Craiger’s Cinema Corner

**1/2  out of  ****

Question: Can a brilliant performance trump a mediocre script? 

That’s among the toughest dilemmas the film critic faces and THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA readily typifies it.  Meryl Streeps’ Miranda Priestly emerges as one of the more memorable characters in any film from 2006.  She’s the editor of Runway magazine, the most influential publication of its sort in the world and she rules over her domain like a dictatorial empress.  Streep parades around with pomp, circumstance, and a nasty - oftentimes repellent - level of indignation for those under her. She’s not a cast iron b-i-t-c-h, but a sterling silver one.  It’s a brilliant performance of feminine bravado and soft-spoken cruelty and narcissism. 

Yet, the major problem with THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA is that it never really populates this wonderfully wicked witch in a story that is equally compelling.

The film is based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 semiautobiographical novel of the same name.  Some have claimed that the story is taken from her literal time working as an intern at Vogue magazine under iconic editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour.  Weisberger, in a smart marketing move, claims that she never based the book on either Wintour or her time with the magazine, but many readers chimed in to the contrary.  As a result, the book became a smash, spending six months on the New York Times’ Best Seller list.  It became known as the epitome of “chick lit.”  The book certainly made a stir in the sense that it allowed readers the chance to take an inside look at the gauntlet that is the fashion industry as well as trying to match up Weisberger’s fictional personas with real life ones.

Unfortunately, the film never really emerges as anything as compelling as the source material might otherwise dictate.  The film is made up of too many divergent and regurgitated elements from other genre pictures.  The movie parades around as a semi-satirical black comedy about the often grueling daily lives of the men and woman that make a living working under an ice queen of a woman.  It also wants to provide a peek into how the world of the fashion industry is Darwinian, to say the least. 

This – at face value – could have been the material for a great, Christopher Guest-style mockumentary or a bleak satire that never dared to take easy roads with the material.  Instead, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA chooses a much more audience friendly approach with the subject matter.  It allows the satire to segue into redundant, after-school-special melodrama.  It pains to show us that – gasp! – the big fashion industry grabs you, chews you up, and spits you out and that – double gasp! – young, impressionable woman will become seduced by its allure and finally – triple gasp! – working in the industry will teach you valuable life lessons, like being honorable, trust your friends and don’t be a sell out. 

Yawn.

My main misgiving with the film is with the coyness with which the story transpires.  Surely, a film about a fashion magazine and it’s go-for-the-jugular work ethic could have been edgy and ripe with bleak commentary.  A much more fascinating and invigorating story would be to see a naïve and impressionable girl truly be lured in the circles of fashion hell, never to return from its magnetism.  THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA takes the road-most-traveled approach.  It wants to be a smashing expose on how the fashion industry is morally corrupt and how one woman must come to grips with the ethical choices that mare her daily job.  I guess by “ethical choices” the film means whether she should wear pants made by Gucci or Armani. 

The film wants our buy in to a plot that is as predictable and paper thin as an anorexic super model.  It’s a woefully predictable fish-out-of-water story about an ugly duckling that becomes an empowered and well-tailored gopher at her big fashion job and then realizes – gee whiz – that her new outward beauty is uglier and less desirable than her old life.  She re-discovers the beauties of her “past” life and discovers that the fashion world – dag-nammit – is superficial and silly.  To call THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA trite is an huge understatement.

Perhaps one of the larger problems is with the casting of the ugly duckling of the film – the gorgeous Ann Hathaway.  Excuse me, but has she not played this part before in THE PRINCESS DIARIES?  Also, maybe she’s just too pretty of a presence even when she is introduced as a fashion virgin.  Perhaps a better casting choice would have been to get an actress less glamorous and fetching in order to make her transition from Ivy-league graduate student to pompous and snobby fashion guru more effective.  I like Hathaway, but her presence in this film is a distraction.

The film opens with Hathaway’s character - Andy Sachs, a recent graduate of journalism - trying to make her way in the big city and live her dream as a magazine writer.  Gee, let’s cross off obligatorical, starry-eyed dreamer story plot elements:

q       A live-in boyfriend that loves her, but slowly will begin to grow weary of the woman she will become…check.

q       A loving and caring father that will come to visit her and also grow equally despondent with the career choices she will make…check.

q       A Faustian protagonist that does not give Andy her dream job, but eventually lures her over to her intoxicating and power-trippy lifestyle…check.

q       A mentor figure that works with Andy that will – despite being initially displeased with her presence – help assist her with the in’s and out’s of her job and will “fix her up” as to please her boss…check.

q       Another handsome man with power that swoops into Andy’s life and that does immeasurable favours for her when the plot demands it and later makes her repay the favours when a chance at becoming a writer can be supplied through him…check. 

