Lebanon (Film Review)

Lebanon is an Israeli film that played in U.S. theaters for a few weeks last summer.  For those who missed its initial release, it just came out on DVD and is worth catching.  While not the absolute masterpiece that some of my fellow critics have claimed, it is a very good film that boasts the ability to milk unbearable suspense out of war film cliches. Set during the First Lebanon War, it tells the story of an Israeli tank crew.  Shmulik (Yoav Donat) is the gunner and the new member of the crew.  Assi (Itay Tiran) is the ineffectual leader who fails to command the respect of his men.  Hertzel (Oshri Cohen) is the ammunition loader and the closest thing in the film to a live wire—his constant challenging of Assi’s authority quickly becomes a nuisance for everyone in the tank.  The final member of the crew is Yigal (Michael Moshonov), the quiet driver who tries to stay out of everyone’s way.

Accompanying a squad of paratroopers into enemy territory, the tank moves into an urban area where it’s hard to tell the difference between civilians and fighters.  Most of the film is seen through Shmulik’s scope as he scans the area for fighters.  But Shmulik is fresh from training where the only thing he was asked to shoot were barrels.  When he is faced with firing on a truck full of enemy fighters, he freezes, focusing on the panicked face of the driver which, through the scope, looks to be only inches away.  Despite repeated calls to shoot, he cannot do so and this action results in a firefight that finds not only the enemy dead but also one of the Israeli soldiers.  With no way to evacuate the body from the area, Jamil (Zohar Strauss), the major in charge of the operation, orders the body placed in the tank.  This is done as much as a punishment to Shmulik as it is for pragmatic reasons.  Inevitably, the next truck that comes along is not the enemy but still pays the price for Shmulik’s inability to fire on the first truck.

The story is one we’ve seen many times before.  It simply morphs from a film of “men on a mission” to one of “trapped behind enemy lines.”  But for the most part writer/director Samuel Maoz is not interested in plot.  He was a member of a tank crew in the First Lebanon War, and this experience informs every frame of the film as he focuses on the smallest of details.  From the myriad indignities of being stuffed inside a tank (the heat, dehydration, claustrophobia, choking fumes, and being forced to urinate in metal boxes) to the horrors of war (fear of the unknown, confusion of battle, grisly sight of mangled bodies), Maoz keeps the film uncomfortably intimate.  Taking cues from claustrophobic war film classics like Das Boot and Kanal, Lebanon isn’t a film you watch so much as smell and feel.  “Everyone knows war is hell,” Maoz seems to be saying, “but did you know it smells like smoke, blood, and shit?”

While it may be obvious, this intentional demythologizing of warfare is the only overarching message that Maoz seems intent on exploring.  He avoids any political statement about the situation in the Middle East that led to the war and, aside from one extremely heavy-handed shot (the only point that Maoz loses firm control of the tone), there is no reference to the numerous problems the region has seen since the war.  All that matters in the film is that war is a dehumanizing, horrible experience that no one should find entertaining.  This is reinforced by the constant use of seeing the war through Shmulik’s scope.  This perspective gives much of the film the same look as a first person shooter video game.  But unlike a video game, much of what is shown is horrific or mundane, never exciting or fun.

If this doesn’t exactly sound entertaining, that’s because it isn’t.  It’s a film that I find myself reluctantly recommending.  Despite the familiar genre tropes on display, it manages to carve out its own identity through Maoz’s stellar direction and solid work by the cast.  It’s effective at what it wants to do, but that’s also where it becomes difficult to watch.  It’s a film that deserves to be seen, just don’t expect a popcorn flick.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.

Monsters Among Us

Whether he intended to or not, writer/director Gareth Edwards has crafted a movie in Monsters that is all about defying expectations.  It’s an alien invasion film that avoids the usual pitfalls of the alien invasion genre.  There are no massive scenes of aliens or spaceships laying waste to everything in their path.  The aliens are barely glimpsed until the final ten minutes of the film.  There are no scenes where people of different races, religions, or socio-economic classes put aside their differences to fight back in a rousing display of violence inflicted upon the invaders.  All of these choices about how not to approach the genre are refreshing.  What’s even more of a nice change-of-pace comes from what the film is: a quiet character study. Much like last year’s District 9, Monsters takes place in an alternate universe where aliens landed on Earth several years ago.  Here, they landed in northern Mexico, which has become known as the infected zone.  The aliens are gigantic, tentacled beasts that basically keep to themselves, only coming into contact with people when they migrate and their paths bring them into small towns.  These encounters usually end with devastation as large portions of the towns are destroyed and many people are killed.  Some of this damage and loss of life is the fault of the aliens, and some of it is collateral damage caused by joint Mexican-U.S. military troops assigned to fight the aliens.

Into this chaos goes Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a photographer working for a huge media conglomerate.  He’s busy photographing the aftermath of the latest battle in a Mexican village when he’s ordered by the owner of the media conglomerate to find and accompany his daughter, Sam (Whitney Able) back to her home in Los Angeles.  When their tickets and passports to take a ferry to the Baja peninsula are stolen, they are forced to take a guided trek through the infected zone to reach the United States.

While that setup sounds like a survival thriller waiting to happen, the film is actually a road movie about two quietly desperate people running away from their real lives.  Kaulder has a son that he didn’t know about until the child was few years old.  The mother allows him to see the boy, but doesn’t want Kaulder to tell him the truth for fear of confusing him.  He goes along with the lie, but as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that the situation is eating him alive.  As a result, he spends his life skulking about the wreckage that has become the areas along the border of the infected zone, avoiding the situation that awaits him at home.  Sam is engaged to be married but doesn’t want to go through with the wedding.  Why she was in Mexico is never made clear, but it’s intimated that she may have run away.

