Movie review by Greg Carlson

Judging from photographs as well as the popular imagination, Emily Blunt’s beautiful neck is at least twice as long as Queen Victoria’s, but historical fidelity is not the first thing on the mind of filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee, whose “The Young Victoria” is an entertaining, sumptuous, and romantic confection.  Blunt has been marvelous in several films, especially “My Summer of Love” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” and the performer capitalizes here on a title role that allows her to inject modernity into what might otherwise have been a stuffy period costume ball.  Blunt’s sunny demeanor contrasts sharply with portraits of the morose majesty, and the movie is better for it.

“The Young Victoria” needs neither its obvious voiceover (it would surely be better to show, rather than tell, the audience that for Victoria, “Even a palace can be a prison”) nor its somber title cards announcing milestones in the monarch’s biography.  The film could also use a great deal more of Jim Broadbent as King William IV.  Broadbent relishes the puffery and pomposity of a hilarious banquet scene outburst that sends Miranda Richardson, the manipulative Duchess of Kent and Victoria’s mama, scurrying from the table.  Paul Bettany is underused as Lord Melbourne and Rupert Friend is handsome as Victoria’s husband-to-be, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Julian Fellowes’ screenplay switches between the blossoming romance of Victoria and Albert and the political jockeying that consumes the lives of those in the young royals’ orbit.  Fellowes opts to restrict the film’s point of view to the opulent quarters of the wealthy power brokers, a move that closes off any understanding of the common people who hate Victoria one day and love her the next.  This lack of perspective generates even more confusion when “The Young Victoria” alludes to widespread unrest.  An angry protestor chucks a brick through a window, and a slow-motion assassination attempt intrudes on Victoria’s cloistered world, but without further explanation, everyone pretty much goes about his or her business.

Despite some expository gaps, Vallee paces the 104-minute film with economy and fluidity, and as a result, “The Young Victoria” does not overstay its welcome.  History nuts, certain to gripe that Albert never actually took a bullet for his wife, might leave the theater feeling a little undernourished, but the movie has more than enough climbing through the House of Hanover’s family tree to send the faithful to their encyclopedias.  The depiction of the Kensington System, the elaborate set of rules forced upon Victoria by her mother, accounts for the Queen’s early unhappiness and offers the filmmakers a perfect conflict through which to dramatize Victoria’s eventual rejection of her mother’s control.

The strength of “The Young Victoria” rests with Blunt’s delightfully anachronistic performance and Vallee’s looseness with the title character’s courtship and eventual marriage to Prince Albert.  Victoria’s connubial bliss, complete with an impetuous frolic in the rain and a chaste bedchamber romp, imagines a side of the ruler seldom if ever seen, and Blunt and Friend make believable the joys and the frustrations of newlyweds bound by peculiar traditions, protocols, and expectations.  The script touches on gender, but never long enough to establish a substantive meditation on feminine power in interpersonal relationships.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Arriving after a sporadically produced stage play and an unaired television pilot, “Youth in Revolt,” the Miguel Arteta adaptation of C.D. Payne’s comic coming-of-age writings is a film so wispy it almost blows away when you sigh from your theatre seat.  It is also often funny and generally entertaining.  Michael Cera makes a fetching Nick Twisp, upped in age from just shy of fourteen to a more sexually mature sixteen.  Opening with a vigorous masturbation sequence that intrudes over the studio logos, “Youth in Revolt” announces ribald intentions that never convincingly materialize, despite plenty of hilarious conversation about all things carnal.

Twisp is another smart, self-deprecating, hyper self-aware teen, the type who listens to vintage Sinatra on vinyl and rents foreign language Criterion Collection DVDs.  Disgusted by the sex lives of his divorced parents and their partners, Nick fantasizes about losing his virginity, and his lustfulness turns to obsession when he falls under the spell of Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a well-read Francophile whose quick wit and charisma instantly overpower Nick.  Sheeni calls out Nick when he mixes up Mizoguchi with Ozu, and despite living under the watchful eyes of her conservative, religious parents, she emerges as someone with her own designs on life beyond the Ukiah trailer park where she first meets Nick.

