As we kick off the holiday season in one of the most explosive years in modern American politics, it seems like the perfect time for good progressives to gather together and be uplifted by a story about a passionate crusader for civil justice. But if you walk into Roman J. Israel, Esq. expecting the Battle Hymn of The Resistance, you might come out disappointed.
 
The film touches on inequality in the justice system and some other topical themes, but it veers away from those discussions without really exploring them in much depth. Instead, we follow the title character as he stumbles and mumbles through three weeks of internal conflict, acting as both plaintiff and defendant in his own personal trial of the century. The film is more enjoyable if you look at it as a character study rather than a structured narrative, and Denzel Washington’s strong performance saves a film that might otherwise might be pretty tough to get through.
 
Washington plays Roman, a rumpled legal savant whose noble ideals and bold fashion choices are rooted in a bygone era. He’s worked behind the scenes at the same tiny defense firm for four decades, but abruptly must strike out on his own after the lead attorney suffers a heart attack, leaving him jobless. Thus begins a meandering odyssey in which Roman improbably finds himself fending off job offers from a high-powered defense attorney (Colin Farrell) and kindling a tepid friendship with a kindhearted community organizer (Carmen Ejogo). His ensuing journey dances around the question of whether an old-school approach to grassroots activism can still hack it in a time when civil rights have been derisively rebranded as “identity politics.”
 
Roman is idealistic, principled and persistent, at least on his best days, but his crippling awkwardness all but obscures these strengths. This is where Washington’s talent as a physical actor really shines through: Roman walks with a clumsy gait that progresses into an even clumsier run, and the combined effect of his bad posture and nervous tics make him look uncomfortable and out of place pretty much wherever he goes.
 
It’s not long before Roman is tempted by the allure of the corner office, and despite believing that he’s in it for all the right reasons, he struggles to resist the flirtations of wealth and power and criminal intrigue.
 
“I’m tired of doing the impossible for the ungrateful,” he says, defensively revealing a core frustration of being a committed advocate: putting in an immense amount of thankless work, often with little in the way of tangible payoff.
 
It’s not a bad message, but it gets muddled by an uneven tone. Is this a legal drama about an underdog who crusades against injustice, breaks all the rules, and wins cases that ought to be sure losers? A dark comedy about a bumbling but endearing do-gooder and his quest to find love? A crime thriller about a regular guy who somehow gets mixed up in the criminal underworld? The film somewhat erratically skips around between each of these storylines, never really committing to one coherent thread.
 
In one sense it’s good that the film defies categorization—for long stretches we get to see Roman just being himself, for better or worse, without knowing where the story will take him. However, the uneven tone does make it harder to swallow some pretty lazy plot shortcuts.
 
This meandering approach worked much better in writer/director Dan Gilroy’s terrific 2014 thriller Nightcrawler, which also happens to focus on a character who just kind of floats through life, taking advantage of whatever opportunities happen to fall into his lap. But while Jake Gyllenhaal’s antihero in that film is essentially an unhinged bottom-feeder, Roman acknowledges his moral quandaries and does his best to navigate a justice system that isn’t built for noble causes.
 
But at the end of the day, neither Roman J. Israel, Esq. nor its title character really know what they want to be.
 
— Rob Heidrick

“Finally, it’s acceptable for children to be murdered in movies again!”

“If there’s one thing about the recent state of film that we can all agree on, it’s that the lack of kid-killing has been a real bummer. Then here it comes and makes everything right.”

“Did you say ‘it’ or It?”

“Does it matter? Whoa, Rob. Better yet: Does It matter? Get it?

“Yep…”

“Now whenever I say ‘it’ I’m going to wonder if I’m unintentionally saying something clever about the movie.”

“It only ever happens unintentionally, Eric.”

​“I want to point out that I agreed to see this movie with you because, (A) I thought it was going to be terrible, and (B) the last movie we saw together, Her, also had a single-syllabled pronoun title, and the idea of only seeing pronoun-titled movies together was mildly amusing to me.”

“Oh yeah. That was good.”

“That? Haven’t seen it, but I’ll put it on the pronoun-titled movie IMDB list I’m going to whip up when I get home.”

“Can’t wait to not read that list of like… four movies. But, now that you mention it, I’m going to make a list of ’80s movies where they kill kids.”

“Pretty sure you’re going to end up on some kind of list yourself for that.”

“Back in the day, you could have a kid die in the cold open and still get a PG rating.”

