By Tom Stempel.

Going Through the Motions.

Spectre

(2015. Screenplay by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth, story by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, based on characters created by Ian Fleming. 148 minutes.)

This being a James Bond film, there are a lot of motions it goes through. In the opening sequence, which undoubtedly cost more than the entire budget of any three sixties Bond films, Bond is in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead and on the track of a bad guy. Bond follows him through the crowds, and through the crowds, and through more crowds. Bond runs across some roofs and gets a shot at the baddie, which blows up a building, and then chases the baddie some more. They end up in an out-of-control helicopter over the crowds and Bond pushes the guy out of the helicopter after getting the man’s mysterious ring. Sounds like an opening for a Bond film to me.

But for all the money, stunts, and special effects, the scene seems rather lethargic. My assumption at that point was that it was the fault of the director, Sam Mendes, back at the helm after Skyfall (2012). Mendes seemed more at ease with the great character scenes in Skyfall than the action scenes, so it was a logical deduction.

But as the picture wore on, it seemed to be a script problem. The thug who chases Bond for a good part of the picture, Mr. Hinx, is about as bland a thug as the Bond films have given us. In a later scene, he fights with Bond on a train. This recalls the great fight between Bond and Grant in From Russia with Love, but Grant has an edgy intensity that Hinx doesn’t. The new M, who has some interesting colors in Skyfall, is reduced to a mere bureaucrat here. Miss Moneypenny does not have as much to do here as she did in Skyfall. Bond’s first affair is with the widow Sciarra, and even with Monica Bellucci in the part, there’s not a lot there. Bond’s main girl, Madeline Swann, is a little livelier, but not by much.

Bond is not given a lot to do, either emotionally or simply in terms of reactions to what is going on. We know that Daniel Craig is tired of the doing the part, but the writers have not given Craig much to play, or if they did, he is not playing it. Worse of all is the archfiend of the piece, the equivalent of Silva in Skyfall. In an attempt to tie together the four Craig Bond films, it turns out this guy with his organization Spectre has been the boss of all the baddies in those four. We eventually learn is name is Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Wait a minute. The real Blofeld has to be ninety if he’s day, since he first showed up in You Only Live Twice in 1967. It’s one thing for the guys to mention the characters in the Craig Bonds, but bringing in Blofeld as a man in his forties is just clunky.

Blofeld here is played by Christoph Waltz, who was born to play a Bond archfiend, but the writers don’t give him any interesting lines or actions, they way they did Silva. I mentioned in my piece on Skyfall that Mendes seemed to bungle what appeared to be funny lines in the script, so I can’t help but think the writers just gave up on writing them for him this time around. It makes the film rather leaden.

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Screenwriter?

Trumbo

(2015. Screenplay by John McNamara, based on the book Dalton Trumbo, by Bruce Cook. 124 minutes.)

This one had me before it said hello. Prior to the main titles, we get a series of title cards that explain that once there was a Communist Party of the United States of America, that in the thirties and forties Americans joined it because of what they thought were its progressive ideas, and in 1943 Dalton Trumbo joined the party.

Now why would that grab me? Because in nearly all previous films that are sympathetic to blacklisted screenwriters, the writers avoid indentifying or certainly dealing in any detail whether their characters were party members or not. In his original screenplay for what became the 1991 film Guilty by Suspicion, blacklisted writer Abraham Polonsky made the main character, a movie director based on himself, a member of the party. When producer Irwin Winkler decided to direct the picture himself, he rewrote the script to make him not a member of the party. Polonsky took his name off the script. Obviously Winkler and those on other films about the period felt, probably rightly so, that American audiences would not have any sympathy for a Communist. McNamara and the makers of the film are willing to take a chance, and more power to them.

When he was much younger McNamara knew four blacklisted screenwriters and one of them, Ian McLellan Hunter, suggested McNamara read Cook’s 1977 biography of Trumbo. He did and found the story fascinating, but did not get around to writing the script until many years later, after twenty years of writing and producing television. (This background is from Ramona Zacharias’s interview with McNamara in CS.) His experience shows.

