kept in the loop, but it comes off like a petty tantrum.

Streep is abetted in the principal role by Alexandra Roach, who plays Thatcher as a young woman inspired by her grocer/mayor father to make something of herself. The audience is asked to take the emergent politico’s positions and beliefs on faith, since the fundamentals of her alignment with any specific party are absent. The film’s critical thinking skills are so weak, the viewer is asked to imagine the reasons for shots of champagne-swilling “Maggie’s Millionaires,” as well as all references to union busting. Inexplicably, Thatcher’s struggles with Northern Ireland and the IRA are sketchy footnotes. The 1979 assassination of Thatcher’s mentor Airey Neave, the 1981 hunger strike, and the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing are presented without context or insight.

Even with the movie’s weird framing of Thatcher as a slipping, senile crone, “The Iron Lady” is standard hagiography, inevitably overlooking any number of Thatcher’s worst tendencies. The movie doesn’t even bother to address Thatcher’s acquisition, courtesy of the Soviet Defense Ministry’s “Red Star” mouthpiece, of the title nickname. Pal Ronald Reagan appears only in a fleeting montage, all but eliminating the one big figure that might have been played as a pivotal character instead of the well-used caricature. Thatcher’s hawkish defense of colonial interests during the 1982 Falklands War eats up more screen time than many of the leader’s other milestones. The movie drolly asserts that Thatcher’s own policies had created the conditions that led to Argentina’s amphibious landings, and it is fun to hear Streep say “junta.” The accompanying, unintentionally funny shot of Thatcher as she broods over a naval strategy map looks like it was stolen from the satirical “Spitting Image” puppet show – which boasted a Thatcher at least as memorable as the one concocted in “The Iron Lady.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The pre-eminent cinematic chronicler of his country’s history, Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman artfully revisits one of his guiding motifs in “Nostalgia for the Light,” one of the finest documentaries to make its way to United States viewers in 2011. Guzman’s oeuvre has been dominated by reflections on the 1973 Pinochet coup and its aftermath, perhaps most forcefully in the three-part “The Battle of Chile,” an achievement that Michael Atkinson claims “should be required viewing for high schoolers everywhere.” Guzman’s meticulously framed latest uses a radio telescope array in the Atacama Desert as a platform to discuss time – most importantly the way that we understand the past, interspersing ruminations on astrophysics and metaphysics with the somber stories of old women who comb the Chacabuco concentration camp grounds for the bone fragments of disappeared loved ones.

Guzman listens to astronomers and closure-seekers alike, intertwining the quantum-esque head trip of professor Gaspar Galaz’s suggestion that the way in which light travels places us in the eternal realm of the “already occurred” with the highly personal accounts of the relatives of Pinochet’s political prisoners. Archeologists and historians also work in the Atacama because the artifacts and remains are so pristinely preserved. Guzman’s technique turns the storylines into meditations on searching, and the yearning, seeking, and questing for answers both immediate and celestial catapults the film into a realm that feels altogether more spiritual than historical.

Despite the harsh and barren landscape of the Atacama and its reputation boasting the Earth’s ideal conditions for stargazing, the desert reveals surprising features that Guzman also chains to his narrative agenda. Pre-Columbian rock carvings and illustrations remain visible despite the ravages of weather and time. A cemetery populated by Chilean miners houses mummified remains in caskets that sit atop the arid ground. The alien landscape, sometimes described as the “driest place on the planet,” shimmers with an otherworldly beauty, even though it has been the site of so much pain. Guzman brings all of these pieces together with startling clarity.

“Nostalgia for the Light” features several stories that confront Pinochet’s destructive impulses, but the director’s careful, measured – sometimes even quiet—presentation carries with it an argument made more powerful and forceful because of its calm, matter-of-fact simplicity. One man made detailed drawings of the layout to the prison in which he was incarcerated. A young woman whose parents were murdered describes being raised by her grandparents and what Pinochet’s legacy means to her now that she has a child of her own. With each of these recollections, Guzman transcends anecdote.

Although “Nostalgia for the Light” did not make the Academy Award shortlist, it recently received the best feature honor from the International Documentary Association and it is assuredly a worthy selection. The movie’s liquid embrace handles the seemingly disparate visual elements in an unpretentious manner. It’s as if Guzman has spent so much time excavating the emotional depths of Pinochet-affected Chileans that he knows exactly how much or how little of his subjects to include. “Nostalgia for the Light” is one of those rare experiences in which the viewer engages in something akin to a conversation with the people being interviewed, which, along with the lovely views of the heavens, testifies to Guzman’s masterful skill.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The family of British playwright Andrea Dunbar is the subject of Clio Barnard’s exceptional cinematic study “The Arbor,” an engrossing piece of creative nonfiction that combines the objectively reported and the imaginatively rearranged with a level of confidence and skill seldom applied to after-the-fact restaging associated with docufiction and docudrama. Dunbar, who at age fifteen wrote the play that shares its title with Barnard’s film, defied the odds of her class and status by soon seeing her work selected for production at the Royal Court Theatre. Dead at twenty-nine of a brain hemorrhage, the alcoholic Dunbar had three children by three different fathers.