Anyway, Andy decides to apply for a job working at Runway magazine, despite having no fashion sense whatsoever (or, at least in our eyes, a normal fashion sense), nor has she even heard of the editor.  What she does not realize is that it’s editor, Miranda Priestley, is the most powerful person in the industry and she wields power like none around her.  However scared Andy is, she decides to stick to her guns, get the job, stay with it for a year, and hopefully it will open new doors for her. 

Her interview is perhaps the best scene in the film.   When she arrives Miranda is not in her office when she does arrive the fashion offices throws themselves into preparing for her arrival like the Queen of England was coming.  When she arrives she listens to Andy.  “I just graduated from Northwestern,” she explains, “and I was editor of the Daily Northwestern.” “The details of your incompetence do not interest me,” Miranda dryly responds.  Soon, Miranda turns to her number one girl, Emily (Emily Blunt, in the film’s second decent performance) and tells her, “Hire the fat, smart girl.”

Andy predictably has no idea what she has gotten herself into.  Working for Miranda is – in essence – like being a 24/7 butler.  Her daily demands of Andy are astronomically crazy.  She flies into the office, literally throws her hat and coat at her face, and makes outlandish requests like, “Find me that piece of paper I had in my hand yesterday morning” or – at one point – “get me two copies of the new HARRY POTTER book.”  No problem, says Andy, but when she discovers that Miranda meant the unpublished manuscript for the book that has not even been published yet and she wants it in a few hours or she’ll be fired, she begins to realize that she is literally working for a devil in heels.

Andy’s home life and friends offer her solace.  Her boyfriend Nate (ENTOURAGE’S Adrain Grenier) listens to Andy’s daily diatribes about the stresses and demands of working for a monster.  She carries a cell phone every minute and is often interrupted during the most intimate moments to fetch the most needless items for her boss.  Nate can’t understand why she does not quit, and her growing indifference to quitting her job creates a riff between the two.  To make matters worse, Andy slowly – shock of all shocks! – begins to pamper herself up and become the very thing she thought she hated.  With the help an office designer named Nigel (the always funny Stanley Tucci), Andy pretties herself up and starts looking like she just came off the runway.  The problem is that Andy is – amazingly – too large to fit most of Nigel’s clothes that he has at his disposal.  She is a size six.  Nigel, trying to motivate her, says, “Six is the new fourteen.”

Andy soon becomes more and more entrenched with her job and gets so good at it that – my God! – she will surpass Emily in her position.  Emily eats, drinks, and sleeps her job.  She can’t wait to go on special assignment in Paris (she amusingly states that, “I’m on this new diet for Paris. I don’t eat anything until I feel like I’m about to faint, then I eat a cube of cheese. I’m one stomach flu away from reaching my goal weight”).  However, when Emily gets too sick to follow Miranda there ( she gets what she calls an “incubus or viral plague”), Miranda then forces Andy to break the dastardly news to Emily that she will be replaced by her, knowing full well that it’ll break her heart.  Oh my, the ethical choices one has to make for the sake of a job.

You may have noticed a sly level of sarcasm in my review, and it’s more than intentional.  THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA parades around from one routine plot point to the next with such a numbing inevitability.  The film is essentially a broadly spun morality play that becomes as superficial as Miranda’s wardrobe.  Andy’s developing self-actualization that – holy Hanna – she works for a horrible person and that she is also becoming a horrible person – is dull and tedious.  Because of this, the film never really develops any decent forward momentum because the viewer knows precisely where it’s heading.  There is not one surprising development in the film.  Even more blatantly telegraphed is a tertiary character played by Simon Baker, a power player in the industry that – you just know – will be able to get that HARRY POTTER manuscript for Anne, make her fall for him, and allow her journey to the Dark Side of the fashion Force complete. 

Again…Yawn.