McNamara is smart to start in the early forties, when Trumbo was one of the highest paid screenwriters at MGM. We see him in a positive way and he’s a terrific character. We don’t see him join the party, or are we given any reason he joined. In reality he discovered the people he worked with were party members, particularly during World War II, when the Russians were our allies. The film smartly avoids the issue of why he did not join until 1943, when many party members from the thirties had become disenchanted with the party and its shifting policies. When McNamara was researching and writing the script, he talked to Trumbo’s two daughters. Nicola, the oldest one, insisted that it be clear that he had been a member of the party. Instead of scenes of party politics, McNamara gives us a great scene of Trumbo explaining to a very young Nicola what Communism is all about.

The script gives us a good look at the atmosphere at MGM. Then we get to the investigations of the House Subcommittee on UnAmerican Affairs (HUAC) into Communist influence in Hollywood. McNamara gives us some of Trumbo’s testimony, and while we are sympathetic, he is so obstreperous that we can understand why the Hollywood 10’s decision to challenge the committee was a public relationship disaster. The industry had fought off previous attempts to investigate Hollywood, with public support, but support disappeared after these October 1947 hearings. (For my take on the whole period, read my book FrameWork, especially the chapters on the party and the black market.)

McNamara moves the story along, and the black market sections are the most entertaining in the movie. I can, however, understand why McNamara slips in an historical error in this section. In real life, Trumbo was contacted by B-movie producer Frank King the day he returned from Washington after the October 1947 hearings. King was smart enough to realize that a lot of expensive writers would now be available at bargain rates. In the film McNamara has Trumbo go to them after he gets out of jail in 1951. It makes the film flow smoother. The black market scenes are lively and funny, as Trumbo and his other blacklisted friends are churning out scripts for King and others. We also see how Trumbo’s overwork affected the family. You should take your loved ones to see the movie to see what living with a writer is like in case they don’t already know.

The film is also a bit misleading about the two black market scripts that Trumbo won Oscars for. The first one was the 1953 film Roman Holiday. Trumbo is seen giving a complete script to his friend Ian McLellan Hunter, and the implication is that is the script that was shot. In fact, Hunter did additional work on it, as did John Deighton. Even Cook says the question of who contributed what is fuzzy. We get the impression that the script won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, but it won in a category the Academy used to have called Best Story, which on the original credits was attributed to Hunter. In the recent restoration of the film, Hunter’s name on the story credit has been deleted and Trumbo’s put in its place.

The situation with the second film was similar. It was the 1956 film The Brave One that Trumbo convinced the King Brothers to make, even though it was, as Trumbo says in the movie, something they were not used to, “a good script.” The original credits on the film indicate the story was by Robert Rich, and the screenplay was by Harry Franklin and Merrill G. White. All were Trumbo pseudonyms. Again, the film won the Best Story Oscar, not the Screenplay award, and word got around that Trumbo was the real writer, especially after nobody could find “Robert Rich.”

McNamara understands he has a wonderful set of characters to play with, and he does a great job. He beautifully captures Trumbo in all his moods and all his literate wit. Everybody on the picture was delighted they got Bryan Cranston to do it and rightly so; some money people wanted a bigger star, and they were wrong. McNamara has written in a great bunch of hats for Helen Mirren to wear as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. One of McNamara’s best secondary characters is the fictional Buddy Ross. We meet him when he is full of himself as an executive at MGM, then later when he snubs Trumbo, then again after he’s had a few flops as an independent producer and begs Trumbo to write a script for him. I have no idea what the real Frank King was like, but if he was not like how McNamara and actor John Goodman portray him, he should have been.