Central to Barnard’s technique is the use of actors lip-synching to recordings of Dunbar’s relatives and affiliates (announced via an opening title card), which allows the director to light and frame moments in time with a kind of weird omnipotence only afforded by pre-recording a soundtrack. For example, in one stunning tableau, the memory of a long-ago fire is accompanied by a corresponding image in which flames leap in the shot’s background. The startling beauty of Ole Bratt Birkeland’s digital cinematography paints the environs of the run-down Bradford, Yorkshire streets with deliberate incongruity in comparison to the lives under discussion. Dennis Lim quoted Barnard saying that she “wanted to make a film that looked the opposite of how it sounded,” and the careful compositions operate in stark contrast to the wrenching tale being narrated.

Arguably, Dunbar’s daughter Lorraine eclipses her mother as the movie’s principal focus, and performer Manjinder Virk – like the other actors employed in Barnard’s bold experiment – must negotiate the challenge of constructing a “performance” tethered to a soundtrack that requires the memorization of every single original breath and pause. As the mixed-race daughter of a white mother and Pakistani father, Lorraine’s understanding of prejudice includes some devastating revelations about her treatment during childhood. As “The Arbor” continues, we learn more about Lorraine’s own demons with the same unblinking exactitude that has been applied by the filmmaker to Andrea Dunbar.

Given the unfathomable layers of pain, abuse, neglect, addiction, and illness that enveloped Dunbar during her short life and her grandson Harris in his even shorter one, Barnard cautiously resists what could easily have been rendered as emotionally manipulative in favor of almost ice-water-in-the-veins understatement. This doesn’t mean that “The Arbor” won’t bring you to your knees, but the matter-of-fact way in which the interview subjects talk about personal experiences that could lead to madness or despair says something about impoverishment and the presence and/or absence of hope.

Barnard’s directorial vision extends beyond the lip-synched interviews to a series of scenes from Dunbar’s debut theatrical drama arrestingly shot outdoors with neighborhood residents literally standing in as audience members. The theatrical snippets operate as perfect interstice to the lengthier first-person direct camera address content, demonstrating the frightening symmetry between Dunbar’s characters and the grim experiences that dominated her own day-to-day existence. Dunbar had always deliberately smudged the lines of self-portraiture and concretized chronicle, which Barnard understands and harnesses on screen to perfection.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Composed of vivid 16mm film footage culled from dozens of hours of material that had been lying dormant in Sveriges TV (Sweden’s Television, a national multi-channel public broadcasting station), “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” functions like a time capsule, teleporting viewers into the midst of America’s urban social chaos in the Vietnam War era. Assembled by Goran Hugo Olsson, the documentary reacquaints students of history with African American nationalism through interviews with several key figures associated with the Black Panthers. Additionally, the movie honors its title by tracking on the ravages of heroin in Harlem and other neighborhoods, the Nation of Islam, and the Attica Prison Riot, to name a few more of the movie’s broad-ranging interests.

Stokely Carmichael claims a critical role as one of the principal voices of the era, and the activist’s caustic wit emerges in several public addresses excerpted in the film. Most impressive, however, is a quieter moment when Carmichael sits down with his mother Mabel for an exchange in which the struggle against racism is illustrated with personal clarity. Carmichael is gentle but determined as he coaxes his mother to talk about her husband’s ongoing encounters with discrimination, and the scene shows Carmichael’s considerable skill as a master communicator.

Angela Davis is the other personality who emerges alongside Carmichael as the documentary’s “star.” Her 1972 interview from the Marin County Jail contains the most riveting on-camera response to questions posed about the movement’s willingness to reject Martin Luther King, Jr.’s peaceful resistance and entertain the necessity of violence. Davis says, “When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

In an interview with Channing Kennedy to promote the film, Olsson suggests that the language barrier of the original documentary crew contributed to the openness and generosity of subjects who might otherwise have declined to be photographed by white journalists. Whether this assertion is substantially true, the “lack of knowledge” (Olsson’s words) of the filmmakers in the various situations they covered infuses the movie with a strong sense of fundamental rhetorical explanation of positions that terrified the likes of Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and other representatives of the white establishment.