Despite Sheeni’s objectified position as Nick’s inamorata, Doubleday capitalizes on her opportunities, and will leave many viewers convinced that she would have made a principal character and protagonist every bit as interesting as the young Mr. Twisp.  Doubleday inscribes notes of condescension and aloofness in her interpretation of Sheeni, and the performer navigates the character’s detachment and frankness with dexterity.   “Youth in Revolt” is less interesting when Sheeni is not onscreen, and relative newcomer Doubleday will hopefully turn up in more features in the near future.

Among Payne fans, there will be much debate concerning the extent to which Nick’s alter ego Francois Dillinger, a wolfish, Belmondo-esque hustler who would like to tickle Sheeni’s belly button “from the inside,” succeeds, as Cera is called upon to play opposite himself in several special effects-driven scenes in the style of “The Parent Trap” and the more recent “Moon.”  Nick’s other persona and feminine side, Carlotta Ulansky, sees Cera cross-dressing to get close to Sheeni, but the ruse is played broadly and briefly, like many other outrageous gags that Arteta stages but neglects to develop.  Interstitial animations in different styles also contribute to the anarchic, grab-bag approach favored by the filmmaker.

For a film that purports to traffic in teenage rebellion, “Youth in Revolt” sticks with a familiar game plan.  Several set pieces, including dormitory shenanigans, a ballet of automotive destruction, and a Thanksgiving feast that sees a host of authority figures under the influence of hallucinogens, have already been done to death in sit-coms and teensploitation.  “Youth in Revolt” is always at its best when focused on Nick’s droll, biting observations about the injustices and frustrations of his daily life, and Cera’s skillful comic timing elicits many laughs.  The movie may not do much to change perceptions of its lead actor as an awkward man-child, but Michael Cera does it as well as anyone.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Something important went missing in the filmic translation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” by director John Hillcoat.  Hillcoat’s “The Proposition,” a smart, grueling Western set in 1880s Australia caught the eye of “The Road” producer Nick Wechsler, who imagined that the filmmaker could recapture the terrible beauty of Hillcoat’s 2005 success.  This time around, Hillcoat capably visualizes the grim death of civilization, but “The Road” strings together a series of almost self-contained episodes that rob the story of momentum.

Like “Mad Max,” “28 Days Later,” “Children of Men,” “I Am Legend,” and 2009’s “Terminator Salvation,” “Zombieland,” and “2012,” “The Road” is another entry in the post-apocalypse filmmaking derby that has become a staple of several genres.  “The Road” leans heavily and needlessly on the weary voiceover of protagonist Viggo Mortensen, known metonymically as the Man, who leads his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), through a devastated landscape populated with cannibalistic scavengers.  Neither book nor film offers a specific explanation of the cataclysm that wiped out most plant and animal life, a choice that should focus one’s attention on the emotional relationship of father and son instead of the doomsday spectacle.

Joe Penhall’s screenplay hews closely to the events in McCarthy’s novel, but Charlize Theron, who appears in several flashbacks as Mortensen’s wife, plays a much larger role in the film version.  Along with sun-dappled visions of happier times, including a pastoral glimpse of the Man and his horse and a surreptitious grope during a public music performance, these interludes presumably break up the monotony of the Man’s quest to reach the rumored safety of the coast.  A perfunctory birthing scene – which should have intensified the inevitable and impending horror awaiting the newborn – is vexingly ordinary.  McCarthy has been parsed and criticized for ignoring women, but Theron’s duties in the movie add little to the present-tense immediacy of the father and son ordeal.

The most interesting carryover from the novel considers whether the Man is, as the Boy hopes, “one of the good guys,” and Hillcoat flirts with the question in a handful of scenes in which the Man makes starkly cruel choices, presumably to defend his son.  In one, Robert Duvall makes a cameo appearance as a decrepit traveler upon whom the Boy takes pity.  Duvall hangs around long enough to gush vomit and share some cryptic wisdom (not necessarily in that order, although it doesn’t really matter), but the Man refuses to offer him anything beyond canned fruit cocktail.  In another passage, the Man humiliates a would-be thief (Michael Kenneth Williams), divesting him of everything he needs in order to survive.

