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Reviews

Review: ‘Adopt a Highway’ Saved by Ethan Hawke’s Strong Performance

The first few minutes of writer and director Logan Marshall-Green’s Adopt a Highway spends its time following blustery-eyed convict Russell (Ethan Hawke) during the final hours before being released after a 21 year stint from a California prison.

Compared to the usual sequence where most films deposit their parolee outside the gates and allow the euphoria of freedom to be the guiding sentiment, Marshall-Green documents the utter confusion and numbing bureaucracy that unfolds as Hawke just tries to make sense of his new surroundings. At one point, the prison guard tells him to start walking faster, implying that maybe he doesn’t want to “get out or something.” For a man who’s been institutionalized and probably told where and when to walk for more than two-thirds of his adult life, it’s easy to see why he’d lag behind.

The confusion doesn’t end there, however, and it’s a testament to Hawke’s vivid characterization that Adopt a Highway grabs hold of you and creates a striking portrait of a man adrift in a world he no longer understands. Barely speaking more than a handful of words for the first half of the film and making even less eye contact with anyone he meets (especially his various run-ins with police officers and his parole officer) the film leans towards low-key thriller aspects. Just when and how will this three-strike parolee mess up?

This is the simmering tension that hovers over the first half of the film, even as it breaks into a scraggly comedy of sorts when Russell tries to acclimate back into society. His erasure from the world is never more evident than when he walks into an internet cafe and explains that he needs an email for the necessary parolee paperwork. After a bit of mumbling explanation, the cafe employee’s reaction is to want a selfie with a man who owns no cell phone and doesn’t hold the first clue as to how the internet works.

The amusing tone is soon squelched when this new-found technology delivers the message to Russell of his father’s death years ago. Struggling to keep it together, Adopt a Highway then dials up the temperature as it continues to throw hard-scrabbled energies of the world at Russell, none more so fantastic than something he finds hidden in a dumpster behind his work place. It’s this out-of-left-straw plot device that serves as the one that breaks the camel’s back and sets Russell literally running from his dead-end prospects of a three-strike criminal.

As Russell sets out on a long journey towards something redemptive, however, the film loses steam. In its aimlessness, which often frees up and livens films when they break the shackles of confinement and hit the open road in search of something elusive, Adopt a Highway struggles. Even the fleeting relationship he develops with a fellow female bus traveler (Elaine Hendrix), who’s seemingly running towards or away from the similar pangs in life, the film feels strained.

But perhaps the biggest struggle of all lies in the film’s finale. Following forced logic involving a plot strand that, finally, changed Russell’s life, it’s a development that strives for serendipitous emotional release but ends up as confused magic realism instead. Logan-Marshall establishes his disdain for a law that sent a young man away for so long for something that’s now served over the counter in California easier than lobster rolls in the opening credits, so it’s easy to see why he’d want to end on a happier note for his sacrificial lamb, but the karma feels overcooked.

As frustrating as the script is, what ultimately makes Adopt a Highway still enjoyable is the immersive performance of Ethan Hawke. He creates a believable and empathetic figure out of a film that seems determined to sideswipe him with unbelievability at every turn.

The film opens in limited theatrical release, VOD and digital HD on Friday, November 1.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews

Review: ‘First Reformed’

dfn-first_reformed-300Knowing the personal history of a filmmaker isn’t necessary, but at times, it can be helpful. In the case of writer-director Paul Schrader, it’s almost essential in understanding the buried waves of faith, guilt and reconciliation that’s been at the heart of his films for several decades now.

Raised as a Dutch Calvinist, he came to films later in his youth. Once he discovered their power, the religious themes embedded in him became a central force in his work, endlessly working and re-working the conflict of man and a higher authority in fascinating and cathartic ways. In his films with Martin Scorsese — especially his screenplays for Taxi Driver (1976) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1987) — Schrader authored some of the most powerful explorations of faith and man’s inherent struggle with nature.

All of this is to say First Reformed is yet another attempt for the director to assuage some of those complicated feelings. And if this sounds especially challenging, it is. And quite the heavy film. But not one without its merits, whose supremely unnerving and stringent ideas has stuck with me for several weeks now after first seeing it.