“The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” makes serious its commitment to vintage visual design, withholding any images of the contemporary commentators whose voices provide thought and perspective on the archival documentation that unfolds. Musicians Erykah Badu, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, and Talib Kweli are joined by poets, scholars, and activists, and while their thoughts make important links between today and the four-decade-old content, the long-neglected interviews – from the famous and the anonymous alike – feel every bit as fresh. Olsson has stated that only two images contained in the film are not from the original period, and the absence of new footage gives the movie an undiluted purity that can only be found in the commemorative – a reminder that “this happened.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Bad movies set in Hawaii vastly outnumber good ones. Elvis, Gidget, Charlie Chan, Ma and Pa Kettle, and the Brady Bunch have used the idyllic location as a stunning backdrop. Adam Sandler went there for “50 First Dates” and returned recently for the putrid “Just Go with It.” For every “Punch-Drunk Love” (which only manages a detour), we have more examples like the pathetic 2004 version of “The Big Bounce.” “The Descendants” falls into the category of Hawaii-based stories determined to move beyond tourist views and postcard snapshots to show a dimension of the islands rarely explored on film. That aspect, however, is largely ignored in favor of a family drama mired in the midlife male milieu.

Alexander Payne’s first feature in seven years, “The Descendants” alludes to the complicated relationship between indigenous inhabitants and the interlopers who profited from Hawaii’s resources. George Clooney plays Matt King, one of the beneficiaries indicated by the title, a mixed-blood attorney smart enough to recognize that he and his extended family are still “haole,” no matter how many generations have lived and died on the islands. While King is preoccupied with the impending sale of a family-trust owned parcel of unspoiled beachfront, his wife suffers a devastating injury in a boating accident, and in the course of addressing the dire situation with his daughters, discovers that his spouse was unfaithful to him.

King decides to track down his wife’s lover, and the resulting – and wildly improbable – coincidence that stitches together the two principal plot threads pulls hard on the film’s credibility. Coupled with one of the master devices of soap opera scum, the lingering coma, Payne mortars the bricks of the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings with an unhurried hand that would yield better results if the dialogue wasn’t so simple. “The Descendants” shows and tells, and shows and tells again, until the viewer begins to believe that this sort of suffering is universal, and even happens to handsome millionaires who live in an earthly paradise.

George Clooney’s saintly householder lacks much of the corrosive edge that Payne has been so consistent in applying to his protagonists. From hot-potato debut “Citizen Ruth” to career best “Election” and on through the bigger commercial successes of “About Schmidt” and “Sideways,” the filmmaker has eagerly presented rough characters who often resist immediate likability in favor of richer, more nuanced inner and outer lives. Clooney, whose easy charm and calm confidence place him in close proximity to classic-era idols like Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and William Powell, works hard to humanize King by filling him with insecurity and self doubt, a task made tougher by unnecessary voiceover that throttles the viewer with insulting obviousness.

How are we supposed to accept Clooney’s “backup parent” as an exasperated everyman when he is privileged with so much power, wealth, and beauty? The man’s bloodline flows back to Hawaiian royalty. He has sole decision-making authority over a flock of cousins seeking his favor in the real estate deal. Somehow, Clooney the actor carries the whole endeavor on his shoulders, reassuring skeptical moviegoers that Everything Will Be OK and that “The Descendants” depicts the kind of thing that we could all experience, even when it really doesn’t.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Perpetual provocateur Lars von Trier shares one of his least overtly “disobedient” stories in years with “Melancholia,” a visionary end-of-the-world disaster drama laced with a puckish streak of black comedy. Unlike controversial lightning rod “Antichrist,” the majority of the bile directed to “Melancholia” came not as a result of what appears on the screen, but instead for the moviemaker’s impolitic press conference at Cannes. Von Trier’s mouth drew attention from the work, a gorgeous elegy in which the notoriously unstable auteur explores the contours of his ongoing struggle with depression by imagining a collision between Earth and a “rogue” planet that has been hidden behind the sun.

Like Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” and Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express,” “Melancholia” is cleaved carefully, calculatingly in two, and each section of the luminous speculation on astronomical finality reflects significantly upon the other. The halves are named for sisters played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst, physical near-opposites whose responses to impending oblivion and catastrophe are miles from the kind of action-oriented emergency operations undertaken by so many of the participants in cinematic cataclysms. In the most simplistic terms, Gainsbourg’s Claire takes care of Dunst’s Justine until the end is nigh and their roles reversed, but that description is a disservice to the beauty of the storytelling.

Justine, named by von Trier in homage to the Marquis de Sade’s doomed heroine, suffers tortures less physically graphic than her namesake, but the filmmaker – whose skillful character appellations often operate on multiple levels – might be simultaneously offering a rejoinder to the parade of detractors who accuse him of misogyny as a matter of presupposition and continuing in earnest his tradition of anguished female protagonists with whom he so closely identifies. In any case, Dunst completes the richest, most assured performance of her career. The startling image of wisps of electricity dancing from her fingertips places her in closer proximity to de Sade’s protagonist than first imagined.

