Diana

Oy vey!  The dreary and unintentionally absurd Diana stars Naomi Watts as the People's Princess and chronicles the last two years of her life.  Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (who ventured into similar terrain with the Academy Award nominated Downfall about the waning years of Adolph Hitler) and scripted by Stephen Jeffries, Diana is a miscalculation from the start, with its made-for-trashy-television approach and unsubtle staging of the demise of one of the most beguiling and enigmatic creatures of the twentieth century.  The film begins with Diana dithering about in her Parisian hotel room, a sense of dread swells the soundtrack, as if she knew.  Well we know whats about to happen; it was one of the most historic events of the last thirty years.  As she careens down the hotel corridors, she stops, the camera stops to look back.  It's meant to be an artistic moment of reflection, but the effect is simply ridiculous.  Oh the foreboding!

Yet this is a love story, and the title cards bring us back two years earlier to another confusing part of the Princess Diana puzzle, just before the divorce heard round the world from Prince Charles became final and the world was as enraptured to the dramatics of the royal family in a more singularly trashy way.  Aware her marriage is but up, but in no position to call it officially kaput, the film posits that Diana had one last shot at happiness and romance with a dapper Pakistani heart surgeon named Hasnat Khan (played by Lost actor Naveen Andrews.)  The two meet cute in a traditionally Hollywood moment at a hospital when a friend of the late princess falls ill and a grand romance develops.

Two Mothers trailer

Here's the French trailer to Two Mothers, which debuted at this years Sundance Film Festival.  The film, penned by Christopher Hampton (Atonement, Dangerous Liaisons) and directed by Anne Fontaine (Coco Before Chanel) stars Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as two women who fall for each others respective young adult sons.  Looks all steamy and stuff, as well as a very pointed drama that could reap strong roles for the leading actresses...or not.  Xavier Samuel and James Frecheville (Animal Kingdom) play their sons.  The film received mixed reviews at Sundance.

On the subject of Robin Wright, is there another well-liked and clearly talented actress who has yet to fully break out in any significant way.  Even with the freshly plucked A Princess Bride coming out party, she always seemed sidelined, or marginalized, either by the films themselves or the actors you have seemed to steal her sheen.  Lately, however, it appears at least on screen (she's also currently in the much buzzed about Netflix original House of Cards) she's not trying altogether too hard, amassing a recent film resumé that includes small roles in respected titles like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Moneyball, and Rampart-- all the while just standing there alongside her leading men.  Rampart is a clear example of a slightly something more role and a gutsy performance attached to it, but it all kind of dissolved as the film slightly fell apart despite her conviction.  The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009) was a nice role (of which earned a strange shout out from her ex Sean Penn at the 2009 Academy Awards telecast), but too much of slight film to be taken seriously, as was A Home at the End of the World (2004) and, perhaps her best film role, She's So Lovely (1998.)  As the song in Cabaret goes...maybe this time.

The Impossible

With a film like The Impossible, which documents the horrific tsunami that destroyed Southeast Asia in 2004 seen through the prism of one family, one really knows what to expect.  The emotional beats, built-in sensitivity to ones suffering, there's a certain formula; it's all in the execution.  With Spanish director Juan Antonia Bayona at the helm, who crafted the elegant thriller The Orphanage (2008), he begins his film with a bristling tension.  We know what will happen, but stages nice sequences of a family in harmony-- in this a real family vacationing in Thailand for Christmas holiday.  There's a playful ordinariness in young children frolicking, eager excitement for Christmas gifts and family swim sessions.  Of course, and just as the musical cues will remind us, a tragedy is about to strike.  Wisps of wind, birds fleeing, a red ball stopped in mid play.  Bayona stages the disaster in a uncommonly humane way, seen through the eyes of innocents unaware of whats about to happen, and sadly aware there's little they can do.  There's an immediate indictment of man versus nature eeriness that would spook anyone with it's grounded sense of reality.

The sequence itself is a grandiose display of technical precision.  Tightly shot, exactly executed and bravura in craftsmanship.  There's a tinge of on-ones-seat nerves, as one might expect from the fun but scary disaster films of yore, but the awareness that this, in fact, true, quells movie-going excitement, and subdues it to utmost emotion.  As the water covers the ocean side resort that the well off Bennett family is staying at, there's an immediate ripe undercurrent of immediate sadness.  That Bayona stages the disaster with such a no-nonsense immediacy, barely taking time for the viewer to grasp whats happening is a triumph; it's just a shame that him and his team couldn't sustain it, instead going the easier way out, harkening and bludgeoning his audience with assaults of suffering without the same sense of control.  But as a beginning, The Impossible succeeds with long stretches, with unsentimental displays of nearly wordless, almost pure cinema.  In the aftermath, Maria (Naomi Watts) is dragged down the ocean current, separated from her husband, Henry (Ewan McGregor) and three sons.  Bayona assaults Maria with nature's affect in a sequence that's harrowing and nearly impossible to watch.  Watts surely will be commended for the pure physicality of her performance as her Maria is bruised and ambushed.

When she meets her eldest son Lucas (Tom Holland), there's a relief and a respite as the film ventures from disaster movie to survival film.  It's this stage of the film where Bayona loses sight of the reality he so authoritatively presented during the storm.  The emotional stakes are high, and certainly tears will continue to be shed; it's just that kind of movie, but there's a more pronounced bit of manipulation at hand, one that can't easily be forgotten, even in the course of crying ones eyes out.  Holland, however, gives a marvelous performance a young child, afraid, but forced to take on the role of leader and plays his scenes with a naturalistic dignity and preternatural command.  Towards the center of the film, he takes charge of the sequence where he, as a lucky victim not too terribly injured, becomes a surrogate to helping bring other victims together in a nearby hospital.  The setup is mawkish enough for anyone to easily call uncle, but Holland and the filmmakers, perhaps seemingly aware, underplay the grandness of it.  It's through this sense of command that plots Holland as the only actor to really ever break out of pure sad survivalist role in the film.  Watts and McGregor are certainly charismatic actors and do good work, but under the minimalist script by Sergio Sanchez, neither are given too much of interior life, outside of the keep moving sense of struggle.

There's a harrowing and graceful tribute to the victims of 2004 tsunami tragedy, and thankfully the film supersedes movie-of-the-week tackiness, but there's still a nagging sense that The Impossible might have soared without such an easily-connect-the-dots the conclusion.  This is a real story, and based on a real family's tragedy, and since the trailer itself gives the whole thing away anyway, there's nary a spoiler on that front.  There is something to be said, however, for the trite dialogue, unsubtle gestures of suffering all in service for entertainment.  What starts as a horror film swiftly turns into a somewhat hokey survival fetish film, masquerading as humane drama.  Either as a good thing or bad, it becomes all too apparent Bayona was more interested in former.  B-

Fair Game

Not to be confused with the Billy Baldwin\Cindy Crawford film of the same name, this Fair Game focuses on outed CIA agent Valerie Plame.  Directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne films, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) and starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, the film premiered at Cannes this year to mixed reviews, but a few nice ones for Watts.  More over, it's an important story of one of the least flattering portraits of Bush administration and the Iraqi War.  I'm hopefully the film delivers on some level just because the story is definitely cinematic in comparison to most biography movies-- you've got the war, government conspiracy, spy setting to work with.  It could also serve as a reminder of how powerful an actress Watts is capable.