The Circle

Director: James Ponsoldt
Starring: Emma Watson,  Tom Hanks, John Boyega, Karen Gillan, Ellar Coltrane, Patton Oswalt, Glenne Headly, Bill Paxton
Running Time:
Rating: PG-13

★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

Within James Ponsoldt's adaptation of Dave Egger's 2013 dystopian sci-fi novel, The Circle, resides an idea, and sometimes even a reality, so timely and captivating that the film literally forgets to anything with it. Starting strongly, it builds its promising premise one step at a time, methodically mapping out a clear direction the story should take and where everyone wants to see it go. It's one of those rare cases where predictability is desired because the concept is so rich it almost feels as if most of the work is done. Unfortunately for us, as viewers, it's an eye-opening reminder of just how false that assumption is. No concept on its own is ever good enough to carry an entire picture. So just as The Circle seems to get going, it ends. Or rather, it just closes. Complete stoppage. In fact, the film feels so abruptly unresolved, even when the credits started rolling, I was still unsure it concluded. With a certifiable treasure trove of unexplored material left, it may be the cruelest example yet of a movie not being what it's about, but how.

Armed with a talented cast, a superb writer/director, and screenplay co-penned by the author himself, it fails to do something that seems almost ridiculously simple: Raise the stakes. The film's very existence promises that, as we're teased throughout that it'll dive into those deep, dark, morally compromising waters occupied by the likes of 1984 or A Brave New World, its obvious inspirations. And the timing couldn't have possibly been better for it. But instead, we're left nodding our heads in agreement at all the timely, relevant ideas the movie contains, appreciating something that more closely resembles a documentary about what a great movie about those ideas would look and feel like. Two hours of set-up with minimal payoff. Strangely, it might be one of the best recent remake candidates, as it would be tempting to see what the same cast could do with a different script that lets them fully follow through on all the ideas presented, and frustratingly left on the table, relegated to our imaginations.

When struggling customer service rep Mae Holland (Emma Watson) is contacted by her friend Annie (Karen Gillan) about a potential job opening at the enormous, Google-like, California-based tech company she works for called The Circle, it seems to be the perfect opportunity. With her father, Vinnie (Bill Paxton in his final role) suffering from multiple sclerosis as mom Bonnie (Glenn Headly) provides around-the-clock care, Mae's personal life is in a bit of turmoil, tempered somewhat by a recent reunion with ex-boyfriend, Mercer (Boyhood's Ellar Coltrane). After apparently acing what's best described as a bizarre interview, Mae gets a job in The Circle's "Customer Experience" department, where she learns the importance of maintaining a strong and very public social media presence within the company.

The mastermind behind this entire operation is CEO Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks), who with right-hand man and co-founder Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt), envisions a world of complete transparency with his introduction of a program called SeeChange, and wants rapidly rising employee Mae to be the face of it. But when co-worker and social networking pioneer Ty Lafitte (John Boyega) keys her in to the company's potentially nefarious motives, she must make a choice that puts her personal beliefs and the privacy rights of citizens directly at odds with an opportunity to be at the forefront of a new digital revolution.

As a reflection of the world in which we currently live and where it seems to be heading, the script hits it right on the head, successfully envisioning a fictional tech company nearly identical to and inspired by both Google and Apple. With a base of operations more closely resembling a laid-back university campus than the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company, Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, The End of the Tour) really gets the aesthetic  of what this environment would look and feel like, as well as the excitement of being a part of it. That this is happening right now and the film's strongest aspect is that with its emphasis on social media obsession and the elimination of privacy, not a whole lot of what occurs seems even the slightest bit exaggerated. If anything, it could stand to go more over-the-top, which is exactly where we think things are going.

In capturing the wide-eyed exuberance of a reserved girl overwhelmed by her new surroundings, Emma Watson's performance as Mae, while fine, seems to be a bigger achievement in casting than anything else since she (like most everyone else) is never pushed to do the heavy lifting you'd think would accompany a story this ripe with possibility. Of course, Eamon and The Circle have less than philanthropic intentions with the rollout of this new technology, which essentially monitors every individual 24/7 with hidden cameras, and it's to the screenplay's credit that it does at least address the pros and cons of this technology, as well as its moral implications. Unfortunately, it doesn't get around to showing any of them, at least in an impactful enough manner to kick the narrative into the next gear.