Starring Ethan Hawke as minister Ernst Toller of the antiquated First Reformed Church, he’s a priest going through some especially hard times. A crisis of faith is an understatement. Dutifully pouring whiskey into his cereal each morning and drinking even more throughout his mostly isolated days, Toller’s collapsing worldview doesn’t get any easier when he meets a young couple in his dwindling audience.

The wife (played wonderfully by Amanda Seyfried) asks him to speak with her husband (Philip Ettinger) about his recent depression. With a baby on the way, she’s naturally concerned, especially after he expresses the wish to have the baby aborted since his experience with environmental activist groups has left him hopeless and lost about Earth’s future. You know, global warming and all.

It doesn’t take long to enlist Hawke’s conflicted priest to the husband’s point of view, even after the husband takes drastic measures. Hawke’s Reverend Toller spirals further into doubt, alcoholism and confused sentiments. Add to the fact he may have terminal cancer and is recording all his thoughts in a disturbing stream of consciousness voice-over narration, and Hawke delivers a mesmerizing performance, rife with angst and twitching body language. Portraying someone sliding into a dark mirror image of himself is always tricky, but he makes it believable and his voice-over, which serves as the anchor of the film’s mordant view, lulls one into a state of slight identifiable agreement. Even when things go off the rails, we sort of understand.

Firmly rooted in Schrader’s lifelong exploration of man’s tortured rhetoric with his spirituality, it also comes the closest to Schrader cribbing a Robert Bresson film. Call this his Diary of a Country Priest (1951). If Schrader has been mimicking Bresson’s transcendental style for decades now, First Reformed is almost a distillation of everything from the cancer Travis Bickle believes he has in Taxi Driver (1976) to the simple “man in a room” idea Schrader has often curated most of his scripts around. If nothing else, First Reformed is exciting for the way in which he’s been working out the Bresson kinks since the mid-70’s.

Shot in the same austere style as the film’s tone, I think repeat viewings will only enrich this film. Getting through the first half, which is basically a series of very dense conversations about God, free will, man’s place in nature and other theories of relationships, can be exhausting, but it’s these contemplative moments that usher in the hyperbolic and manic emotions of the film’s final third. First Reformed exemplifies how even the most pious can be worn away over time by the vagaries of human nature, and then brought back from the precipice when they least expect it. Heavy, indeed.

(Portions of this review were previously published when the film premiered at the 2018 Dallas International Film Festival.)

First Reformed opens in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on Friday June 1.

Festival Coverage, Perspectives

Festival Files: 2018 Dallas International Film Festival, Dispatch #3

If Saturday in the sport of golf is known as moving day, then Saturday at DIFF was known as premier day. Bringing a variety of mid-level studio titles to the festival certainly drew in the crowds and murmur. I skipped the Mister Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, since it opens in just a few weeks hence. By all accounts, I missed a communal theater experience awash in tears and feelgood euphoria in these dark times. Two other big premiers were on my radar, however.

One of these was Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. Probably the polar opposite of euphoric and feelgood — although some decipher its delirious finale as something close to soul redeeming — the auteur writer and director’s film comes completely “as advertised,” which is to say very challenging and quite heavy, man. I suppose I could petulantly blame my late showing after a long day of three other films as the reason I didn’t totally connect with its wavelength, but that would be disingenuous.

There’s much to like in Schrader’s stringent vision of a priest (Ethan Hawke) having a major crisis of faith after coming in contact with a young couple. The wife (played wonderfully by Amanda Seyfried) asks Hawke to speak with her husband about his recent depression. With a baby on the way, she’s naturally concerned, especially after he expresses the wish to have the baby aborted, since his experience with environmental activist groups has left him hopeless and lost about the Earth’s future. You know, global warming and all.

It doesn’t take long to enlist Hawke’s conflicted priest to the husband’s point of view, even after the husband takes drastic measures. Hawke’s Reverend Toller spirals further into doubt, alcoholism and confused sentiments. Add to the fact he may have terminal cancer and is recording all his thoughts in a disturbing stream of consciousness voice-over narration, and Hawke delivers a mesmerizing performance, rife with angst and twitching body language. Portraying someone sliding into a dark mirror image of himself is always tricky, but he makes it believable and his voice-over, which serves as the anchor of the film’s mordant view, lulls one into a state of slight identifiable agreement. Even when things go off the rails, we sort of understand.