I guess my review thus far has been one big proof to show that one virtuoso, standout performance can’t save a film with a lackluster and formulaic screenplay.  Meryl Streep’s scenery-chewing performance as a fashion boss without any discernable heart of gold dominates every minute of the film that she occupies.  If anything, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA is on remarkably solid footing whenever she’s on screen.  Framed around her intoxicatingly vile performance is a cautionary tale of how absolute power corrupts absolutely and one woman’s journey to realizing that – yikes – she just doesn’t want to be a Valentino-garbed lap rat for a trendy and posh fashion empire.  If for only one reason, see THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA to watch Streep march around in her tour-de-force portrayal of a deliciously amoral figurehead.  As for the film’s lightweight and laughably limp story of how the cutthroat, back stabbing fashion world eats up unassuming prey?  Well…let’s just say that the film needs a large makeover.

Read more of CrAiGeR’s reviews at:

www.craigerscinemacorner.com

COMING IN JANUARY:  CrAiGeR picks his TEN BEST and TEN WORST films of 2006

****  out of  **** 

Robert DeNiro’s THE GOOD SHEPHERD – his first film as a director since his sublime 1993 coming of age story, A BRONX TALE – is a passionate, confident, and masterfully told tale of intrigue.  DeNiro has already established himself as arguably the greatest actor of his generation, and now his grand, ambitious, and intricately detailed look at the birth and early years of the CIA has established him as a major filmmaker. 

The film works at its finest when it details the shadowy and murky underpinnings of the agency, its Cold Warriors who are forced to live lives obsessively by immoral codes of conduct, and the way their power wrecks the moral fabrics of their lives.  Patriotic fixation surrounds DeNiro’s story and characters, so much so that readily identifiable protagonists and antagonists are not easily defined.  Told with a methodical and well measured pacing, impeccably strong performances, and richly and patiently draw suspense, THE GOOD SHEPHERD is a thoughtful, complex, and utterly absorbing masterpiece of espionage and blind allegiance.

It has been said that the screenplay of the film (impeccably conceived and expertly laid out by Eric Roth, who also penned last year’s best film, the equally politically charged MUNICH) has been floating around in development hell as one of the great, unproduced scripts of the last decade.  It passed through a relative who’s who of Hollywood directorial elite – from the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Philip Kauffman, and John Frankenheimer – before DeNiro set his sights on it.  

In fine form, DeNiro breaks the usual cinematic sophomore slump of directors with great first films with his stirring and incredibly nuanced character drama.  Perhaps the finest element of the film is in its build-up and discrete patience it has with the material.  Clocking in at nearly three hours, THE GOOD SHEPHERD could have felt laboriously long and dull considering the subject matter.  DeNiro is able to supremely reign in the epic screenplay, which covers vast time periods and locations, and weaves and interweaves both backwards and forward in time, with the perseverance and timing.  The film is completely hinged on DeNiro’s abilities here to orchestrate the oftentimes dizzying, labyrinthian structured, and lucid script by Roth into a cohesive and manageable work that sustains itself despite all of its divergent material.  This, in itself, is no easy feat, and for DeNiro – a relative novice filmmaker – to command such authority and confidence in the material is noteworthy.  This is filmmaking at its most mature and articulate.

Just as intriguing is the grunt perspective of America’s then-developing foreign espionage agency.  Past films with the similar subject matters have often zeroed-in on the more romanticized elements of the spy game.  But what Roth and DeNiro do here is de-mystify intelligence work by making it anything but romanticized.  The overall theme of their work here is that higher ups make the calls and it’s the men and women at the lower echelon that are forced to do the thankless tasks for God and country.  THE GOOD SHEPHERD understands that perhaps the real heroes (if they could be called that) of the CIA were the ones that engaged in endless analysis and dissecting of intelligence data.  Their work is probably the least appreciated, as it is the basis by which the agency engages in its missions. 

Because these people lead compartmentalized lives, it is very appropriate for the actors in the roles to be efficiently subdued in underplaying their performances.  These are people that live in shells and are trained to not show any discernable emotion.  That’s precisely why Matt Damon’s tour-de-force performance as Edward Wilson – a CIA task man – is so chilling and calculating.  He is not a typical genre film spy.  He’s not James Bond and he definitely is no Jason Bourne (some comparisons to his character in THE GOOD SHEPHERD and the latter one mentioned seems kind of inevitable). 

