Spider-Man

In 1997, Batman & Robin nearly killed off the comic book superhero movie. It was famously reviled by critics and underperformed at the box office. Blade (1998), however, came out the next year and proved that there was still interest in the genre. It wasn’t until the phenomenal success of X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002), which managed to tap into the pop culture zeitgeist in a significant way, that the genre returned to prominence. Both movies were made by directors who grew up with these comic books and were fans. More importantly, they understood what made these iconic characters work and strongly identified with them.

Sam Raimi, in particular, was an inspired choice to direct Spider-Man. In many respects, his 1990 film Darkman was a comic book superhero movie not actually based on an existing title. It demonstrated that he had the innate storytelling instincts for the genre and the stylistic chops to transport the famous webslinger from page to screen. The end result was a loving homage to his humble beginnings at the hands of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko while still feeling contemporary.

Raimi immediately established Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) as a pasty-faced dweeb that admires his high school crush Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) from afar. It’s not like he’s invisible as the movie makes a point of having her stick up for him while others ridicule him. He is an outcast and is friends with another outsider, Harry Osborn (James Franco), a rich kid that flunked out of private school and is tired of living in the shadow of his brilliant scientist father, Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe). David Koepp’s screenplay efficiently introduces all the significant people in Peter’s life and establishes the relationships between each other. Raimi has fun introducing the core supporting characters in Spider-Man’s world, like the Daily Bugle’s publisher J. Jonah Jameson played with perfect bluster by J.K. Simmons who captures the essence of the notoriously cheap yellow journalist while also taking an instant dislike to the webslinger.

The movie soon establishes a parallel between Peter and Norman as they undergo physical enhancement that also affects them mentally. With Peter it happened accidentally but Norman made the choice to do it, which drives him insane. Initially, Peter’s newfound powers make him cocky and selfish as he uses them for profit. It is only when this behavior results in the death of his beloved Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) that he learns to use his powers for the greater good.

Maguire has a memorable scene with Cliff Robertson when Uncle Ben has a heart-to-heart with Peter, telling him, “These are the years when a man changes into the man he’s gonna become for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into.” He then utters the movie’s most famous line, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Instead of listening, Peter foolishly chastises Ben for telling him what to do and to stop pretending to be his father, which visibly wounds the elder man. Robertson is excellent in this scene as he makes you care about him so that you feel bad when Peter dismisses him so callously. Maguire is quite strong in this scene as well, showing how Peter has become drunk with his newfound powers, believing that no one can relate to what he’s experiencing. He is also quite affecting in the aftermath of Ben’s death. Peter is in his room quietly crying, devastated by what happened and with the knowledge that it was his fault. He could have prevented it.

Kirsten Dunst brings a fresh-faced girl-next-door vibe to the role of M.J. She’s obviously beautiful but the actor isn’t afraid to act disarmingly goofy when posing for Peter’s pictures during their school field trip. She isn’t bored by the science stuff and actually looks interested in the tour guide’s spiel. The movie wisely has the relationship between her and Peter as its heart, establishing their friendship in scenes like when they tell each other their aspirations after they graduate from high school – she wants to be an actor and he wants to be a photographer, working his way through college. It a wonderful character building moment as Peter encourages M.J. to follow her dreams.

The two actors have fantastic chemistry together. We want to see Peter and M.J. get together yet it is always tantalizingly just out of reach. The scene where he saves her from would-be muggers as Spider-Man and she rewards him with a passionate kiss is a moment of intimacy that is missing from a lot of the current crop of comic book superhero movies, which are strangely asexual. What, superheroes don’t get to have love lives? The potential romance between Peter and M.J. is one of the best things about Spider-Man.

Willem Dafoe does a great job conveying Norman’s gradual transition to the dark side and the emergence of a split personality. It allows the actor to play two separate characters – Osborn, the victim, and the Green Goblin who wants to punish those that wronged him. The movie takes the time to show what motivated a decent man like Norman to go bad, transforming himself into the Goblin. He’s not a simple, world dominating baddie but a tortured soul driven mad by self-imposed pressures and corporate machinations. It was a quite a coup getting someone of Dafoe’s caliber to play the villain. He gives the role his own distinctive spin, like the Thanksgiving dinner he attends at Peter and Harry’s place. It looks like Norman but the way Dafoe plays it you can tell that the Goblin persona has taken over in the way he leers suggestively at M.J. and threateningly at Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) when she slaps his hand for touching the food before saying Grace.