As they make their way through the infected zone, Kaulder and Sam bond with each other as they survive the occasional harrowing attack by the aliens.  As they get closer, they draw out details from each other that fill in some of the blanks of their back stories, but thankfully, are allowed to keep just as much hidden.

This is the first feature from Gareth Edwards.  Prior to the film, he was a visual effects artist, a point worth the raising only because most effects artists that make the leap to directing do so through their taking the reins for some special effects extravaganza.  Often these films are hollow spectacles, devoid of an interesting story or characters.  Monsters is the exact opposite.  While he pulls off some impressive shots of the aliens in the third act climax, Edwards largely avoids using his effects background as a crutch.  He instead concentrates on his two leads, letting the impressive, sympathetic performances by McNairy and Able carry the story.  The film thus is leisurely paced, allowing the camera to linger on the people and destruction that Kaulder and Sam encounter on their journey.  This lends an apocalyptic mood to the film that is more effective than any of the big-budget destruction on display in films like Independence Day or Cloverfield because it keeps the action on a more intimate level.  It’s hard to believe in an entire city being destroyed by aliens, but a few buildings in a small village?  Despite the elemental ridiculousness of the alien invasion genre, that destruction is believable and all the more horrific.

Monsters isn’t a perfect film.  There is some forced material about the current illegal immigration situation (the U.S. government has built a wall along the border to keep out the aliens) that feels out of place with its lack of subtlety.  But it is a very good film.  By focusing on a believable world in the wake of an unbelievable event, Edwards has crafted a film that is as personal as it is ambitious.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.

2010's Best Movie: Winter's Bone

As a film critic, there are certain occupational hazards you have to face.  Namely, that every time you sit down to watch a film, you risk the chance of wasting 90 to 150 minutes of precious time on a turkey.  But then you aren’t done with said turkey.  You then spend one to two hours writing a review about why the film was a turkey.  And then, if you’re like me, you spend another fifteen to twenty minutes rehashing all of your thoughts about the same turkey on a podcast.  For those of you keeping track, that’s up to five hours spent on one bad film.  That’s a big chunk of your life spent watching, thinking, and writing critically about a film that can probably be summed up by simply muttering: “What a piece of crap!” I suppose spending hours of my life that I will never get back on movies like Grown Ups, Jonah Hex, and the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is what makes me latch on to a movie like Winter’s Bone, and work overtime to get people to watch it.  This is the second time I’ve written about the film for a website, I’ve talked about it on two podcasts, and I’ve encouraged all my friends and family to watch it.  Why would I do this for a film that I have no personal investment in, either financially or emotionally?  The answer is simple enough: to this point, Winter’s Bone is the best film of the year.

I’m not alone in this view.  Winter’s Bone was universally hailed by critics, a difficult feat for a film to pull off.  It’s understandable why the film received such a gracious reception from the critical community and did surprisingly well at the box office.  It’s a dark film noir that manages to have a true emotional center in Ree Dolly, a seventeen-year-old girl charged with keeping what remains of her family together.  Equal parts detective story, character study, and slice-of-life observation, the film benefitted from a star-making performance by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree and a career-best turn by John Hawkes as her uncle, a frightening, meth-addicted man of violence.  That he is one of the few people that Ree is able to count on says a lot about the dark places to which the film is willing to venture.

But for me, the greatest strength of the film was the fact that it was shot on location in the Ozark Mountains.  Taking place in and around the small town of Forsyth, Missoui, director Debra Granik captured a stark reality about the overwhelming poverty that has adversely affected many of the rural areas of our country.  This was the element of the film that affected me the most.  It’s also the point where I need to come clean.

I grew up only seventy miles from where the film was shot.  Like the characters in the film, I lived in a very poor, rural area.  Thankfully, I didn’t grow up in poverty (and if I did, my parents did a great job of hiding that fact from me), so no one in my family was forced to resort to cooking meth to put food on the table.  I lived in southern Missouri for nearly the first 28 years of my life before I moved to Chicago.  Even as I put my rural upbringing in the rearview mirror, I didn’t recognize the fact that I was basically reinventing myself as an urban liberal and that I was no longer a dairy farmer’s kid from the middle of nowhere.

After eight years of living in Chicago, the Windy City came to feel like home.  Earlier this year, when I relocated to New Haven, I grew homesick for Chicago in a way that I never felt for southern Missouri.  This didn’t surprise me because, quite frankly, I never liked living in my native state.  What did surprise me was how many memories of my childhood had gone missing in my eight years away from Missouri.  What was even more surprising was the fact that many of those memories came flooding back to me as I sat in, of all places, a darkened theater in downtown New Haven.  I didn’t see that coming.

Maybe that’s part of the reason that Winter’s Bone hit me so hard—it nailed all the little details of what everyday life is like in that region of the country.  From the rundown houses hidden away on dirt roads to the large, round bales of hay on which children chase each other, I found myself nodding in appreciation at everything that Granik got right.  When I saw a detached garage with old license plates hanging on the doors, I had a brief moment of strange panic when I wondered if that scene had been shot at my childhood home.

For the last few months, I began to wonder if the reason I threw so much support behind the film was because of this connection to my childhood.  Had I been blinded by an unconscious nostalgia?  With last week’s DVD release of the film, I was able to watch it again.  As it turns out, it stands up perfectly well on its own.  This is a story that could have been set anywhere and, as long as the acting and writing were as strong, would have been a great film.

But don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.  Movies this good don’t come along everyday, especially from the low-budget indie world.  The film industry is a business that responds to financial success.  Winter’s Bone did better than expected in theaters.  If it becomes a hit on DVD, that kind of financial success will be hard to ignore.

Or just watch it because it’s the best film of the year.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.