When Mae becomes this social media superstar, embracing her role within the company and supporting its mission, the film, and Watson's performance, are its strongest, reflecting Truman Show-like themes that explore the dangers and thrills of living an entirely public life, accompanied by some great on screen visuals. And as she becomes Eamon's pet project, that was absolutely the time to take things to the next sinister level, as you could easily rattle off about four of five steps the writers could have taken to make this company seem like a lethal threat. What they're planning certainly warrants it, posing a big enough threat to be endangering the lives of anyone questioning the organization's purpose, especially Mae, who's ascended into the inner Circle. Why not tamper with her father's medical equipment? Or do something with or to John Boyega's mysterious character, whose dropped just as quickly as he's introduced.

When something does finally occur that could be considered "dangerous," it's essentially an accident involving a character whose relationship to the protagonist was presented in such a muddled, ambiguous way from the moment he first appeared on screen, that it hardly connects. A sub-plot involving dissension between Mae and her friend Annie over the company's agenda isn't developed at all and seems to come out of nowhere.The biggest loss stemming from the script's faults is a failure to properly utilize Tom Hanks, here given the rarest of opportunities to sink his teeth into what could have been one of the actor's most complex roles had the material supported him.

It's almost painful to watch Hanks' scenes since his magnificent channeling of a scheming, Steve Jobs-like CEO, whose greed convinces him he knows what's best for the world, is basically undercut by an uneventful screenplay. Watching him on stage in his corporate presentations, you can only imagine the result had this gone to that dark place, allowing him to really cut loose and get inside the head of a potentially fascinating on screen villain. Instead, he's forced to provide nearly all of this himself, but it's a good bet most will still be thoroughly impressed with how much he does with it. And already well established by now as a surprisingly strong dramatic supporting presence, Patton Oswalt sits it out on the sidelines, mostly forced to stand around giving stern looks. This all leads to a final act let-down, as you could envision something similar to this ending actually working had the groundwork been properly laid leading into it. What we're left with feels more like an extended teaser for a more compelling project.

While assessing the movie you didn't see rather than what's on screen is rarely a good idea, what happens when most of its running time is comprised of reminders of that better, unseen film? It seems as if every scene unintentionally teases us with what we could have been, and despite this being one of my most anticipated releases of the year, it's hard to look at it as anything other than a disappointment, regardless of expectations. That indie-leaning Ponsoldt is such a great director probably accounts for nearly half those expectations, making it easy to assume that the biggest, most mainstream effort of his career was hampered by a studio that lacked the guts to explore the potentially polarizing, but compelling themes Eggers' put forth in his novel. For The Circle to be successful, it had to go dark, and use the platform it was given to intelligently exploit some very real and timely fears. By never fully addressing the ideas at its core, we're left with a final product that feels less like a paranoid thriller than a tame corporate training video.
       

The Spectacular Now, Fruitvale Station

The Spectactular Now  
Director: James Ponsoldt 
Starring: Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Brie Larson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kyle Chandler
Running Time: 95 min.
Rating: R

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

High school coming-of-age movies have fallen a considerable height from the glory days of John Hughes, where teens were treated as three-dimensional people viewers of any age could root for and care about. A brief description of The Spectacular Now would easily fool anyone into thinking it's joining the recent scrap pile. Bad boy meets good girl and she has to redeem him. But director James Ponsoldt and (500) Days of Summer screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber flip that premise on its head, delivering a smart, sensitive drama that doesn't pander to its audience, while insightfully observing real life problems without a hint of manipulation or contrivance. Each decision feels carefully considered, with so much resting on the standout performances of the two leads, who are given the opportunity to play flawed, likable characters we want to see happy, independent of whether they end up together or not.

Miles Teller plays popular, but unambitious high school senior Sutter Keely, whose daily life consists of an endless stream of drinking and partying, with little thought given to his future. In a rare touch for the genre, Sutter's vices don't look fun in the least, depicted instead as a serious addiction that's taking over. He's basically a teenage alcoholic. His equally popular girlfriend (Brie Larson) dumps him and it's gotten to the point that even his mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) can't put up with it anymore.

After a late-night partying binge he wakes up on the lawn of classmate Aimee Finnicky (Shailene Woodley), a pretty but socially invisible "girl next door" who reads manga and has a paper route. They start seeing each other. Sort of. That their relationship can't easily be classified because of how different they are is one of the film's biggest strengths and what follows is complicated, but in an authentic, messy kind of way.

Upon Sutter realizing he's actually falling hard for this girl, his thoughts shift to him not being deserving of her and there's this intriguing mystery that develops involving Sutter's long-absent dad (a brilliant Kyle Chandler). It's a supporting performance perfectly calibrated to subvert and challenge expectations of not only the character and story, but the actor playing him. Even seemingly minor players like Sutter's boss, Dan (Bob Odenkirk) are so richly drawn in their brief appearances you'd imagine a film focusing on them would be just as rewarding. As Sutter's older sister Holly, Mary Elizabeth Winstead conveys that there's even more to her than originally thought, the character's snobby demeanor merely a defense mechanism masking the emotional pain of their upbringing.    