In addition to Hopper, there are other real life characters who show up. One is Edward G. Robinson, who is forced in what author Victor Navasky called “degradation ceremonies” to give names of his friend so he can go back to work. That powerful scene is followed by an equally good scene in which Robinson explains to Trumbo that it is easy for Trumbo to work on the black market, but as an actor he can’t work anonymously. Here the script touches on the reasons why some people felt compelled to testify. Two late arrivals in the film are Kirk Douglas and director Otto Preminger. Trumbo was simultaneously writing Spartacus (1960) for the former and Exodus (1960) for the latter. The film nails the differences between the two very well.

Not as Bad as I Feared, But Still Not Very Good.

Secret in Their Eyes

(2015. Screenplay by Billy Ray, based on the screenplay by Juan José Campanella and Eduardo Sacheri (and uncredited, the novel by Eduardo Sacheri). 111 minutes.)

For those of you with long memories, you may recall I love the 2009 Argentine film this one was based on. That was a rich mixture of plot, character, a smart look at Argentine society, as well as thematic concerns about love and memory. Campanella, who also directed, had directed several episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and he realized that here he was making a film rather than a TV episode. It meant the movie could be playful about film style, theme, and characterization. Needless to say, I was guessing the new American version would not live up to the original, and it does not. By a long shot. It becomes more American in its emphasis on plot and star turns, not necessarily bad things but here they diminish the wonderful complexities of the original.

In the original, Esposito, a former legal investigator, is now writing a book about a case twenty-five years before where he and his partner Pablo caught the murderer of a young woman teacher, but the suspect was let go so that he could become an informant to the corrupt regime. In the new version, Ray is an FBI agent who in 2002 figured out who murdered a teenage girl, but the higher ups let him go since he was already an informant at a mosque where they assumed terrorists were headquartered.

Billy Ray is trying to make the story more topical, but he simply makes it more conventional. Both Esposito and Ray the character are enchanted by the prosecutor in the case, Irene in the original, Claire here. But Esposito comes back as much to see Irene as to solve the case, whereas Ray has simply been obsessed by the case. Esposito is a much richer character than Ray, who is rather one note.

The biggest change in the script is that instead of a schoolteacher, the victim is the daughter of Jess, one of the cops working the case. The husband is a minor character until the end of the original, but Jess has been conceived and written as a star part, played by Julia Roberts. We end up spending more time with Jess being understandably miserable than we really need to, but if you have Roberts, you naturally want her on screen as much as possible.

That, combined with Claire not be as tough and well-written as Irene, and played rather inertly by Nicole Kidman, throws the balance of the film off. If you are going to make changes in what was a great script, you’d better make them better, not just do them to pacify your star.

Yeah, good luck with that. This could be one possible reason that we have never had an American version of the great Kurosawa film High and Low (1963), even though it’s based on a novel by American writer Evan Hunter (writing as Ed McBain). Toshiro Mifune is the star of the first half, but we don’t see much of him in the second half. It works because Mifune is such a strong presence that he hovers over the scenes he’s not even in. If you rewrite for an American star, they would insist on being in the second half.

There are other changes in the new version. Jess comes into her own in the final two twists, which are from the original, and it does make a certain kind of sense to give those twists to a major rather than a minor character, but I prefer the original, since it is fresher if not as weird as the new version.

In the original, Pablo, Esposito’s partner is a drunk. Not a reformed drunk who’s “going to meetings,” but a guy who drinks on the job…and whose instincts lead him to a big break in the case. You probably could not get away with that in an American film these days. In the new version Ray’s partner Bumpy just has a sweet tooth for snacks. Not the same thing.

In the Argentine version, there is a great scene where Esposito and Irene find themselves in an elevator with the killer. Nothing happens, but the suspense is deadly. There is a similar scene in the new one, but it just does not work, probably because we are not as deeply involved with the characters.

Oh, the title. In the original, it refers to secrets we and the cops both have seen in lots of people’s eyes. In the new version, we get some close-ups of Ray’s eyes in the opening scene, but then there is only one other reference to a secret in somebody’s eyes. Like the rest of the movie, this element is not as rich as the original.