Unfortunately, Hillcoat doesn’t explore the Man’s impossible decisions, and since the audience is invited to identify with his role as a whatever-it-takes guardian and protector, the Man metaphorically assumes a Christ-like mien, especially as the magnitude of his sacrifice approaches its final moments.  Viewers unfamiliar with the novel might be more forgiving of the director’s handling of both the plot elements and the voice of the Man, but admirers of McCarthy’s unmistakable prose will flinch when exchanges that were stony on the page melt into goopy puddles.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

If Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” is one of the year’s most Bressonian films, then Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” is certainly its antithesis.  Manipulative, smug, and supremely confident of its own worth, “Up in the Air” is a movie of and for its time, a skittering commentary on economic despair coupled with a conventional “to thine own self be true” mantra.  George Clooney’s tremendously appealing performance saves the film from total disaster, but the movie is ultimately too dependent on self-actualizing epiphany – in other words, it has more than one big moment in which a character realizes that a major mistake has been made, and then sprints off in the opposite direction to try and fix it.

Clooney’s Ryan Bingham is a seasoned terminator who fires people for a living, a veteran air traveler more comfortable on a hotel room mattress than in his own seldom used bed in a drab apartment in Omaha.  He crosses the country in pursuit of 10 million frequent flyer miles (a substantial upgrade from the novel’s 1 million), distancing himself from the anguish he leaves in his wake.  As Bingham shuttles from city to city, he divides his time between seducing fellow road warriors like Alex (Vera Farmiga) and condescendingly putting up with his earthbound sisters.

Reitman, with co-screenwriter Sheldon Turner, overhauls and transforms Walter Kirn’s grim, sooty novel so radically that only a smattering of themes, ideas, and lines make it from the page to the screen.  Kirn’s Bingham, a discombobulated, paranoid, pill-gobbling conspiracy theorist, is edgier and less likable than Clooney’s calm opportunist, and the book is more interesting for it.  Additionally, the filmmakers concoct the entire subplot of Bingham’s indoctrination of Anna Kendrick’s ambitious efficiency expert/career transition counselor.

Reitman sounds the movie’s sourest note during a grounded wedding interlude in “authentic” Wisconsin.  The director dredges up several old chestnuts, from a groom with cold feet to the encouraging pep talk that validates the protagonist’s persuasive rhetorical gifts.  The sequence, which includes a queasy visit to Bingham’s old high school with his new squeeze, is scored with fragile, melancholy acoustic tunes like Elliott Smith’s “Angel in the Snow,” a device that has felt stale and imitative ever since “Miss Misery” earned an Oscar nomination for “Good Will Hunting” in the original song category.

“Up in the Air” probably wouldn’t have received as much love and praise had Reitman skipped the equivocation and moralizing, but that combination is one of the filmmaker’s hallmarks.  Studio publicity has milked the anecdote that the people who appear in the “getting canned” montages are not actors but regular folks who have lost their own jobs.  Somehow, though, Reitman’s casting gesture seems less than magnanimous and more than a bit exploitative.  “Up in the Air,” like Reitman’s other features, vigorously mixes the solemnity with heaping helpings of comedy.  My favorite moment was Sam Elliott’s cameo resurrecting the Stranger.  He does not happen to mention that Bingham is the man for his time and place, but seeing him did remind me to watch “The Big Lebowski.”  Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes, well, he eats you.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In a recent interview with Maria Garcia in Film Journal International, director Jane Campion invoked the name of Robert Bresson, the colossus of unblinking austerity and scholarship of the soul, whose oeuvre has become a Rosetta Stone for generations of moviemakers.  Campion’s “Bright Star,” a love story based on the doomed courtship of Romantic poet John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne, reverberates with many of Bresson’s techniques, and even if Campion lacks the most rarefied of the French master’s gifts, her talents are considerable.  “Bright Star” is among the director’s finest films.

Literary superstars, especially tubercular poets who die at 25, defy quiet cinematic portraiture, and Campion wisely filters the consciousness of the narrative through Abbie Cornish’s Fanny Brawne instead of through Ben Whishaw’s John Keats.  Cornish is superb, and her performance so sensual it is easy to see how Keats might have fallen easily, speedily in love.  The two actors share an inviting chemistry and a smoldering eroticism that allows Campion to perfect the art of suspended and sublimated desire.  Few movies manage to effectively translate the emotional resonance of poetry without a share of pretentiousness, but Cornish and Whishaw recite some of Keats’ best known work as though the lines were showers of sparks.