As he demonstrated with Darkman, Raimi has a knack for kinetic camerawork and editing tailor-made for a comic book superhero movie, which he demonstrates during the Green Goblin’s attack on the Oscorp Unity Day Festival in downtown New York City. While trading blows with him, Spider-Man saves several innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, most notably M.J. The CGI in this sequence is impressive, seamlessly showing off both combatants’ abilities. Technology had finally caught up to what the comic books had been doing all along and brought Spider-Man’s webslinging powers vividly to life.

At the end of Spider-Man, Peter sums up his lot in life best when he says, “No matter what I do no matter how hard I try, the ones I love will always be the ones that pay.” This movie shows the sacrifices a hero must make in order to keep the ones he loves safe. Spider-Man is about what it takes to become a hero and what it means to be one. All it takes is one fateful moment to change your life forever. For Peter it was refusing to stop and armed robber who goes on to kill Uncle Ben. At that moment Peter realizes that his actions have real consequences and that he must use his powers responsibly. Thus, Spider-Man is born. It is this moment that sets him on the path to becoming a superhero.

Brothers

So far, most films about the current war in the Middle East have not fared well at the box office with efforts like Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007) and Stop-Loss (2008) getting limited distribution or underperforming at the box office (or both), often garnering little interest with mainstream audiences. People don't want to be reminded of the problems we face over there or the effects of it here at home when our soldiers return. To counter this attitude with his film Brothers (2009), director Jim Sheridan cannily cast marquee names like Natalie Portman, Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal in an attempt to appeal to a mainstream audience. A remake of Susanna Bier's 2004 Danish film Brodre, Brothers performed modestly well at the box office, but was largely unseen and remains an absorbing look at just not what soldiers go through, but how their loved ones deal with them once they get home. It also features powerful performances from the three aforementioned lead actors.

Captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is a United States Marine heading back to Afghanistan for another tour of duty. He’s a loving family man with a beautiful wife named Grace (Natalie Portman) and two adorable daughters, Isabelle (Bailee Madison) and Maggie (Taylor Geare). Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman are instantly believable as a married couple that clearly loves each other. There is a familiarity that couples have and even though they don’t have much screen-time to convey it before Sam ships off, they pull it off in the way their characters look and interact with each other. In contrast, his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) has just been released from prison after serving time for armed robbery. He’s the black sheep of the family and Grace doesn’t think too highly of her husband’s brother, but is nice to him in person. While Sam and Tommy get along fine there is tangible tension between their father (Sam Shepard) and latter. This is evident in an uncomfortable family dinner where their father makes it known that he sees Sam as a hero for serving his country and Tommy as a disappointment, causing the latter to make a scene. You can cut the tension with a knife during this scene until Tommy’s controlled outburst brings long simmering resentments to the surface.

While on a mission over hostile territory, Sam’s helicopter is shot down and he’s presumed dead. Sheridan makes the right choice when depicting the standard scene of the wife being told that her husband has been killed by showing Grace coming to the door and breaking down once she sees the military officers. No words need to be said and the scene ends there because Portman’s reaction says enough. Instead, Sheridan shows Grace’s full-blown emotional breakdown when Tommy stops by later that night to return Sam’s truck. Rather than console her, he erupts in anger and storms off. It’s an odd reaction, but in character as Tommy is clearly someone with a lot rage inside of him.

Tommy starts spending more time with his brother’s family, helping around the house and the rest of the film plays out the growing attraction between him and Grace. Meanwhile, Sam survives the attack on his helicopter and is being held prisoner and tortured.

Natalie Portman turns in a wonderfully nuanced performance as a woman trying to process the unbelievable grief she is experiencing. There are scenes where you can see Grace putting on a brave face for those around her, especially her children, but every so often she lets it slip and reveals the hurt that exists under the surface. For example, there is a scene where everyone throws a surprise birthday party for Grace and as she’s about to blow out the candles on her cake. There is a moment where she has a distant, haunted look before catching herself and regaining her pleasant façade. It’s a nice bit of acting from Portman and throughout the film she conveys a complex range of emotions as the actress shows how Grace processes the grief of her husband’s death and her emerging, conflicted feelings for Tommy.