Firmly rooted in Schrader’s lifelong exploration of man’s tortured rhetoric with his spirituality, it also comes the closest to Schrader cribbing a Robert Bresson film. Call this his Diary of a Country Priest (1951). If Schrader has been mimicking Bresson’s transcendental style for decades now, First Reformed is almost a distillation of everything from the cancer Travis Bickle believes he has in Taxi Driver (1976) to the simple “man in a room” idea Schrader has often curated most of his scripts around. If nothing else, First Reformed is exciting for the way in which he’s been working out the Bresson kinks since the mid-70’s.

Shot in the same austere style as the film’s tone, I think repeat viewings will only enrich this film. Getting through the first half, which is basically a series of very dense conversations about God, free will, man’s place in nature and other theories of relationships, can be exhausting. And wow, the conversations after the screening definitely skewed the spectrum from virulent hatred to shaken admiration. I fell pretty much in between both.

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The other big star-studded event of the day included Susanna White’s Woman Walks Ahead. Boasting the most recognizable cast of the festival, including Jessica Chastain, Sam Rockwell, Bill Camp, Ciaran Hinds and Michael Greyeyes, the film is an interesting history lesson wrapped in a very cliched and uninteresting film.

Following the travails of a widowed East Coast woman who bravely travels to the West in order to paint the portrait of Sitting Bull (and becoming an activist in the process), the film features solid acting, but it’s so acute in hitting all the right beats and playing out the traditional themes of expansionist guilt and staunchly-drawn lines of good and evil that it loses sight of any originality. The largely middle-aged crowd ate it up, though, so summer arthouse box office prospects look promising.

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Another rare misfire at the festival so far has been Anthony Pedone’s An American In Texas. A mosaic of life in the small coastal Texas town of Victoria in 1990, it’s a film that achieves a strong command of time and place around its ensemble cast. What doesn’t work is its jumble of ideas, ranging from anti war sentiments to small town dead-end-drive malaise that becomes overbearing as the film winds down.

The malaise comes largely from its group of punk rock bandmates, each struggling with their own throttled existence and levels of parental disinterest. A romance develops between Chad (James Paxton) and new girl in town Kara (Charlotte Best). Chad’s other friends in the band, including Paul (J.R. Villareal), Zac (Sam Dillon), and Billy (Tony Cavelero), spend most of their days avoiding the looming spectre of the oil refineries that their parents work at, choosing to drop acid and play unique games of smashing up the interiors of houses. Of course, it’s all fun and games until real consequences enter the picture.

Being a labor of love for writer-director Pedone for years and arising from his own experiences in the city of Victoria, it’s justifiable to see An American In Texas as the unwieldy picture it is because the sheer amount of exorcising Pedone has done for his youthful time there. I just wish it honed some of the raggedness into stronger characterizations.

The 2018 Dallas International Festival runs from May 3-10 at the Landmark Magnolia in the West Village. Check http://www.dallasfilm.org for schedule and tickets.

 

 

 

 

Reviews

Review: ‘In a Valley of Violence’

dfn-in_valley_of_violence_300If there is a mantra the movies have taught us, it’s that the easiest way to transform an ordinary or seemingly hapless man into a well-oiled killing machine intent on wiping out everyone is to mess with his vehicle or kill his best girl and or dog. From that single minded theme comes Ti West’s latest film, In a Valley of Violence. And since it’s a Western, set in the town of Denton (Texas?) in the mid nineteenth century, a car is out of the question.

The ordinary man here is Paul (Ethan Hawke), a possible war deserter who happens to camp in the wrong wind-swept patch of land. After effectively showing his quick-wittedness towards a thief, Paul comes into contact with a group of yokels who seem to pride themselves on bullying any strangers to their small canyon town. The early suspense is built upon our knowledge of Paul’s prowess with a gun, leaving everyone else in the film to discover just how deadly he can be.

Led by the loquacious Gilly (James Ransone), Paul soon becomes the aim of the gang’s torment, which doesn’t stop even once he agrees to quietly leave town. The fact that Gilly is also the son of the town’s marshal (John Travolta) infinitely bogs down the cause and effect ratio as well.

The first half of the film establishes the concrete sides of good and evil. Gilly and his troupe, including one of them played by indie director-actor Larry Fessenden, who always brings an off-kilter edge to his roles, certainly make us hate them. The second half devolves into violent revenge mode, the only question being raised as to who (if any) will make it out alive. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to savor in the film.