Ponsoldt knows not to try too hard and at a turning point where everything could have flown off the rails, he resists the temptation, choosing even more honesty. That this takes place in unnamed "Smalltown, U.S.A" in an unidentifiable era brings a universality to the story, allowing it to exist in a timeless vaccum. No one will be laughing at the music and clothes years down the line, as is usually the case with most other high school movies. What will be remembered is how Teller and Woodley take familiar character types and make them feel completely fresh, him with offbeat goofy charm and her with a realness and authenticity that never come off as "acting." And just watch what she does in that killer final scene. She's too good to be toiling away in YA franchises, even if this was ironically adapted from a young adult novel. Let's just pretend the giant check she's cashing for Divergent is really for this.

Fruitvale Station
Director: Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Melonie Diaz, Octavia Spencer
Running Time: 85 min.
Rating: R

★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

Despite certain misgivings I have about about the film itself, none of them affect my feelings about Michael B. Jordan's performance as Oscar Grant, the young man shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police at Oakland's Fruitvale Station on New Year's 2009. If anything, I wish that first-time writer/director Ryan Coogler's effort had the subtly and nuance of Jordan's performance, which sets a high bar the picture can't quite reach. There's little doubt that Oscar Grant was far from perfect. He was only human. And there's also little doubt what happened on that train platform was an avoidable tragedy with more than enough blame to go around, along with some unfortunate coincidences and bad luck. To say the transit cops handled the situation poorly would be a gross understatement, but it's hard not to feel Coogler's trying to unnecessarily stack the deck. The facts tell the story, yet he insists on going beyond that, to the point that by the film's finish it almost feels like we've gotten a public service announcement.

The film follows the last day of the 22-year-old Californian's life before being fatally shot on that train platform, circumventing the rocky relationship he has with his girlfriend and the mother of their infant daughter, Sophina (Melonie Diaz, really strong), and his own mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer). It paints a picture of an ex-con trying to do right and get on the straight and narrow for his family. For all we know much of it may have gone down as depicted. But certain details feel too convenient, with Coogler going so far out of his way to avoid portraying his subject as a saint that he ends up doing exactly that.

There's an early scene in which Oscar tries to save a dying dog hit by a car. Besides the incident being drenched in heavy-handed symbolism and blatant foreshadowing, I could have done without animal cruelty (real or simulated) to show us Oscar's a good guy. And just to level things out we also get a scene where he threatens his boss. No one thinks this young man "deserved" what eventually happens so it's perplexing that we're being lectured on his morality with contrived situations. Maybe they happened. Maybe not. But it rings false in the context of this film.

It's when we finally get to that train platform that things start to feel real. How the situation escalates to the point it does is so fascinating and disturbing that you almost wish the whole movie was this incident in real time, if it wasn't so difficult to watch. Coogler's clearly a skilled director, making excellent use of shaky cam to give us a found footage feel and show various points of view from different witnesses. Certain details from earlier pay off in surprising ways, creating a storm of events that tragically converge at the station. The last half hour earns its emotional response by doing away with the editorializing and grandstanding and just showing what happened .

Anyone who's seen Friday Night Lights knows how great an actor Michael B. Jordan is and so much of that natural charisma and quiet intensity is on display here. We care about Oscar because of his performance, one that too often must battle to overcome the script's flaws. It's a problem when a film is based on true events and you can't believe much of what happened even it it's completely true. The last shot reveals the film's true intentions. And that's the roadblock when tackling a controversial real life issue. Judgments and intentions are best checked at the door.

Smashed

Director: James Ponsoldt
Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul, Octavia Spencer, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Mary Kay Place, Kyle Gallner
Running Time: 81 min.
Rating: R

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★) 

There are certain actors and actresses you're just a fan of. It would probably be easier to deny it and pretend I go into every movie with complete objectivity, but the fact is that I'm much more likely to watch and appreciate a film starring performers I like and have followed throughout their careers. I want them to make smart choices that confirm my opinions of their talent, and if they don't, it's disappointing. Three of them co-star in James Ponsoldt's Smashed, a film about alcoholism that's really about a descent into sobriety. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul and Nick Offerman appearing together in a single film reading from a phone book probably would have been enough for me, but here's Winstead giving an award caliber central performance as an alcoholic, Paul as her immature, unsupportive husband and Offerman proving he can inhabit a character that's about as far removed from Parks and Rec's Ron Swanson as possible. On top of that, the film itself is nearly perfect in a straightforward, no-nonsense way that may not be immediately apparent. It plays honestly, but without judgement.

