Movie Review: The Flock (2007)

Genre: Crime Drama  

Director: Andrew Lau  

Starring: Richard Gere, Claire Danes  

Running Time: 105 minutes  

Synopsis: In New Mexico, Errol Babbage (Richard Gere) is a public safety official tasked with keeping tabs on registered sex crime offenders. Obsessive and high-strung, Errol is being forcibly retired and has to train his replacement Allison (Claire Danes). He introduces her to the world of sexual perverts living in society, and she witnesses his diligence in trying to make sure none of them re-offend. But when a young woman is abducted, Errol is convinced one of his "flock" has strayed, and he races to uncover the culprit before the victim is harmed.

What Works Well: This disturbing journey into the dark world of deviants and the agents tasked with monitoring their behaviour packs an impact. Director Andrew Lau creates a psychologically grim and seedy milieu of remote mobile homes, spooky abandoned houses, and sex dens, while Richard Gere impresses with a portrayal of a man well beyond the edge, his exposure to atrocities blunting his humanity and ability to distinguish between right and wrong. The line-up of degenerates-as-suspects is a cross-section of creepiness attracted to criminality and violence.

What Does Not Work As Well: Character backgrounds are sorely lacking, with Claire Danes suffering most and never getting to grips with Allison's role. The outcome is a flat portrayal of human carnage, and growing suspicions that atrocities are displayed for pure shock value. The plot logic is bumpy, not helped by Babbage taking on the role of police investigator while the actual detective work goes missing.

Conclusion: A cleansing shower is recommended after the credits roll.



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Movie Review: Evening (2007)

A romantic drama, Evening boasts a stellar cast but chokes on a labored story intent on squeezing recycled emotions out of dreary characters.

In the present, the elderly Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) is near death, spending her last hours at home in bed being cared for by daughters Nina (Toni Collette) and Connie (Natasha Richardson). Nina is surprised when a semi-hallucinatory Ann recalls a man called Harris as her first love. Flashbacks reveal a seminal weekend from 50 years ago.

In the 1950's, Ann (Claire Danes) travels to a swanky Newport mansion to attend the wedding of her best friend Lila (Mamie Gummer). Ann reconnects with Lila's brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy), a frequently drunk aspiring writer who has harboured a crush on Ann since they were in college. Buddy introduces Ann to his friend Harris (Patrick Wilson), a handsome doctor. She is immediately smitten, but her romantic pursuit is complicated when she learns both Buddy and Lila may also be in love with Harris.

An adaptation of the book by Susan Minot, Evening is pretty as a postcard and just as disposable. Minot wrote the script with Michael Cunningham, and what may have worked on the page as thematic permission to seek self-kindness is cruelly exposed on the screen. Director Lajos Koltai exploits Ann's transitioning mental state to wedge trite mystical moments (stars, butterflies, a night nurse dressed in an angelic gown) into a stultifyingly inert narrative.

Despite the presence of an all-star cast of women (Glenn Close and Meryl Streep also have small roles), the characters are consumed by ruinous judgment, overheated dialogue, and lethargic pacing circling the same miserable laments for two hours. The most incurable problems ironically stem from the men. Buddy is allowed to wreck multiple scenes as the obnoxious drunk heartbroken young man, and his exit, while meant to be tragic, is cheerworthy. Worse still is Harris, the doctor supposedly igniting everyone's passion reduced to a stone-faced non-presence with the personality of a brick wall.

Meanwhile back in the present, Nina (the free spirit) and Connie (the responsible homemaker) bicker according to the rules of stereotypical cinematic sisters, with an unexpected pregnancy thrown in to satisfy the circle of life. Vanessa Redgrave spends the entire movie in bed babbling about one weekend in her life and trying to separate reality from fantasy. Her fever dreams were undoubtedly more entertaining than this Evening.



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The Movies Of Claire Danes

All movies starring Claire Danes and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Little Women (1994)

How To Make An American Quilt (1995)

The Rainmaker (1997)

The Hours (2002)

The Family Stone (2005)

Evening (2007)

The Flock (2007)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Family Stone (2005)

A Christmas family comedy, The Family Stone features plastic people, events and emotions. A strong cast salvages a few moments of merriment.

Christmas time is approaching, and New York City-based businessman Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney) and his new fiancée Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) travel to the Stone family home in Massachusetts for the Holidays. Meredith is highly strung, and is immediately a misfit within the Stone family dynamics. Everett's parents Sybil (Diane Keaton) and Kelly (Craig T. Nelson) are upbeat but dealing with Sybil's illness.