A supreme idolator of genre, filmmaker West has always managed to infuse his pieces with a wry sense of modernity. In his horror films, especially The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, he took a well-tread genre and not only elicited genuine scares from it, but captured an atmospheric Polaroid of the original films and their faded glories. That in and of itself felt organic. Attempting to accomplish the same with the Western, he’s failed. Instead of bringing anything new to the table, In a Valley of Violence feels like an inert homage with splashes of (already) retro Tarantino copying a Peckinpah film.

The portions of the film that do work however, lie in the performance of John Travolta. His marshal is acutely aware of the stupidity both sides are slowly sinking into and his attempts at maintaining the peace while asserting his authority as a father-figure are entertaining. His final scene, standing in between two men intent on killing each other, is an exit for the ages.

Also amusing is that aforementioned flash of modernity given to the two lone women in the film, sisters Mary Anne (Taissa Farmiga) and Ellen (Karen Gillan). Just as the battle lines have been drawn in the streets, so is it between the hearts of these two. Ellen is engaged to Gilly while Mary Anne breathlessly falls for the new-in-town drifter Paul after nursing his wounds. The way the two banter and fly around their largely-vacant hotel home, huffing and puffing teenage retorts and jealous glares reminds one of a gloriously staged TV sitcom.

Yet, those fleeting moments of life wedged between the dirge of gallows humor, death and revenge can’t save In a Valley of Violence. Like the stone-faced Paul, it’s a film that starts out one place and ends exactly where you know it will. It’s homage and Western pastiche and that’s all. There’s no “there” there. It’s also a film that deserves its disclaimer that “no animal was harmed during the filming.”

In a Valley of Violence opens in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on Friday, October 21 at the AMC Mesquite 30. It also begins playing on VOD platforms the same day.

 

 

Reviews

Review: ‘Before Midnight’ Captures the Complex Frailties of Long-Term Love

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Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater's 'Before Midnight'
Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Midnight’

Falling in love is a unique and beautiful experience. Falling out of love is complicated and painful and messy, and no one likes to talk about it much in the movies; it’s far easier to examine the wreckage than to try and prevent it.

Eighteen years after Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) first met — see 1995’s Before Sunrise — and nine years after they met again — see 2004’s Before Sunset — the new film Before Midnight finds the couple at another crossroads in their relationship. They have been together for nearly nine years; Jesse broke free from an unhappy marriage and moved from Chicago to join Celine in Paris, but visiting with his son in Greece for the summer has made Jesse wish he could be a closer, more constant presence in the young teenage boy’s life.

The crisis erupts as the couple quietly converses on a drive back from a local airport to their vacation accommodations, their twin daughters asleep in the back seat. It’s a bravura sequence, an unbroken shot nearly 15 minutes in length, that tracks the conversational twists and turns leading inexplicably yet almost inevitably from convivial generalities to bitter recriminations, the kind of conversation that begins with ‘hello there, lover’ and somehow ends with ‘goodbye forever!’

Despite their obvious love and affection for one another, Jesse and Celine are also harboring deep-seated resentments; unresolved conflicts have festered and chipped away at the foundation of their relationship. Rather than completing each other’s sentences in a loving manner, they quickly jump to conclusions, full-blown, worst-case scenarios that surely have a basis in past disagreements. It’s like a small crack in a big window that slowly, slowly grows; unless they can resolve the root issues, their relationship is doomed to failure.

Once again, director Richard Linklater collaborated with Hawke and Delpy on the intricately-constructed screenplay, which is filled with rich language and thick currents of discursive group discussions and the aforementioned intimate conversations. Often, the talk dips into a vat of simmering relationship waters; stay too long, and severe burns and disfigurement threaten.

The tension that results is more stomach-churning than any summer blockbuster, mainly because it feels so familiar to anyone who has been in a relationship for any length of time. Love is tenuous in the best of times, and in the worst of times it can mean salvation — or damnation if it rips apart. All we can do is try and keep it going.

Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy understand that. Before Midnight may not be the easiest movie to watch, especially if it strikes too close to home, but it’s one of the best of the year. Wrestling with love has never seemed so essential.

Before Midnight opens on Friday, June 7, at the Landmark Magnolia, AMC NorthPark, and Angelika Plano.