He’s a man of limited social skills beyond what the agency has trained him to use.  He speaks every little, only when warranted, keeps his feelings in check, and professes a deep, heartfelt passion to his agency and country when – oddly enough – he is a man of limited passion.   It is surely one of 2006’s most thankless and demanding roles in the sense that it requires an actor who can throw away any theatrical flourishes and instead play it with a resonating level of soft-spokeness and strength.  Like the film’s screenplay, Damon’s layered portrayal here slowly and patiently develops this man’s egregious, almost fanatical, loyalty to his job that ultimately grows to haunt and destroy his life.  That’s the key to THE GOOD SHEPHERD.  It’s about how diehard patriotism and stern loyalty makes one go down a road where decisions made out of professional necessity can inevitably have disastrous consequences.  It’s about how good, moral men become amoral without any turning back.

The movie begins in 1961 and alternates back and forth between this time and the 30’s, 50’s, and 60’s.  At first we see the events leading to and after the infamous “Bay of Pigs” invasion, which history has shown to be a debacle of epic proportions.  Edward Wilson is high up on the CIA ladder, and since he is one of a very few that are aware of this top-secret operation, he is held in suspicion.  Senator Phillip Allen (in another effortlessly effective performance by William Hurt) is in charge of reporting everything to President Kennedy and now he needs answers as to why the Cuban invasion failed so miserably.  The problem for Wilson and company is that the details of the mission are so rigidly guarded.  So, someone must have leaked Intel to the Soviets that there was a plot afoot to overthrow Fidel Castro.

It soon becomes Wilson’s job to find the source of the leak and “deal with it.”  His long and arduous journey leads to many unexpected tangents, especially in the form of a very grainy and washed out surveillance photo and even more terrible audiotape.  The snippets of information that he gets from the tape indicate that the man making love to the woman leaked the mission to her.  There are even more clues, which leads to the film’s longest running and brilliantly crafted subplot where the tech heads at CIA very slowly are able to decipher the most minute details from the photo and tape to narrow down the suspect.  The manner with which they are able to get clues is astounding.  They dissect the audiotape to reveal church bells in the background, look at the drapes on the walls in the background of the picture to determine manufacturer and point of sale, and they even use the ceiling fan in the image as a clue to the location.  The unfolding mystery of the perpetrator is THE GOOD SHEPHERD’s most transfixing element.

While Wilson is on the manhunt the film jumps backwards and forward in time to Wilson’s origins in the agency.  1961 is the year that essentially frames the rest of their narrative back in time.  The film dives back to see Wilson’s time as an undergraduate at Yale.  We see a young man that has not quite reached the American archetype of the Vulcan-like, grey suited, thick rimmed spectacled covert man.  He is a nice, friendly, poetry-loving student, born into wealth and privilege.  Soon, he is asked to join a secret fraternity called Skull and Bones in 1939 and it is here where he meets a man that will change his life forever, John Russell Jr. (Gabriel Macht).  John’s father (played by Keir Dullea…yes…David Bowman from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY) is a very powerful senator who plays a role in Wilson’s future to come.

While at Yale, Wilson develops a tender and sweet romance with a pretty Catholic girl named Laura (Tammy Blanchard).  Soon, his social life takes a turn south when it appears that an FBI agent named Sam Murach (Alec Baldwin, ozzing cool) recruits Wilson to spy on his poetry professor, Dr. Fredericks (the great Michael Gambon) who is rumored to be a Nazi sympathizer.  Wilson balks at first, but nevertheless takes the challenge of spying on the teacher.  Why?  Maybe because, since childhood, Wilson has been good at keeping secrets and his stoic demeanor gives him a one-of-a-kind poker face.  Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that Fredericks pawns off others’ poetry to Wilson’s as his own and makes a homosexual advance on him.

Needless to say,  Wilson is so good at what he does that it catches the eye of Bill Sullivan (DeNiro, refreshingly going back to his roots here in a dramatic role), a government agent that thinks that Wilson has the right stuff for a new government agency he wishes to develop.  In a scene that is subtly Faustian, Sullivan appeals to Wilson’s skills and successfully gets him to take a post for the wartime OSS (Office of Strategic Defense).  This, of course, proves to have disastrous results for his personal life. 

At the time he had long since dumped his deaf girlfriend and married Senator Russell’s daughter,  Clover (Angelina Jolie).  He is married to her only out of wedlock.  They have a relationship of phone calls and small conversations for the first few years of marriage.  When Wilson returns home his 5-year-old son barely knows him.  As the script jumps forward in time intermittently, we see Wilson join the ranks of the CIA and his growing involvement in the Bay of Pigs scandal, all while trying to be a good father to his growing son (played as an adolescent by Eddie Reymane).  When he finally learns the identity of the traitor from the audiotape and photo, Wilson is forced to make choices that could torment him for the rest of his professional and personal life.