Campion’s sharp eye has often gazed upon strong women who negotiate and subvert expected gender roles with fierce intelligence and reserves of dignity.  In “Bright Star,” Campion seizes upon Brawne’s keenness for fashion, imagining the teenager as an artist with a needle and thread whose facility for innovative clothing construction matches Keats’ way with words.  Far from reinforcing the old-fashioned concept that relegates supportive young women to homemaker-appropriate pursuits, Campion sees Brawne as Keats’ aesthetic peer.  One of the movie’s most potent images reveals an intricately embroidered pillowcase sewn by Fanny for Keats’ consumptive brother.

Campion’s vision of 19^th century Hampstead Heath is simultaneously elegant and understated.  She directs from her own script (inspired by Andrew Motion’s Keats biography), and makes certain that the measure of daily life in Regency England is just as restrained and chaste as the restricted affair between Brawne and Keats.  With the exception of a few sultry kisses, Fanny and John must forego physical contact, but Campion turns the ache to her advantage.  In one stirring scene, Fanny transforms her quarters into a lepidopterist’s hothouse, filling the space with delicate butterflies while she swoons on the bed and attempts to articulate to her concerned mother the intensity of her feelings for Mr. Keats.

The brilliance of “Bright Star,” and one of its Bressonian traits, lies in how much Campion leaves unspoken and left to the viewer.  Paul Schneider, the American actor who played opposite Zooey Deschanel in “All the Real Girls,” steals several scenes as Charles Armitage Brown, Keats’ best friend and protector.  Brown dreads the spell Fanny casts over Keats, convinced that the flirtatious girl will obliterate the poet’s concentration and dilute the quality of his verse.  Brilliantly, Campion manages to legitimize Brown’s complaints without turning him into a grotesque or a villain (even though he does impregnate the Irish maid).  In an irony surely not lost on Brown, Fanny instead fuels some of Keats’ most brilliant achievements.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like many of Clint Eastwood’s recent films, “Invictus” takes its sweet time to arrive at a conclusion determined from the opening moments.  A glossy and superficial account of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa, the movie blends biopic with traditional sports genre elements, including lengthy sequences in which rugby games are photographed from every possible angle.  Morgan Freeman plays Nelson Mandela with authority and gravitas, but too much of the dialogue is reduced to aphorism and platitude, conveying the feeling that as a political leader, Mandela was more angel than human.

Alongside Freeman, Matt Damon takes on the role of Springbok captain Francois Pienaar, the Afrikaner flanker who came to understand the transcendent potential of a World Cup victory once Mandela reached out to him.  Somewhat strangely, Damon is given very little to do outside of his athletic duties, a frustrating aspect of a movie that might have had much more to say about the key personalities in one of South Africa’s most suggestive and meaningful sports accomplishments.  Pienaar leads the team that black South Africans cheered against, but his presence in the film is unusually apolitical.

“Invictus” follows a linear chronology that builds some momentum as the story unfolds, but the one-thing-at-a-time structure tries the patience when so many scenes alternate between snippets illuminating Mandela’s ulterior motives for taking such a keen interest in rugby and the progress of the Springboks as they struggle to develop a winning team.  Eastwood carefully modulates the way we come to know Mandela, opting to focus on the man’s incredible sense of forgiveness in the service of healing national wounds rather than on any particular demands of his role as the newly elected President of South Africa.

For all the time Eastwood lavishes on rugby, the audience learns very little about the rules of the game or the individuals who made up the championship Springbok team.  Ironically, Mandela is shown in one sequence studying a roster in order to be able to greet each player by name, but with the exception of Pienaar and Chester Williams, the only non-white member of the 1995 Springboks, the viewer is not expected to differentiate among the footballers.  Despite Williams’ claims that some of his own teammates spurned him with racist name-calling, the movie version focuses on Mandela’s anxiety that the winger’s injury will prevent him from being a visible black representative when the Boks take the field.