​“Yeah, what a time to be a child! As children of the ’80s, it’s amazing we didn’t turn out to be serial killers.”

​“And then came the Dakota Fanning-ization of American cinema …

“True. Wait. Why are we blaming Dakota? Were you pulling for Sean Penn to go Of Mice and Men on her at the end of I Am Sam? Dark, dude. Maybe the ’80s did mess us up...”

“I’m not sure what changed. Did it take blockbusters like Hunger Games to re-normalize kid-killing this for the modern era? Maybe real life is just so awful now that people are like, ‘Fine. Dead kids, whatever.’ Either way, dead kids are squarely in Stephen King’s wheelhouse, and It may be the most famous example of that.”

“To be clear though, killing animals on film is still totally unacceptable, unless used as the impetus for Keanu to go on a totally justified killing spree. I remember there was some internet outrage—shocker!—about It being ‘remade’ like the TV miniseries/made-for-TV movie was some sort of masterpiece. But all I can remember is Tim Curry being terrifying and then the giant stupid spider at the end.”

“It doesn’t hold up well.”

“Besides dead kids, what else did you like about this iteration, or should I say, It-eration, of It?”

“All around, the performances from the kids were great. I’m not sure why it took Netflix making cult hit Stranger Things for studios to realize that you can (and should) cast child actors who look and behave like real humans, but I’m all on board with that. It even has that one wiener kid from Stranger Things, 14-year-old Finn Wolfhard.”

“That’s his real name? Oh my god, I need that to be my name. He’s funny and super likable here as a foul-mouthed kid, but I was most impressed with Sophia Lillis’ acting. She plays Bev, the lone girl in this gang of geeks and has the nostalgic look down pat—big-time Molly Ringwald vibes. But her performance really sells how equal parts wonderful and crappy it is to be a teenager in this limbo between childhood and adulthood, where you fully understand and are dealing with heavy stuff but are largely powerless to do anything about it.”

“Going back to Stranger Things for a second: Beyond the whole ’80s nostalgia thing, It takes a lot of cues from the show, both tonally and thematically. I can’t really delve too far into that comparison without dropping spoilers, but both are built around the ‘otherworldly creature versus gang of tween boys and one girl’ genre, and they both feature old-school BMX bikes, ruthless bullies, and lax supervision by adults, who are either evil, loony, or clueless.”

“The adults and bullies in this movie suck! And I mean that as a compliment to their performances. I think It would have worked even better if it focused on the coming-of-age story even more: Wonder Years with a small side of demon clown. It touches on how adults mess kids up and could have even made a stronger connection between the kids’ fears in the film and what they’re dealing with in their lives. Or maybe even what is actually happening to them versus how their minds perceive it as some sort of coping mechanism. Like, Bev’s dad is a scumbag and maintenance worker of sorts who looks like he could and might be spending time in the sewer doing unsavory things to kids. Now, it’s not like I wanted some dumb new twist for the sake of twists where it turns out Pennywise is just an adult snatching up kids and the children see him as a clown to cope with it, but I thought there might be some parallel there to each of the kids’ perception of Pennywise and the things they’re dealing with at home and school, but it’s never fully baked. Hell, maybe that’s stupid, but so is the idea of an inter-dimensional creature who takes the appearance of a clown and wakes up every 20-something years to eat kids in Maine.”

“Speaking of, let’s talk about the clown in the room: Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown.”

“Tim Curry’s are some big clown shoes to fill.”

“I think Skarsgård turns in a pretty solid performance, and he wisely avoids attempting to mimic Curry’s raspy-voiced, creepy-old-man take on the dancing clown. And it must have been tempting to go that route, considering how Curry was really the only aspect of the original miniseries worth remembering. While Curry’s Pennywise calls to mind a sadistic New Jersey tollbooth operator in pancake makeup, Skarsgård lands somewhere between Gollum and a B-minus version of Heath Ledger’s Joker, alternating between wacky and demonic at the drop of a blood-stained fright wig. (And I mean that as a compliment!).”

“Yeah, Skarsgård makes it his own. He gets a ton of screen time, too—maybe too much, especially in those poorly thought-out and executed visual scares where he seemingly teleports toward the camera. We see him so much it raises some questions about the rules of what Pennywise can and can’t do. At times he seems all-powerful and at others he seems to be able to barely hold his own against a few kids.”