I’ve gone at great length to discuss the plot of THE GOOD SHEPHERD, but my synopsis does not do its scope and breadth any justice.  The film, at its core, is fiercely ambitious in terms of locale, story, characters, and themes.  Interlocking stories disjointed by time seems to be the norm these days, but DeNiro sidesteps the more obviousness of the technique and uses it to his advantage.  A linear storyline might not have worked as efficiently or effectively.  Wilson is a man of pesky details, so it’s suitable to see his life hinted at in flashbacks intermittently through the movie. 

Mirroring Wilson’s own investigation to a degree, the audience grows to learn more about his character by piecing together the segments of his life as they are thrown at us.  This ultimately allows for the film to maintain its pace and forward momentum and not become sluggish.  It’s a real one-two punch narrative:  We want to know who the Cold War traitor is plus we yearn to learn more about a man who never revels to anyone whom he really is.  In this manner, THE GOOD SHEPHERD works like CITIZEN KANE in the sense that its disjointed script gives us details of the character’s life here and there, but only at the end can we put all of the pieces of the puzzle together to get an all-encompassing whole.  THE GOOD SHEPHERD is not relentlessly paced like many action thrillers, but it’s just as intriguing and – at times – even more surprising in its payoffs.

The film is graced by stellar performances all around, which may have benefited by having a gifted actor in the director’s chair.  William Hurt, in a small role, is quietly calculating as a mentor figure to Wilson.  Other supporting performances, like Billy Crudup as a British spy and John Turturro as Wilson’s right hand man, are solid.  Turturro is especially powerful as a sardonic and wisecracking agent who is prone to acts of wanton violence and aggression at a moment’s notice (a interrogation scene with him is especially gruesome).  Angelina Jolie also reminds the audience that when you are willing to forget her media-fuelled baggage and personal relationships, she is a forceful and invigorating presence on screen.  She is able to harness her grieving wife figure with the right amount of hurtful contempt for her husband and introverted sadness and spite.

Ultimately, THE GOOD SHEPHERD is spearheaded by Matt Damon’s cold and shrewd turn as a Cold War operative that wants a life of normalcy, but is unable to because of his oftentimes-unethical job.  Many critics have commented on the lack of a strong arc to his character.  They miss the point.  Edward Wilson is a man that started being noble-minded and became engulfed in a world that bathed in moral uncertain at every turn.  There is a dark and underlining bleakness that stresses his life.  He is a patriot, but he rigidly questions his values and motives, especially when his investigation leads him down an alley he wants to avoid but can’t. 

The arc of the character is that he has none.  Wilson is a man so impregnated by the virtues of his own strident faithfulness to his country that he can never divorce himself from them.  Even when circumstances get deeply personal for him, he still can’t seem to decide between God and country or his personal life.  Does choosing his family over work overturn everything that he has based his career and life on?  What’s more patriotic:  Honoring one’s profession in the line of duty or challenging it when the duty lacks virtue?  THE GOOD SHEPHERD, when dealing with the conscience-driven dilemmas that Wilson faces, is unmistakably powerful.

With a story and characters that spans decades, individual sub-plots that interweave upon themselves, plot twists and payoffs that are genuinely surprising, and performances and direction that are Oscar caliber, Robert DeNiro’s THE GOOD SHEPHERD is a sure-fire, Cold War espionage classic.   Under the director’s precise and cunning tutelage, and a script by Eric Roth that is richly detailed and exemplary in terms of layout, the film creates an unmistakable milieu of the early years of the CIA and how stone-cold and autonomous agents used their power within it to corrupt their own loyalty to their countrymen.  By sidestepping the usual action that permeates political thrillers, DeNiro and company instead create an eerie verisimilitude in their fictional take on the birth of the CIA but focusing on the bureaucracy of skullduggery that the young agency faced.  More than anything, THE GOOD SHEPHERD reveals the passion of its director for the story in every frame and his minutely plotted and incredibly sustained political potboiler that’s intelligent and absorbing.  It is one of 2006’s most painstakingly tailored films.

Be Sure to read more reviews by one of Western Canada’s leading on-line film critics at:

www.craigerscinemacorner.com

COMING IN JANUARY:  CrAiGeR picks his TEN BEST and TEN WORST of 2006