Eastwood’s decision to refrain from procedural explanations of rugby will divide viewers, but “Invictus” strains to make clear the tensions and stakes of post-apartheid South Africa.  Mandela shrewdly understands the symbolic power of showing up in Pienaar’s green and gold number 6 jersey, and Eastwood guarantees the audience won’t miss the point either.  An economical subplot concerning the racial integration of Mandela’s security detail covers the same territory, as does a series of shots in which a small boy, unable to gain entry to the Ellis Park final, loiters near a car to monitor the game on the radio.  The toughest cynics will have a hard time swallowing the climactic displays of black/white esprit de corps, but more shocking is the truth of the historical record.  Yes, Eastwood suggests that Mandela almost singlehandedly orchestrated the World Cup championship, but the against-the-odds win of the Springboks is a perfect illustration of real life drama tailor-made for big screen adaptation.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A remake of the 2004 Danish film directed by Susanne Bier, “Brothers” adds nothing new to the tradition of the returning-from-war subgenre, even as veteran filmmaker Jim Sheridan’s steady hand guides an attractive and talented cast.  Three of Hollywood’s most promising young leads, Natalie Portman, Tobey Maguire, and Jake Gyllenhaal, are not entirely convincing as representatives of the working class, but the stars do their best with a script that depends too heavily on doses of mountainous inevitability and dubious implausibility.

Maguire plays Marine Captain Sam Cahill, a veteran soldier who has seen men through several tours of duty in Afghanistan.  Sam dotes on his two adorable daughters and lavishes affection on wife Grace (Portman), his sweetheart since high school.  As Sam prepares to deploy, his troubled brother Tommy gets out of prison, and the extended Cahill family copes uneasily with the changes.  Shortly after Tommy’s return, Sam is believed killed in action, and Grace turns to her brother-in-law for comfort and support.  In love triangle movies, sport can be made of imagining the actors trading roles, and it is hard not to think that “Brothers” might have been more interesting had Maguire and Gyllenhaal switched parts.

It has been suggested that mainstream studio-released films addressing Operation Enduring Freedom carefully avoid taking any political position, but haven’t war movies always balanced on the edge of cheering tremendous personal sacrifice while ruing the horrors that inevitably scar the brave protagonists?  Movies dealing with the cruelty of combat appeal to the voyeur who craves images of inherently dramatic mayhem and yet laments the tragedy of killing.  Sam pays a horrific price that erases his ability to readjust to domestic routine, but the template of “Brothers” is familiar enough that the viewer can anticipate nearly every scene.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder propels the second half conflict of “Brothers,” in which Sam returns to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, but the film’s presentation of the debilitating impairment doesn’t hold a candle to “Taxi Driver” or “Coming Home.”  The story demands that Sam be presumed dead long enough for Tommy and Grace to develop a relationship, but that very requirement challenges the audience to sympathize with the absent Marine, whose own children verbalize their desire for Mommy to partner with Uncle Tommy.  As Sheridan cuts between Sam’s ordeal in Afghanistan and Grace and Tommy growing closer, a tone of anxiety and unease clouds the narrative.

The deficiencies of “Brothers” include oversimplified and underwritten roles for the leads (Portman’s part in particular is egregiously neglected by screenwriter David Benioff), and a few farfetched plot complications.  Sam Shepard, who plays the alcoholic father of Sam and Tommy, praises his straight arrow offspring but makes no effort to hide his contempt for the one who spent time behind bars.  His hot and cold emotional shifts, represented as polar extremes, apply to many of the movie’s other relationships.  The Muslim bad guys are equally as flat, standing in as terror merchants whose lack of humanity feels contrived and convenient.  More disappointing, the principal characters in “Brothers” receive the same treatment, ending up as symbolic representations of dutiful wife, damaged soldier, and repentant lawbreaker instead of recognizable individuals.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like each one of Wes Anderson’s features, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” comfortably floats in the space between the familiar and the not quite real, the grown-up and the childlike.  Loosely adapted from the 1970 book by Roald Dahl, the movie concerns the survival of the title character and his family and friends, but the great joy of the film lies mostly in the gorgeous execution of its handmade, meticulously crafted animation.  The miniature world inhabited by Mr. Fox is as artfully arranged as any of Anderson’s previous sets and equally as complete.  Repeated viewings will reveal a nearly endless supply of dazzling details, from the tiny oil painting of posing badgers to the “unaccompanied minor” tag pinned to a young traveler’s clothing.