No Peace, No…

Chi-Raq

(2015. Screenplay by Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee, based on the play Lysistrata by Aristophanes. 118 minutes.)

OK children, here in a couple of lines is the difference between writing prose to be read and dialogue to be spoken. The ad tagline for this film is “No Peace. No Piece.” It’s a great joke, but only if you read it. Say it out loud, and the problem is we can’t hear the difference between “peace” and “piece.” In the film the line is “No Peace. No Pussy.” Aristophanes would have been proud.

The play, which you may be only vaguely familiar with, dates from 411 B.C. In it an Athenian woman, Lysistrata, decides to try to end the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. She manages to convince the women of Athens to withhold their sexual favors from the soldiers until they stop the war. The soldiers eventually keep tripping over their own boners and agree. It has been getting laughs in many variations every since (you can see a list of productions in the entry on the play in Wikipedia here). In 1946 there was a New York production with an all-black cast, so Willmott and Lee’s idea of setting it in the black area of modern Chicago is not as far-fetched as you might think.

“Chi-Raq” is the nickname reporters have given Chicago, since black people are more likely to get killed in gang violence than die in Iraq. Needless to say, politicians both white and black, are not crazy about the nickname, nor about the idea of the movie. Too bad for them. The movie is a mess, but it is a wild, funny, entertaining mess, with more life in it than in many more genteel films. Several of Lee’s films have tried to use this style before and also ended up as messes, but not as entertaining as this one.

Lysistrata here is a woman in Chicago whose boy friend Chi-Raq is the leader of one of two gangs. After a rousing musical number (and the film is a musical among other things), Lysistrata comes across the aftermath of a street killing and sees the mother’s emotional state. This is played as a straight dramatic scene, as are a few others in the film. For all the film’s freewheeling style, it is about something serious, which was true of Aristophanes’s play too.

Lysistrata talks to the neighborhood wise woman, Miss Helen, and that scene plays like a lecture, even though Lysistrata is played in a breakout performance by Teyonah Parris. You will probably never recognize her from her recurring role as Dawn Chambers, the quiet black woman working with Don Draper in Mad Men. Miss Helen is played by Angela Bassett. Even those two cannot breathe life into that scene.

Lysistrata gathers the women of both gangs in the neighborhood and gets them to make a vow of chastity, a scene very similar to one in the play. Later Lysistrata seduces a white general with Confederate underwear at the National Guard Armory. The scene was the most over-the-top in the film, and I was baffled why it was in the picture.

Part of the reason was to get the woman into the Armory, although the writers could have done that without this scene. The whole Armory business takes a big chunk of screen time, and it was not until I went back to the original play that I discovered why. The Greek women barricaded themselves in the Acropolis, then the state treasury, keeping the soldiers from getting the money to continue the war. It’s not clear in the film why they are in the Armory.

We get more musical numbers, and another lecture scene, this time with John Cusack playing a white priest at a memorial service for the dead child. This scene is a little livelier than the Lysistrata-Miss Helen scene, but still hectors the audience more than it should. We also get footage from women in other countries protesting, which Lee got by equipping film students from the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University with cameras. Oh, and I guess I forgot to mention that wandering through the film is Samuel L. Jackson in some great pimp suits as Dolmedes, a Greek chorus.

Given that the movie starts with Chi-Raq’s rap number, you may not be surprised to find that the rest of the dialogue is written in verse. Some of it is nothing but doggerel, but some of it takes off like good rap does.

So if this is such a mess, why does it work? I think because Willmott and Lee have thrown so much entertaining stuff into the pot that it bubbles up into a nice stew. If you don’t like a scene, as I did not like the Confederate underwear scene, you won’t have to wait too long to get a scene you will like.

I am not sure I would recommend you try this kind of writing at home, but on the other hand, why not? Go for it.

Now That’s How You Do It.