“Yeah, it feels kinda funny to bring up things like internal logic in a discussion about a movie starring a demon clown, but it never really feels like the ‘mythology’ of Pennywise is fully defined … but I’m sure we’ll get to that in the (SPOILER ALERT) … SEQUEL!!!”

“Ugh, I literally turned to you and swore when I realized that’s what we were doing here. Let’s talk other things that It doesn’t do so well.”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage: WTF?”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage was way jarring. The tone pulls a complete 360 from one second to the next. I hurt my neck whipping around so fast to look and see if you were seeing this train wreck too. As surprisingly not terrible as It is overall, I think this is the most turn-to-face-your-friend-and-give-a-WTF-expression neck twists I’ve had in a movie since Suicide Squad.”

“Despite being down to clown, I have to acknowledge that at least 85% of this movie was goofy as hell. Also, Pennywise’s last line made me laugh out loud, and I don’t think that’s what they were going for.”

“Also, without spoiling anything, at least one of the kids definitely kills someone and seems to face no consequences for it. Still, I think It was more good than bad—even if some of the scares fall flat—and it will probably hold up much better than the old miniseries. There are some really strong elements: the acting, the score (which is always at 11), and some smaller pieces, like the children’s TV show on in the background throughout the movie and the projector scene, which sounds dumb on paper and starts out feeling like a Japanese horror film cliché but actually ends up being pretty creepy. Your final thoughts?”
​
“I’d say that aside from the acting, the thing that keeps It afloat (get it?!) is its pacing. Pacing is critical in horror, and it’s so easy to screw up, especially when your source material is a 1,000-plus-page novel. This was perhaps the greatest undoing of the 1990 miniseries, which ran for a plodding 192 minutes and spanned over two VHS tapes. But the new version sticks to a much more effective tempo, and despite several digressions into some pretty silly territory, you never really feel bored. It’s almost like the filmmakers realized that a movie about a demonic clown doesn’t need a ton of slow-burning setup.”

“It’s never new but it never gets old — it’s a folk song.”

Inside Llewyn Davis has a lot in common with the folk music genre: It’s endearing and beautiful at times but slow and sorrowful at others. In the spirit of folk music, we’ve decided to harmonize on this review — two voices in unison. We’ll be passing around the hat afterward.

Rob: The film depicts the Greenwich Village folk scene in the pre-Dylan era, a time when the movement had lost much of its cohesiveness and was struggling to stay relevant as pop music dominated the charts. Writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen present 1961 as a dark time for “serious” folk artists who were determined to keep their craft from falling by the wayside. And apparently, some of them coped with this new reality by becoming straight-up jerks.

Eric: The only thing worse than an asshole who has convinced himself he's an artist is an asshole who actually is an artist. It’s shame to see talent wasted on someone who’s such a miserable human being. That’s Llewyn Davis, a guy who shows more emotion to a stray cat than the people who (somehow) love him. Singing is the only way Llewyn can really reach out to other humans, and it pays the bills, which are pretty much nonexistent since he's homeless and lives on a diet of bummed cigarettes.

Rob: Llewyn has problems taking responsibility for pretty much anything. He drifts around New York, crashing on one friend’s couch after another. He neglects his family. He writes checks to pay for one-night stands’ abortions and just walks away without a second thought. He’s a total deadbeat, even if he sometimes means well.

Eric: We follow scumbag Llewyn around for a week of public transportation, dingy clubs, and run-down apartments. Pretty quickly it starts to seem like a male-centric Girls set in the ‘60s — not only because the lead character is young, self-important egomaniac who treats his friends like garbage and has convinced himself anyone not doing what he’s doing has sold out and those who are doing it aren’t doing it right (“What do you think of these guys?” a club owner asks Llewlyn of an a capella quartet. “I like their sweaters.”) but because two of the three gents from Girls (Adam Driver and Alex Karpovsky) show up in the first 30 minutes of the film. The supporting cast here is fantastic, and in typical Coen fashion, the kooky characters we meet for just one scene are as fascinating as the lead. 

Rob:  Let’s not forget Carey Mulligan, who turns in an enjoyable Holly Hunter-esque performance as one of Llewyn’s aforementioned one-night stands. (If there’s one thing the Coens have perfected over the course of their canon, it’s their trope of hilariously exasperated female characters who are fed up with the stupid men in their lives. God, there are a lot of dumb men in Coen movies.) 