The dissolution of Justine’s carefully planned wedding ceremony is rendered as a farcical chain of almost inexplicable breaches of formal social etiquette. Like Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married,” the viewer is provided with an engraved invitation to one of civilization’s most fascinating rituals, and the mischievous director makes the most of assets like Stellan and Alexander Skarsgard, John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Kiefer Sutherland, and Udo Kier, whose pained wedding planner hilariously refuses to even look at the offending bride who is ruining “his” big day. For admirers, von Trier’s rehearsal-free approach to principal photography results once again in a dazzling series of exchanges. For the uninitiated, the vertiginous jump cuts and woozy, handheld shooting may provide ample torture.

J. Hoberman compared “Melancholia” to “The Tree of Life” in his earliest reports, calling both films “monumentally, even monstrously, ambitious” and coupling the statement with an assertion that there would be many viewers likely to turn away. Once Justine’s fairytale wedding has disintegrated like unexpurgated Grimm, von Trier cranks “Melancholia” into sharp focus through the lens of an expensive telescope and its homemade, bent wire companion. Both objects report the unthinkable. As the threat of death increases, however, Justine’s comportment evolves from numbed paralysis to serene tranquility and peacefulness. The glowing planet draws close, dominating the sky and our thoughts.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Eerie and unsettling, Sean Durkin’s feature film debut “Martha Marcy May Marlene” addresses the psychological aftermath of one young woman’s experience with a violent and sexually and emotionally abusive Charles Manson-like cult/commune. A carefully studied landscape of disorientation and mental transience, the movie sidesteps the sub-genre’s tendency to construct a central relationship between “brainwashed” hostage and professional “deprogrammer,” choosing instead to explore the protagonist’s fragile, tenuous grip on mundane, day-to-day activities and her shaky reintegration into the lives of her baffled, blindly naïve family.

Elizabeth Olsen inhabits the various personae suggested by the film’s alliterative, titular monikers with hypnotic appeal, confidently resisting the temptation to base Martha’s personality on a foundation of unwitting victimhood and sacrificial tokenism. Instead, Olsen and director Durkin lace the character with an almost abrasive flintiness, and the result is a complex portrait in several ways reminiscent of Jane Campion and Kate Winslet’s Ruth Barron in “Holy Smoke.” As Martha alienates her frustrated sister and incredulous brother-in-law with irrational behavior, including crawling into their bed while they are having sex, Durkin refuses to judge her. Instead, the director moves in close to Martha’s mounting paranoia that the cultists are only an eyelash away from showing up to reclaim her.

Cutting smoothly between Martha’s time in the twisted congregation of Catskills-dwelling nonconformists and her difficult transition back to the “normalcy” offered by her sister’s comfortable lakeside vacation rental, Durkin provides only some of the tantalizing details that motivated Martha to leave her unorthodox life after roughly two years “off the grid.” Through the flashbacks we meet Patrick (John Hawkes), the quietly intense clan patriarch whose silver tongue rationalizes drug-assisted rapes of the steady procession of young women who find their way to his working farm. Patrick’s manipulation of followers, men and women alike, is glimpsed in several chilling scenes, and Durkin’s tight rationing fosters curiosity about the kinds of things Patrick does that the audience is not privileged to witness.

As if the sexual assaults were not enough, Patrick also orchestrates and/or presides over break-ins and home invasions, including one horrifying incident that presumably contributes to Martha’s decision to detach from the group. Beautifully photographed by Jody Lee Lipes, who also shot “Martha Marcy May Marlene” co-producer Antonio Campos’ terrific “Afterschool,” the movie’s frames alternate between the open and the claustrophobic, compositionally voicing Martha’s estrangement and alienation. Additionally, natural outdoor settings, including a recurrent water motif, glisten with sumptuous tactility. The contrast between Patrick’s rustic environs and the sleek minimalism of the house inhabited by Martha’s sister also contributes to the division between Martha’s past and present.

For many viewers and several critics, Durkin withholds too much information. While the deliberately oblique course of the drama imposes Martha’s confusion on the audience, the filmmaker’s unrelenting obfuscation and uncertainty is worn like a badge of honor up to and including the enigmatic final scene. Staying true to Martha’s inability to take comfort in any one identity, Durkin elides key dimensions of traditional closure, a bold tactic that will delight some moviegoers and infuriate others. The ending, like a handful of preceding scenes, drags “Martha Marcy May Marlene” right to the edge of horror, but perhaps the most haunting thing about the film is that its talented filmmaker is not afraid to identify with Martha’s attraction to life in a cult.