The plot, a straightforward series of challenges between Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and a trio of awful farmers who aim to put an end to his thievery, alternates between the action chase and the kinds of scenes Anderson lovers expect: perfectly observed moments of pain and joy, where characters question their motives and jealousies aloud.  The style, like Shakespearean soliloquies with arid, arch, contemporary brevity replacing iambic pentameter, works like a charm in the mouths of the woodland cast.  One can almost hear Hamlet’s contemplative yearning when Clooney’s middle-aged larcenist muses on his nature, “Why a fox?”

Anderson’s drive to shoot the movie using stop-motion pays off tremendous dividends.  Despite joining a long tradition marked by the indelible imprint of past masters, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is wholly its own.  In other words, the technique may not be original, but the end result is sui generis: it’s not Willis O’Brien on “King Kong,” not Tadahito Mochinaga’s work for Rankin/Bass, not Harryhausen or Starewicz, neither Nick Park nor Henry Selick.  The fastidious Anderson outdoes himself with the level of minutiae in the production design, working with Nelson Lowry to achieve spectacular autumnal landscapes and richly textured interiors.

Like the conversations held between characters in his other ensembles, the exchanges in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” run the gamut from shocking self-disclosure to sly prevarication.  The director has always had a gift for externalizing self-doubt – particularly among the intellectually gifted – and Jason Schwartzman’s Ash is the very embodiment of wounded inadequacy.  Ash’s competition with talented cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson) recalls similar dysfunctional rivalries in “The Darjeeling Limited” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” but the younger age of these characters infuses their relationship with real tenderness.  A late night scene in Ash’s bedroom in which the kits address sleeping arrangements is among the movie’s most sublime treats.

Because “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was directed by Wes Anderson, the film will be scrutinized and analyzed by all sorts of bloggers and academics who will comb through the text for traces of submerged meaning.  Charges of racism, for example, have already been leveled at the movie, although Laura Bans appears to be on less solid ground than Jonah Weiner, who wrote about Anderson’s “unbearable whiteness” for “Slate” in 2007.  A more credible complaint is the movie’s dearth of important female characters.  Felicity Fox (Meryl Streep), like Etheline Tenenbaum, is the glue that keeps her family from disarray, a wise maternal presence whose calm contrasts with her husband’s wilder nature.  Most of the speaking roles, however, belong to males.  It’s a minor complaint, but it would be nice to see a more equitable distribution in the future.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In “An Education,” Danish director and Dogme 95 contributor Lone Scherfig abandons the constricting limitations of the movement’s so-called “Vow of Chastity” for a traditional and straightforward treatment of the bildungsroman.  Featuring a confident central performance by the beguiling Carey Mulligan, the movie has little new to say about a bright young girl caught between the allure of a charming older suitor and the possibilities afforded by a first-class education, but it still merits consideration.  Nick Hornby’s efficient adaptation of journalist Lynn Barber’s “Granta” essay (later a memoir) snaps with plenty of intelligence and wit, even if some of the thornier quandaries of the story are unaddressed.

Mulligan plays Jenny, a superbly talented 16-year-old aspiring to Oxford who accepts a ride in David’s (Peter Sarsgaard) handsome maroon Bristol one rainy afternoon.  With broad strokes that echo many sentiments expressed in the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” David seduces both Jenny and her parents – though not necessarily in that order.  Despite being more than twice Jenny’s age, David speaks with a silver tongue; he may be too good to be true, but Jenny quickly concludes that her life is more intriguing with David in it.  Even when she glimpses the darker aspects of his modus operandi, he preys on the very combination of Jenny’s precocious intellect and her naïve openness by telling her bluntly about some of the unsavory things he does to make a living.