Wild Tales

(2014. Written by Damián Szifron. 122 minutes.)

This was a Foreign Language Film nominee this past year. I missed it in theatres, but in July I got it on DVD from Netflix. I did not get around to watching it until December. It was worth the wait, because it is one of the few completely successful anthology films I have ever seen.

The problem with most anthology films is that they are uneven. See my comments on O. Henry’s Full House (1952) here, or better yet my comments on We’re Not Married (1952) here. Since Married is about married couples who learn they are not legally married, there is at least a thematic consistency, but it doesn’t completely cover the variety of stories. Wild Tales manages to do just that.

There are six stories. The first one, pre-credits, is the shortest. On an airliner, a model and a music teacher get to talking. We assume it’s just flirting until the model mentions that her former boy friend, Pasternak, was a musician. It turns out the music teacher knew him and was critical of his work. And the lady in front of him was another of Pasternak’s teachers and thought he was trouble. And nearly everybody else on the plane has some connection to Pasternak, whom the hysterical flight attendant tells us has locked himself inside the cockpit.

His shrink pounds on the door and tries to convince him it was all his parents’ fault. We then cut to an older couple sitting reading in their back yard. Who are they? Well, what does movie logic tell you? That they are his parents. And they realize, too late, the airliner is heading straight for them. So the tone of the film as dark, very dark comedy is set up.

We think perhaps the theme of the movie is revenge, which it turns out to be. But this Argentine movie is not just a typical American cop’s-partner-is-killed-and-cop-gets-revenge story. Szifron, who also directed, works a lot of variations and twists. When is a variation not a twist? If it’s just a change that doesn’t lead anywhere, like a good twist does.

In the second story, we are in a small diner as opposed to a large airliner. A rather grumpy guy comes in and the waitress recognizes him as the man whose financial dealings drove her father to suicide. When the cook suggests they poison his food, the waitress objects. She does not want to go to prison. But the cook has been in prison and thinks it’s not so bad. The poison doesn’t take, but the man attacks the waitress, and the cook kills him with a knife. So the waitress gets her revenge, but only at the hands of the cook, who is perfectly happy to go back to prison.

In the third story, a riff on Spielberg’s great 1971 television movie Duel, a middle class driver on a desolate highway flips off an Argentine equivalent of a redneck. The road rage builds and builds, so here we have an action movie rather than the airliner and diner comedy/dramas. The final comment by a first responder is funny, for more reasons than he knows.

The fourth story begins with a demolition of a large building, set off by our hero Simón (played by the great Argentine actor Ricardo Darin, who was Esposito in Secret in Their Eyes), so we know he’s got to get revenge by blowing something up. So the suspense comes from how is going to use his skill set? He’s had his car towed and having the devil’s own time of getting it back, which leads to his wife wanting a divorce, which leads to, well, BOOM. But that’s not the end of the story. We see what the reaction of the public, particularly a small branch of it, is, which is a topper to the whole story. Szrifon is not content just to leave it at the explosion.

So by the fifth episode, we know that revenge is the connecting thread of the stories. But as the episode develops, we have no idea (unlike in the earlier episodes) how the theme of revenge fits in. A rich man’s son accidentally kills a woman in a hit-and-run. The rich man convinces their groundskeeper to take the fall, but complications ensue as the negotiations with lawyers and the corrupt prosecutor. The suspense builds not only in the story, but for us waiting to see how the story fits thematically with the others. It does in the final moment.

The sixth is the longest episode. We are at a big wedding and the bride suddenly thinks her groom has been sleeping with one of the guests. She goes full-tilt Bridezilla on him and everybody else at the wedding. Instead of ending at that point, we spend a lot of time on the effects her revenge has on everybody, including herself.

If you are thinking about writing an anthology script, this is the one to look at to see how it’s done.

If you enjoyed Tom’s review of Trumbo, don’t forget to check out our interview with its screenwriter, John McNamara: Breaking the Hollywood Blacklist.