But unfortunately the Coen personality shines through only occasionally in Inside Llewyn Davis, in a few great moments that spotlight those oddball characters. In my favorite scene of the film, Llewyn sits in on a recording session with fellow folksters played by Driver and Justin Timberlake, jamming out on a gimmicky pop song about JFK and the space race.

Eric: That was whole bit was hilarious. It’s a shame all these colorful characters but get so little screen time — it’s all about Llewyn (which, I suppose makes sense given the title of the film). But, I would have been happy to see some more from Driver and Timberlake’s characters and Stark Sands, who plays Llewyn’s exact opposite: a painfully optimistic young soldier with a potentially promising folk career ahead of him. 

We do, however, get a hefty dose of John Goodman as surly old jazz man named Roland and his silent, chain-smoking valet Johnny Five, played perfectly by Garrett Hedlund (the lead from Tron: Legacy). Their time together gives some hilarious breaks from the heartbreak that surround Llewyn and his self-inflicted suffering. There’s a perfect blend of sad and funny when Roland and Llewyn talk about the suicide of Llewyn’s performing partner.

Rob: In another of Roland’s (drunken? heroin-fueled?) rants, he points out an interesting contrast between folk singers, whose music he considers lazy and dumbed-down, and jazz musicians who “play all the notes on the scale.”

Eric: Man, I was silently cheering Roland in that scene. I tend to hate folk music — the capos and the boring chords and the uninteresting suburban kids thinking they have something to say. Ugh. But even if the genre doesn’t do much for you because every d-bag you know with an acoustic guitar has turned you off of amateur solo performers, it’s impossible not to get silenced and swept up by Llewyn’s takes on these classic folk songs. The earnest, simple songs are mimicked in the film’s visuals — muted like the calm strum of steel strings. Every frame looks like it could be the cover of a folk album. Like, say, this one from Bob Dylan.

Rob: Dylan’s shadow looms large over the film. We know he’ll soon end up breathing new life into a lot of the old standards Llewyn solemnly performs for half-empty clubs — and he’ll have a lot more fun doing it. Will folk’s looming resurgence save Llewyn from his gloomy mope-fest and break him out of his endless loop of self-destruction? Or will it just be another instance of opportunity passing him by?

Eric: Oh, I know! Or, maybe I don’t — wouldn’t want to spoil the ending. Though I’m not sure I could if I tried. It’s worth mentioning this is character-heavy stuff, so don’t go in expecting oodles of plot. Still, I think if you like the Coen Bros. and the absence of a major story doesn’t completely turn you off, you’ll agree this selection is a fine addition to the Coen’s songbook.

--Rob Heidrick and Eric Pulsifer

Time travel and romantic comedy might not seem like a natural pairing, but writer/director Richard Curtis successfully merges the two genres to great effect in About Time.

The film explores the idea that falling in love is essentially the outcome of a series of good and bad decisions, imagining what it would be like if you could go back and erase all the awkward missteps along the way.

Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) is a well-meaning but decidedly un-suave romantic whose attempts to find a girlfriend have resulted in lifelong frustration. One morning, his father (Bill Nighy) reveals to Tim that he, like all the men in his family before him, possesses the ability to travel through time.

After getting over his initial shock, the endearingly clumsy ginger is given a crash course on the ins and outs of his ability: By shutting himself in a dark space, closing his eyes, and clenching his fists, Tim can shift back to any moment in his own past. He can’t go back before his own birth, and although he can leap back from the past to the present, he cannot travel beyond that point into the future.

Now, any plot involving time travel is bound to be convoluted to some degree, and Curtis has fun acknowledging and embracing that necessity. In response to Tim’s concerns about the catastrophic consequences of meddling with the past, his dad wryly tells him, “Oh, the butterfly effect? Well, we haven’t destroyed the universe yet!” He also cautions Tim against trying to pull a Biff Tannen, listing examples of relatives whose attempts to use their gifts for financial gain only put them on the road to ruin.

It’s a funny, tongue-in-cheek setup that signals we’re not supposed to over-think this whole time travel thing. Of course, things get a little more complicated later on, and the film does break with its own logic at several points, but if you spend any time nitpicking the inconsistencies, you’re missing the point.

Anyway, after several amusing hiccups, Tim finally starts to get the hang of using his power to bail out of awkward situations, which proves to be a huge help in his romantic life. He meets Mary (Rachel McAdams), and through the process of trial and error, he manages to convince her he’s the man of her dreams.

