~Upstairs at the Savoy~
Academy Award Nominee ~
Best Picture, Best Actor & Best Director
The Descendants
| 6:30 & 8:45 each evening |
| 1:00 & 3:30 matinees Sat & Sun |
|---|
Rated R; 115 minutes
James Verniere, Boston Herald (excerpted)
Writer-director Alexander Payne’s (About Schmidt, Sideways) new film (has) put George Clooney in the Academy Award race for the fifth time. The Descendants, a Hawaii-set comedy-drama, tells the story of attorney Matt King (Clooney), a member of a long and mostly wealthy line descended from colonial arrivals who intermarried with the royal family of the nation. As a result, Matt, who is the family trustee, and his fellow “descendants” own 25,000 virgin beachfront acres in Kauai that they must sell or otherwise dispose of within five years or they lose it all.
At the same time, Matt’s difficult wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) is in a life-threatening coma, the result of a motorboat crash, and Matt, who has been a disengaged father, must find a way to bond with his lost 10-year-old daughter Scottie (Amara Miller), who is misbehaving, and his beautiful, fiercely angry, 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley, another Oscar contender for Supporting Actress).
Payne is an acute observer of human frailties, especially the frailties of men, and a terrific director of actors. What you see is the subtlety and inherent prickliness of human interaction, along with frequent bits of absurdity and unexpected hilarity. In small, crucial roles, Robert Forster, Matthew Lillard and Judy Greer are also especially impressive. For his part, Clooney gets inside the skin of Matt King and, like Up in the Air, Clooney has a strong, mostly female supporting cast to work with.
Beginning with a vitriolic rebuke of Hawaii’s reputation as “paradise,” Matt juggles his island-hopping duties as father and leader of a hotly divided, extended family. Payne’s film is based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings. You can see it for the beauty of the cinematography of Phedon Papamichael alone. But you’ll come away raving about the cast and the director.
~Downstairs at the Savoy~
Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender
& Keira Knightley in David Cronenberg's
A Dangerous Method
| 6:00 & 8:00 each evening |
| 1:30 matinees Sat & Sun |
|---|
Rated R; 99 minutes
James Verniere, Boston Herald (excerpted)
Ready for some “Sexual Healing,” David Cronenberg style? A Dangerous Method places a beautiful young woman in the middle of an Oedipal struggle between the two greatest minds at the dawn of modern psychiatry and asks us to watch the sexual and intellectual sparks fly. (I haven’t had this much fun observing smart people misbehave in ages.)
Irishman Michael Fassbender, plays Swiss upstart pioneer Carl Jung and chewing an omnipresent cheroot, Viggo Mortensen is Jewish Viennese giant Sigmund Freud, the older man, a legend of psychoanalysis in his own time, gray-bearded, but still an alpha wolf.
Between these two geniuses, who verbally spar, even while declaring their love and mutual respect, comes a brave and deliciously wanton turn by Keira Knightley as convulsive and hysterical Sabina Spielrein, a guilt-ridden well-to-do Russian Jew. She arrives at Jung’s posh Zurich psychiatric clinic in the first decade of the 20th century in a terrible state, ready for a straitjacket and shock therapy. Let the games begin.
Jung sits behind the dark-haired, sphinx-like Spielrein during their “talking cure” sessions. Fascinated by her sexually rooted problems, he is also keenly aware of how the female patient often fixes upon her male physician, making her vulnerable to advances from him, and how dangerous the temptation, if not also the “method,” is for both the doctor and patient.
A Dangerous Method is a garden of Cronenbergian delights, not the least of which is Sabina’s enjoyment of sex combined with corporal punishment and restraints and the suggestion that such a thing might actually be, at least in the case of this dark flower, therapeutic.