Brothers is a slow burn, slice-of-life film as Sheridan dives deep into this family, examining the dynamic between Tommy and his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War. There are hints that his strict, perhaps even abusive style of parenting pushed Tommy to the kind of life he leads – an aimless ne’er’-do-well with a past full of regrets. The more time he spends with Grace and her daughters, the more of an influence they have on him. They provide a stabilizing effect by giving him a sense of purpose. Jake Gyllenhaal does a nice job of conveying Tommy’s inner turmoil, which he carries around with him. Initially, he gets to play the brooding, moody brother, but over the course of the film he transforms into someone who is more open and responsible. It’s a natural progression that the actor conveys expertly.

Tobey Maguire’s character also undergoes a transformation from genial family man to paranoid soldier suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder after spending several months as a prisoner of war. The actor goes through an impressive physical transformation as Sam is beaten and deprived of sleep so that he becomes a shadow of his former self. He does what he has to do in order to survive. If Brothers has a flaw it is that too much time is spent in Afghanistan showing how Sam’s humanity is stripped away by his captors. I understand the purpose of these scenes – they explain his behavior later on when he finally returns home, but as they continue and Sam’s situation gets bleaker, the balance that Sheridan has maintained up to this point is threatened. The Afghanistan scenes could have been left up to our imagination and conveyed through well-written expositional dialogue delivered by the talented Maguire.

As he demonstrated with In America (2002), Sheridan has a real affinity for getting naturalistic performances out of child actors and Brothers is no different, especially from Bailee Madison who plays the slightly older of the two daughters. Isabelle is more aware of what is going on and that something isn’t right with her father. This realization, as it plays briefly over her face in one scene, is absolutely heartbreaking. As a result, she is more emotional than her happy-go-lucky sibling. Madison really stands out during a tense dinner scene towards the end of the film when Isabelle intentionally baits her father. She is acting out, like a petulant child, but is also the only one in the family who has the courage to address the big elephant in the room – Sam’s increasingly erratic behavior.

Originally, Jim Sheridan was writing a story about two brothers growing up in Ireland but couldn’t get the financing for it. He ended up watching Susanna Bier's 2004 Danish film Brodre and liked it so much he thought it could be remade for North American audiences, changing the emphasis from an illicit love triangle to that of the family. Jake Gyllenhaal was the first actor to sign on, followed by Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman. 

At the time she signed on to do Brothers, Portman made a conscious decision to pick more mature roles: “I’m trying to find roles that demand more adulthood from me because you can get stuck in a very awful cute cycle as a woman in film – especially being such a small person.” To prepare for the part, the actress met with Army wives in order to understand how they managed their lives. She also bonded with the young actresses playing her daughters by having them over for baking parties and hanging out with them between takes. She and Maguire were able to play husband and wife so well because they had known each other for 14 years prior. She said, “Just knowing someone for that long is great history to have when you’re walking on set and playing husband and wife.” In addition, she had also known co-star Gyllenhaal for ten years.

During rehearsals and on set, Sheridan played a live version of Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” to get Gyllenhaal in the mood of a scene where Tommy and Grace share a quiet moment together. For Gyllenhaal, the song reminded him of the connection to his family, in particular his father. In working with the child actors, Sheridan had his own specific method: “what I do is present a scene to them as a problem, a kind of puzzle, and then ask them questions, what they think the character is thinking, or wants to do.”

Brothers received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars and praised Maguire’s performance: “This becomes Tobey Maguire’s film to dominate, and I’ve never seen these dark depths in him before. Actors possess a great gift to surprise us, if they find the right material in their hands.” In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “And Brothers itself – a smart, well-meaning project – never quite pulls itself together. It has a vague, half-finished feeling, as if it had not figured out what it was trying to do. Which may amount to a kind of realism – an accurate reflection of where we are in Afghanistan.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Brothers isn’t badly acted, but as directed by the increasingly impersonal Jim Sheridan, it’s lumbering and heavy-handed, a film that piles on overwrought dramatic twists until it begins to creak under the weight of its presumed significance.”

USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and Claudia Puig wrote, “Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare are excellent as Sam and Grace’s young daughters, derailed by their dad’s scary bouts of anger and his newfound coldness. The youthful portrayals recall the indelible roles of the young daughters in Sheridan’s wonderful 2003 film, In America.” The Los Angeles Times’ Betsey Sharkey wrote, “There will be echoes of that passion and poignancy in Brothers. But unlike the clear voice of those earlier films, Sheridan seems as conflicted as the Cahills about their virtues and failings.” Finally, in his review for the Washington Post, Michael O’Sullivan wrote, “Brothers is depressing as hell. And, like most war movies these days, it ends on a note that’s far from hopeful. But it’s good, and wise, and it feels true. Meaning, it hurts.”

Brothers is a fusion of Sheridan’s fascination with people put under extraordinary duress, like In the Name of the Father (1993), and families dealing with hardships, like In America. At times, Brothers feels like one of the films from the 1980s that dealt with families struggling to understand loved ones that had served time in the Vietnam War – In Country (1989) and Jacknife (1989) are two that come immediately to mind as spiritual antecedents to Brothers. In Sheridan’s capable hands, this film is a nicely observed character study that tries to show the trauma a soldier experience during war and what their family goes through at home, perhaps lingering a little too long on the hardships Sam endures in Afghanistan.

Brothers is a good film about an uncomfortable topic. It doesn’t offer any easy answers – how can it while we are still mired in this war? This will only come with time, but it exists as a document of where we are now. The war in the Middle East may be an unpopular one, but it is important that the stories of the people that fought it over there and continue to do so back home are told. By telling their stories maybe we can process how the war has affected us as a country.

SOURCES

Ditzian, Eric. “Brothers’ Star Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman Talk ‘Growing Up Together.’” MTV.com. December 2, 2009.

Farquharson, Vanessa. “Jim Sheridan Reflects on the Betrayals at Brothers’ Core.” The Financial Post. December 4, 2009.

Freydkin, Donna. “Natalie Portman Transitions into Adult Role in Brothers.” USA Today. December 4, 2009.

“Springsteen’s The River Brings Gyllenhaal to Tears on Set.” WENN Entertainment News Wire Service. December 3, 2009.

Thompson, Bob. “When Irish Eyes are Filming.” Vancouver Sun. December 4, 2009.

Vaughan, R.M. “You leave it to the actors, really, to the acting.” Globe & Mail. December 4, 2009.

DVD of the Week: The Ice Storm: Criterion Collection

Director Ang Lee has had a fascinatingly diverse career. He’s tried his hand at the literary adaptation with Sense and Sensibility (1995), the Civil War epic with Ride with the Devil (1999), a period martial arts tale with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and a comic book adaptation with the much-maligned Hulk (2003). He has successfully dabbled in several genres and with The Ice Storm (1997), he adapted Rick Moody’s 1994 novel of the same name, a drama set in 1973 during the waning years of the sexual revolution.

The film takes place during the Thanksgiving holiday in New Canaan, Connecticut and explores the relationship between two families: the Carvers and the Hoods. Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire) is returning home from school and hopes to lose his virginity to an attractive classmate named Libbets Casey (Katie Holmes). His sister Wendy (Christina Ricci) is obsessed with the Watergate hearings and delights in watching President Nixon going down in flames. Their parents, Ben (Kevin Kline) and Elena (Joan Allen), are a bland WASPy couple whose marriage is stuck in a rut. Ben is having an affair with Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver) who is in a loveless marriage with Jim (Jamey Sheridan). They have two sons, Mikey (Elijah Wood) and Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), oddly off-kilter boys who are becoming increasingly sexually aware with Wendy’s help.

All of their conflicts and problems boil to the surface at a “key party” that the Carvers and Hoods attend during an ice storm. There’s a faint whiff of desperation as all of these conservative WASPs try to be hip swingers. Meanwhile, their children are up to their own subversive activities with unfortunate, tragic consequences.

Needless to say, both of these families are very dysfunctional with the adults being sexually repressed and the kids exploring their sexuality. Lee underlines the dysfunction of these families by visually referencing panels from issue 141 of the Fantastic Four comic book occasionally throughout the film. Paul is reading it on a train during the film’s climactic ice storm. The FF are a family of superheroes and in this particular issue they are plagued by internal strife. There is some delicious foreshadowing as Tobey Maguire would go on to play Spider-Man and Lee would adapt the Incredible Hulk.