Given the film’s early 1960s setting and the cautious, by-the-book attitude of Jenny’s father – warmly played by the endlessly compelling Alfred Molina – some viewers will no doubt find puzzling the movie’s liberal posture regarding teen sexuality, as well as the breezy acceptance of David by Jenny’s parents.  The film takes pains to raise the notion that Jenny’s father views marriage as a legitimate alternative to the difficulties of paying for college, but the ease with which Jenny manages to secure permission for weekend getaways might cause some parents’ hearts to skip a few beats.

Almost more troubling is Jenny’s unwillingness to scrutinize David more closely once cracks begin to show in his not so carefully cultivated persona.  Scherfig might well have intended the movie’s point of view to be so thoroughly filtered through Jenny’s subjective experience – Mulligan is hardly ever offscreen – that viewers see everything her way, but the character is far too smart not to pose tougher questions to David before the doomed moment of her undesired epiphany, which stands as one of the movie’s most self-conscious and least effective scenes.

Scherfig appears to sense some of the pitfalls of the coming of age story, and despite the inevitable revelations and recriminations (protagonist self-directed and otherwise) demanded by the genre, “An Education” remains true to the expanding outlook of its heroine.  Naysayers will deride several of the characterizations as broad and even cartoonish, but Olivia Williams, as Jenny’s wise teacher, quells much of that avenue of criticism.  The movie’s somewhat incongruous, late-stage moralizing and tidy wrapping up of loose ends belongs to another film, but Mulligan’s summery presence elevates “An Education” beyond the strictly conventional.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

An inspirational documentary covering the remarkable maturation process of a group of Akron, Ohio basketball players including NBA superstar LeBron James, “More Than a Game” makes up in heart what it lacks in depth.  Sure to invite comparisons to Steve James’ 1994 “Hoop Dreams,” “More Than a Game” focuses more attention on high stakes seasons and national rankings than it does questioning the surreal transformation of James from talented high school athlete of deficient financial means to household name/corporate brand/multi-millionaire.  Viewers seeking a penetrating examination of the ethics of contemporary sports culture won’t find it among the many images that reinforce a mostly wholesome and largely sanitized Horatio Alger-like telling of the American Dream.

Filmmaker and Akron native Kristopher Belman was only a young film student at Loyola Marymount when he proposed a smaller project on the close-knit team of ballplayers who began working together before junior high.  Through the inclusion of plenty of fuzzy home video footage, audiences experience the prowess of the protagonists from elementary school to the end of their senior year.  One of the movie’s uncanny delights is watching the little boys grow up, and the movie’s multi-year span affords the spellbinding pleasure of seeing literal physical transformation before our eyes.

To Belman’s credit, “More Than a Game” spends at least some quality time with each member of the squad, even if LeBron is the main attraction.  An unselfish player with dazzling passing skills, James extends his magnanimity to the other members of the Akron Fab Four (later Fab Five with the addition of moody outsider Romeo Travis).  Coach Dru Joyce II and his son Dru Joyce III emerge as key figures, and the film accentuates the diminutive younger Joyce’s tenacity on the court as well as the elder Joyce’s struggle to be an effective coach and father to his driven offspring.

Critical viewers will long for a closer, off-the-court examination of the players and their backgrounds.  James, who by necessity became a seasoned and cautious interview subject when he was still a teenager, talks about growing up without a father and sometimes having to stay with a coach instead of his mother Gloria, who was only 16 when LeBron was born, but the film offers no substantive information beyond James’ initial mention.  Belman, who is white, elects to bypass any discussion of race, a theme that might have enlarged and toughened the portrait.  We learn that the teammates elected not to attend a predominantly African American school in favor of the private, more affluent St. Vincent-St. Mary, but no additional examination of the related politics is entertained.

Belman also does not address James’ unsuccessful petition to enter the NBA draft following his junior year and the impact that decision had on his friends and teammates.  By the time James appeared on the cover of “Sports Illustrated,” he and the other Fighting Irish starters had already developed plenty of cocky swagger, but Belman’s only acknowledgment of the dangers of hubris comes courtesy of the section recounting the team’s state title loss to tougher Division II high school Roger Bacon in 2002.  Of course, with James listed as one of the movie’s executive producers, one shouldn’t expect the story to stray too far from confirmatory acclamation.  Despite the deliberate omissions, “More Than a Game” is required viewing for any basketball fanatic.