Summer Movie Season: Start Your Engines

The summer movie season opens with a bang this week: Robert Downey Jr.'s return to a cinematic spotlight that seemed in danger of being extinguished forever.

(Step back, haters: Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man.)

If Iron Man is the first “tent pole” picture of the season, Made of Honor might be the first under-the-radar sleeper possibility — the Patrick Dempsey romantic comedy has the potential to grab an audience that has little interest in the bombastic action fare that will be systematically unveiled over the next four months. (Here's a somewhat discerning list of my most anticipated, largely big-budget and high-profile, movies of the summer.)

I’ve yet to watch either of this week's big studio releases — each of their advanced screenings was after our print deadline — but I intend to at least catch Downey Jr.’s superhero act before the weekend is out.

Curiously, we also have a quartet of art-house offerings this week: My Blueberry Nights, the critically lambasted American debut of gifted Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai; Tom McCarthy’s nuanced immigration drama The Visitor; Vadim Perelman’s Life Before Her Eyes; and Cao Hamburger’s The Year My Parents Went on Vacation.

McCarthy’s slow-burning drama tackles a timely subject (immigration) with more subtlety and effectiveness than just about anything that’s hit theaters since the debate became a hysterical political-season wedge issue.

Powered by Richard Jenkins’ quietly penetrating performance as a sad, widowed college professor who unexpectedly becomes intertwined with a Syrian drummer (Haaz Sleiman) in Manhattan, The Visitor makes its points without resorting to either technical flourishes or flashy narrative gymnastics. It investigates the issue’s many complexities via an organically humanist approach that makes the political films of recent vintage seem more heavy-handed than they already are. Can you hear me Rendition?

There’s a devastating moment near The Visitor’s climax in which a helpless, perplexed Jenkins looks through a Plexiglas window at a security guard and asks a simple question: “Do you hear me?” He is, like many people caught up in this burgeoning issue, still waiting for an answer.

Perelman’s Life Before Her Eyes picks up where his House of Sand and Fog left off — another super-serious investigation of how one’s emotional state leads them to make rash, often dangerous decisions and how one’s past always informs their present.

Uma Thurman plays Diana, a suburban mother struggling to keep things together when the 15th anniversary of a Columbine-esque high school shooting leads to her to have painful flashbacks. Evan Rachel Wood plays the younger, high school age Diana as a brash, adventurous girl with a poetic sense of life’s absurdities and the kind of searching, expressive eyes can’t help but enrapture everyone in their wake — including Perelman, his camera and the audience.

(Just try to defy my enrapturing gaze: Evan Rachel Wood in Life Before Her Eyes.)

The young Diana yearns to transcend the constraints of a typical suburban life, but that changes one day when a fellow student brings a semi-automatic weapon to school and begins to systematically off various students, culminating in a confrontation between the killer, Diana and her best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri) in the woman’s restroom.

Perelman’s non-linear narrative is aided by a hypnotic use of editing and sound. He pivots between the two Dianas seamlessly, but the overall effect is too detached and ethereal for such a visceral narrative hook. And the metaphysical mixing of “realities” becomes wearisome by the film’s obvious finale.

Life Before Her Eyes is a glossy, beautifully shot contraption that needs a little more grit to fully get under one’s skin.

(Perelman stopped by Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment to discuss the film.)

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation struck me as an artier, more exotic Home Alone set in an early-’70s Jewish neighborhood in Sao Paulo instead of an early-’90s upscale American suburb. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its pleasures, but just that they’re of the modest variety.

My Blueberry Nights didn’t have an advanced local screening, which is likely due the poor critical response it got during its Cannes debut last year and its subsequent U.S. opening a few months back. I’m a big Wong Kar Wai fan, but I’m still not sure why he felt compelled to make an English-language film — especially an American road movie. And why cast Pop singer Norah Jones in the lead? Most reviews have been critical of its trite dialogue and Wong’s apparent tone-deaf take on Americana, but I’ll reserve judgment until I actually see it.

(Kent Jones had some typically well-considered thoughts on the subject in CinemaScope after seeing it at Cannes.)

(Why me?: Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights.)

Let’s hope it lasts more than a week at The Esquire, which would be about as long as Wong’s last film, the endlessly fascinating 2046.

— Jason Gargano

Comments

[1minutefilmreview]

Loved the film. We're Wong's fans too.

[C.A. Mac]

Saw Blueberry. Left disappointed when it came to the writing and the storyline. Jude Law was good though...as always, that guy can really convey some deep emotion through the slightest expression, which is a good thing, since there was a lot of expressing in this film. J. Law is talented, I think. Norah Jones looked good, but she needed more words to work with. And I don't think Natalie Portman fit that part for some reason. So I was looking forward to this film, but left feeling like I needed to see another one.