Meanwhile, Everett's siblings do little to make their guest feel welcome. Amy (Rachel McAdams) is the youngest and immediately harbours a bratty dislike towards Meredith; Thad (Tyrone Giordano) is deaf and gay and in a relationship with Patrick (Brian J. White), who is black; Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) is pregnant. Only the laid back Ben (Luke Wilson) makes an effort to reach out. Meredith commits every social faux-pas in the book and grows increasingly frantic. She finally appeals to her sister Julie (Claire Danes) to ride to the rescue.

Directed and written by Thomas Bezucha, The Family Stone offers harmless entertainment filled with contrived situations all leading towards saccharine happily-ever-after resolutions with just a touch of seasonal melancholia. The film is undermined by an almost total absence of authenticity, with the cast struggling against a script seeking laughs but most often inducing groans.

Meredith's fish-out-of-water behaviour is sometimes funny but always unbelievably awkward. Stressed or not, a successful businesswoman should know better how to charm her way into a new environment, but here the script demands that she does nothing except practice aggressive foot-in-mouth. Equally, the adults of the Stone family behave like immature children around the new love of their eldest son and sibling.

The Family Stone is saved from a total loss by a willing cast. Sarah Jessica Parker plays against type and pulls off Meredith as a stuck-up and socially inept diva. Rachel McAdams gives young Amy an attitudinal edge, and Luke Wilson brings out the friendly black sheep of the family in Ben's observe-first, act-later approach to navigating his tumultuous family. Diane Keaton struggles for meaningful screen time, and Claire Danes ghosts into the movie as Julie with the preordained purpose of playing the romantic disruptor, because the script says so.

The Family Stone sometimes induces a tight smile, but rarely delivers a genuine note.

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Movie Review: The Rainmaker (1997)

A David versus Goliath courtroom drama with plenty of appeal, The Rainmaker enjoys a stellar cast in fine form and hits all the right notes, but never quite reaches the emotional heights that it strives for.

Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) graduates from law school in Memphis, and the only job he can land is with the office of ambulance-chaser "Bruiser" Stone (Mickey Rourke) and his crony Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), who has never been able to pass the bar exam. Shifflet takes Baylor under his wing and teaches him the ropes. Soon Rudy has three clients: the elderly Miss Birdsong (Teresa Wright) wants to rewrite her will; low-income mother Dot Black (Mary Kay Place) wants to sue the Great Benefit insurance company for denying coverage for her leukemia-afflicted son Donny Ray (Johnny Whitworth); and Kelly Riker (Claire Danes) is being regularly physically abused by her husband.

Bruiser runs into some serious trouble with the law, prompting Rudy and Deck to establish their own business, as the insurance company lawsuit starts to occupy most of their time. Great Benefit hires a crack team of lawyers headed by the slick Leo F. Drummond (Jon Voight) to defend the case, and Rudy finds himself out of his depth in terms of experience and resources. But Dot refuses to settle, and the case lands in court, with Judge Tyrone Kipler (Danny Glover, in an uncredited performance) presiding. As Kelly's confrontations with her husband grow ever more dangerous, Rudy has to uncover Great Benefit's unethical practices to convince the jury that Donny Ray never received the medical treatment that he deserved.

By the time The Rainmaker arrived in movie theatres as a big-budget, high-quality adaptation of a John Grisham novel, the 1990s alone had already offered a multitude of quality courtroom dramas including three Grisham adaptations. A Few Good Men (1992), The Firm (1993), In The Name Of The Father (1993), The Client (1994), Sleepers (1996), and A Time To Kill (1996) featured big name stars, big name directors and some seminal courtroom moments, and The Rainmaker unfortunately suffers from the nagging feeling that Hollywood was perhaps going to the same well one time too many. There was little new that the genre was able to offer by 1997, and while The Rainmaker does everything right, it doesn't do much that is particularly memorable.

Director Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay, and in one of his more traditional outings, steers the film safely through all the tight corners. The 135 minutes of running time pass by smoothly, and the Memphis setting, mostly in the grungier parts of town, enriches the context. Rudy Baylor is a likable if somewhat bland protagonist, and Matt Damon applies his boyish charm in the right doses to make the rookie lawyer a scrappy hero worth investing in. The narration provided by Baylor, is, for the most part, unnecessary.