Winstead plays Kate Hannah, a schoolteacher who also happens to be an alcoholic. We see in early scenes that, as the former, she's amazingly kind and patient with the kids and pretty much every parent's dream of who they'd trust with their children. Until, hungover from another night of partying, she vomits all over the classroom floor. The kids ask her if she's pregnant and, panicking, she to lies them and a supportive Principal Barnes (Megan Mullally). It's likely Kate's been an alcoholic for a while but is just now starting to come around and realize it. She's not there yet, but getting close. Hardly helping is her equally hard partying husband, Charlie (Paul) whose complete obliviousness to their situation and terminal complacency are the only qualities making him seem like he doesn't have as much of a problem as she does. Kate's only real support comes from the soft-spoken vice principal Dave Davies (Offerman), a recovering addict not only willing to cover up her lie because he has a big crush, but also willing to take her with him to AA meetings where she meets her sponsor, Jenny (Octavia Spencer). On the road to recovery, Kate discovers sobriety is slowly tearing her marriage apart, as a still drinking Charlie feels left behind and a slew of other problems start to surface.  

It seems to be a commonly held belief about young people that their drinking and drug use will never escalate to alcoholism or addiction, and it carries over into movies where the middle-aged tend to be the most serious substance abusers. It's almost as if young adults are expected to be doing it, and, as a result, should be able to handle it just fine. At the beginning of this film you'd almost be forgiven into thinking so, until a moment comes that's frightening in how well Winstead sells it. Waking up on the street with no idea where she is or how she got there, it's the first time Kate seems legitimately scared and mortified of what she's capable of when drinking. During a memorable sequence scored to Richard and Linda Thompson's "I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight," we see Kate spend the night smoking crack with a hooker, and it's after that she realizes it's the final straw. But really it's just the beginning. Short-term, her decision to embrace sobriety surprisingly causes more problems than it solves in her marriage and life, while bringing dormant ones to the surface, such as an already strained relationship with her mother (Mary Kay Place).

There were already strong hints of Winstead promise in 2011's The Thing prequel and now seeing this it'll be easier to understand why I suspected that role in Scott Pilgrim was way beneath her. This confirms it. It's almost become a long-running joke that playing an alcoholic is every actor's dream since it invariably leads to awards recognition of some sort, but there's a reason for that. It's difficult to do believably. She doesn't squander the opportunity, knowing that drunk people often behave like delusional sober people, completely ignorant to everything going on around them. And it's the mode she's in for the entire first half of the film, which is no small feat. But it's when the drinking stops that her performance really kicks into high gear, as Kate's eaten with guilt over her sobriety driving a wedge through her marriage. She also has to ward off the advances of confidant and co-worker, Dave, though using the term "advances" is probably stretching it given his struggles talking to women. Offerman leaves all traces of the manly, breakfast obsessed Ron Swanson behind in a really subdued, low-key dramatic performance that still doesn't completely abandon the dry sense of humor he's known for. It proves, unsurprisingly, that he's capable of other things.

Aaron Paul plays Charlie as a good guy, but also one stuck in a complacent holding pattern. In this way, he resembles Jesse Pinkman of Breaking Bad's early seasons (right down to the substance abuse and playing video games on the couch) to the point that he'll probably be accused of just playing a variation on his TV character. But this speaks more to our familiarity with Paul than the actual performance, which is surprising in how he cedes so much of the spotlight to his co-star. Now that Kate's sober, there may no longer be a place for him in her life and they'll have to take stock as to whether they ever had anything that went beyond drinking and partying. We also wonder if she can move past how unforgivably unsupportive he's been in her recovery. But much like Flight, the other 2012 film dealing with alcoholism, Kate won't really be clean until she admits she isn't and takes responsibility for her lies.

Watching Smashed, I couldn't help but wonder how badly it would have turned out if a major studio had released it, interfering to make it more exciting or dumbing it down so a depressing topic like alcoholism could be more cheery and accessible. Thankfully, we'll never see that version and I'm given the opportunity to see three of my favorites given free reign to just tear into this meaningful material with everything they've got. It also marks the first time I've seen a movie character pulled over for driving drunk...on a bicycle. First-time director Ponsoldt makes it happen but it's easy believe the hard part was over once this cast was set in place. It wasn't until the end that I realized Paul and Offerman don't share a single scene together. And that feels strangely like the right call. For the story's purposes, there's no need, so they don't.  But the film ultimately belongs to Winstead, revealing dimensions to her abilities even her biggest fans couldn't have anticipated. And that she does it opposite two of TV's best, only makes the accomplishment seem that much greater.