It’s a safe bet that most would consider it a luxury to have a “do-over” option in the courtship process—just look at what it did for Phil Connors! And like Phil, who initially sees his continual returns to the past as a curse, Tim comes to appreciate the ability to hit Ctrl–Z, undo his mistakes, and take advantage of missed opportunities.

Thanks to this superpower, he’s also able to bridge some of the emotional distance between him and his father, who has maintained a caring but somewhat prickly relationship with Tim before bonding with him over their shared gift.

At its heart, About Time is a sweet but not overly sentimental rom-com that’s as much about a guy’s love for his family as his quest to find his soulmate.

—Rob Heidrick

The Counselor should have been great. It’s hard not to get excited about the prospect of Ridley Scott taking the helm of Cormac McCarthy’s first original screenplay, directing a cast stacked with the likes of Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, and Brad Pitt. It’s one of those films you really expect to enjoy, only to come away wondering how it’s possible for so much talent to be squandered in so little time.

The film is about 10 percent plot and 90 percent overwrought dialogue, giving rise to a scrum of potentially interesting characters who are ultimately given nothing to do. And then there’s Cameron Diaz, whose over-acted turn as a hypersexual cheetah fetishist is yet another sad chapter in her long résumé of poor performances.

Fassbender stars as the nameless Counselor, a criminal defense attorney whose clients are players in the Mexican drug trade. Blinded by his love for his fiancée (Penélope Cruz) and his desire to express that love in the form of a gigantic diamond, the Counselor agrees to act as the middleman in a convoluted scheme that involves shipping $20 million in cocaine from Mexico to Chicago. (The details of the plan are never made explicit, so we’re mostly left to guess about each character’s role in the arrangement.)

Bardem does his best to outshine the material as Reiner, the Counselor’s liaison to the Juarez underbelly and one of many characters who try in vain to warn the hero it’s never a good idea to get in bed with Mexican drug lords, even if it’s just a “one-time deal.” Pitt’s Westray is another slick operator who likes to spice up his criminal dealings with pop-culture references and clever turns of phrase.

Original screenplay notwithstanding, the film feels like an adaptation of one of McCarthy’s novels, and it falls into the same trap that many adaptations have before it: It tries to squeeze the prose for all its worth in fear of wasting a single drop of the artistry that went into crafting it. This comes at the expense of plot momentum and coherent pacing, which quickly devolve into afterthoughts.

Scott chooses to have several key plot developments unfold off screen, opting instead to half-explain them later within lengthy soliloquies. And despite spending so much time talking, the characters are devoid of any kind of background stories that might have added some much-needed contextual flavor to their ramblings.

It would have been easier to identify with the Counselor (or at least understand his intentions) if McCarthy had provided a better taste of the character’s past — a glimpse of some of his shadier clients and the extent to which he’s aware of what they’re capable of. Only then would we really know how much he realized he was putting on the line by inserting himself into that world.

I get what McCarthy was going for. He clearly has a love for his characters and wants us to feel the same affection by watching them engage each other in intimate repartee. We’re supposed to get to know them by sitting in on these improbably witty exchanges in which gangsters name-drop their favorite poets and Mickey Rourke films. (Drug lords — they’re just like us!)

Which is fine, I guess. And there are moments in the film when this actually works, particularly in smaller scenes that allow the characters to flex their personalities (but still don’t really move the plot forward). As usual, Bardem is best suited for that job, most notably in a scene in which he goes into gory detail in relating an anecdote about Diaz’s character getting intimate with a Ferrari. But overall, too much is mired in innuendo, and the viewers are tasked with filling in all the gaps themselves.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not opposed to doing a little bit of work to pull out the subtext. Heavy-handed flashbacks and other lazy shortcuts are poor substitutes for smarter, subtler storytelling. And it’s healthy to ask the audience to use its imagination every now and then.

But throw a guy a bone here. It’s important to keep in mind that film is a visual medium, and there’s a certain threshold where a movie starts to drown in its own dialogue.

In some sense, Ridley Scott has made a career out of toeing that line. He’s the master of slow-burning story arcs that build suspense through a series of quieter moments — Alien, Blade Runner, etc. But what makes those films great is their nuanced but authentic character development — we get to see Ripley and Deckard evolve in meaningful ways as they confront the hostile forces surrounding them. They don’t just talk (and talk and talk) about the cold realities of existence; they take matters into their own hands and fight battles they’re most likely going to lose.

The Counselor — both the character and the film — ultimately fail to do this.

— Rob Heidrick