The three stories compete for attention in the first half of the movie, but the insurance lawsuit dominates the second half, and the movie evolves as expected into a satisfying high-stakes courtroom showdown to influence the jury. Jon Voight does his part and creates in Drummond a worthwhile adversary who justifies his high fees by shredding witnesses just when Rudy starts to believe that he might gain an unlikely upper hand.

The other two legal cases, involving Miss Birdsong's will and Kelly's domestic abuse, do get short changed, and ultimately get in the way of the main narrative thrust and are almost all but discarded. Miss Birdsong's ordeal with the will is a great excuse to see Teresa Wright on the screen one last time. Kelly's wife abuse story takes a turn towards mayhem that has all the appearances of a desperate attempt to occupy Rudy with something other than the insurance firm lawsuit.

Danny DeVito, Mickey Rourke and Danny Glover add plenty of animation and some moments of humour, while late in the case Virginia Madsen and Roy Scheider make telling contributions in the courtroom.

Despite having its heart in the right place and working the big bad corporation theme to perfection, The Rainmaker lacks a killer moment of impact to differentiate it from other legal dramas. This does not make it a lesser film, just a lower profile but still enjoyable adventure in the jungles of the law.

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Movie Review: The Hours (2002)

A dense multi-era drama inspired by the life and works of Virginia Woolf, The Hours is a slow moving three character study revolving around depression and death.

After opening with Woolf (Nicole Kidman) committing suicide by drowning, the film alternates between three separate stories. In the early 1920s, Woolf is miserable living in the British countryside, struggling with writer's block and depression as she tries to write the novel Mrs. Dalloway. Her husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane) bears the brunt of her anti-social behaviour, while a visit from her sister Vanessa (Miranda Richardson) makes matters worse.

In Los Angeles of the early 1950s, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a depressed housewife reading Mrs. Dalloway. Laura is pregnant with her second child, stuck in bland suburban hell, and no longer in love with husband Dan (John C. Reilly). Laura has a sensitive and precocious five year old son (Jack Rovello), and a glamorous neighbour Kitty (Toni Collette) who is facing her own hell.

And in New York City of 2001, Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) is busy organizing a celebration and party for her lifelong friend and former lover Richard Brown (Ed Harris), a renowned author and poet suffering miserably with the late stages of AIDS. When they were lovers, Richard bestowed the title Mrs. Dalloway on Clarissa. Now Richard is deeply depressed, and forces Clarissa to question her approach to life. Clarissa's partner Sally (Allison Janney) and daughter Julia (Claire Danes) watch as Clarissa's big day disintegrates, and the appearance of Richard's former lover Louis Waters (Jeff Daniels) does not help.

Directed by Stephen Daldry, The Hours wallows in a misery of its own creation. While the three lead performances are perfect, with Kidman nabbing the Best Actress Academy Award, the film is a lengthy, unrelenting treatise on lives stalled at the dead end of severe depression. The Hours starts in a dark place and walks, slowly, into pitch blackness.

All three stories unfold over the course of one day, and Daldry cleverly weaves the emotional strings linking the three women, from the depression and death themes to visual parallels and dialogue, with Mrs. Dalloway serving as the common foundation. A vague strand of unexplored lesbian lust also oscillates across the three stories. A more physical connection ultimately emerges between Laura and Clarissa, and overall the film does just enough to maintain interest through the thick fog of despair.

Through the dense thicket of tangled negative emotions, relief comes only in the enjoyment derived from Kidman, Moore and Streep, actresses at the top of the craft bringing to life three women struggling against greater forces. Kidman sacrifices her looks with a harsh nose to simulate the common image of Woolf. Her subdued performance is filled with internal struggle and external iciness, a woman content to let her misery drip out and contaminate those closest to her.

Moore gets to reveal the least about Laura Brown, a character with hardly any other adults around her to talk to. Brown's day is centred on one major decision, a choice between seeking immediate relief or longer term opportunity. Her son appears to know more about his mother's mental state than most boys his age. Streep's Clarissa is trying to be positive, and she does her best to fend off Richard's choking negativity and carry on. But when misery comes knocking it can be relentless, and Clarissa's big day will see black clouds move across her sun.

Ultimately The Hours only finds resolution in various forms of emotional escape rather than difficult confrontation, all three women ending the day staring at future prospects that are at least as gloomy as they appeared in the morning. There are only glimmers of light, and the passing hours serve more to confirm the gathering storm of dejection.

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