The Ice Storm feels like an Ingmar Bergman or John Cassavetes film from the 1970s with a dash of Atom Egoyan (the look of either Exotica or The Sweet Hereafter). It also has a textured, painterly quality thanks to the exquisite cinematography of Frederick Elmes who also shot some of David Lynch’s best films (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart). He really captures the tacky, kitschy look of the ‘70s and is helped considerably by the attention to period detail (awful sweater vests over turtleneck sweaters) and the top notch production design (capturing the look of the houses from that era).

The Ice Storm takes a fascinating look at a specific time and place through the eyes of an outsider – the Taiwanese-born Lee who offers a fresh perspective on American culture. His film can be seen as a melancholic lament for the end of an era and the loss of innocence that began with the Kennedy assassination. Kudos to the Criterion Collection for giving this unfairly neglected film their deluxe treatment.

Special Features:

The first disc features an audio commentary by director Ang Lee and producer/screenwriter James Schamus. They banter back and forth like the long-time friends and collaborators that they are. At one point, Schamus jokingly refers to a “pre-Scientology” Katie Holmes and recounts some of the challenges of shooting on location including greedy town locals who held up filming. Lee makes some astute observations about the characters and points out his favorite shots and lines of dialogue in the film. They talk about Maguire’s voiceover narration and how it provides structure to the film and how it comments on the action. This is an entertaining and informative commentary.

There is also a theatrical trailer.

The second disc starts off with “Weathering the Storm,” a 36-minute retrospective featurette with new interviews with a lot of the key cast members who reflect on making the film and how it affected their careers. Joan Allen describes the script as minimalist in nature and was intrigued by it. Kevin Kline’s agent described it as the bleakest one he’d ever read and this piqued the actor’s curiosity who read and found it quite funny. Sigourney Weaver talks about the social restrictions her character and women in general faced in the ‘70s. Everyone talks about what it was like to work with Lee. This is an excellent look at how the film came together by some of the actors who were in it.

“Rick Moody Interview” features the author of the source novel talking about his feelings towards the film adaptation. These characters were an intimate part of him and the film version was a very different take on them. He was allowed to watch the process of the adaptation by the filmmakers.

“Lee and Schamus at MOMI.” The two talk about their filmmaking career together at the Museum of the Moving Image in November 2007. They talk about how various films came together and reflect on them in an eloquent and intelligent way.

“The Look of The Ice Storm” features interviews with cinematographer Frederick Elmes, production designer Mark Friedberg, and costume designer Carol Oditz. They talk about how they helped realize Lee’s vision.

Also included are four deleted scenes with optional commentary by Schamus. We see Ben at work in a funny bit with Kline and Henry Czerny. He talks about why these scenes were cut.

Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (2000) is a redemptive tale of a college professor in the midst of a mid-life crisis. It is a film about faded glory and people past their prime. Curtis Hanson’s film is the kind of small, oddball little tale with a decidedly off-kilter, dark sense of humor and a cast of eccentric characters. It was a bit hit with critics but never quite connected with a mainstream audience due in part to a bungled initial promotional campaign that clearly did not know how to convey the quirky tone of the film into an easily digestible soundbite.

Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is a burnt out English professor that wrote a much celebrated novel entitled, The Arsonist’s Daughter, but has since been having a hard time with his follow-up. He keeps writing and writing with no end in sight (current page count sits at around 2,100+ pages). His young wife has left him and he’s sleeping with his boss’ wife, Sara Gaskill (Frances McDormand), who is also the Chancellor of the university where he works. His long-suffering editor, Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.) is in town to take a look at the book. He maintains a “what me, worry?” façade but is in danger of losing his job unless he can find a potential best seller and applies subtle but definite pressure on Grady. The professor has also taken under his wing a brilliant but troubled student, James Leer (Tobey Maguire), from his creative writing class. He’s a tortured artist wannabe as evident from his habit of sitting in an empty, dark classroom. He is also ostracized by his classmates who resent his ability to write.

Producer Scott Rudin gave Michael Chabon’s book to screenwriter Steve Kloves. At first, he wasn’t interested – he hadn’t written a word in four years and had never adapted a novel before – but while reading the novel he connected with the material, “and a sort of kinship with Michael Chabon’s tone and the way he looked at his characters, with all their flaws, with a real generous spirit,” he said in an interview with Creative Screenwriting magazine. Initially, Kloves agreed to adapt the book and talk about directing it but two and half years into working on the screenplay, he decided not to direct. After the success of L.A. Confidential (1997), Hanson was working on a script of his own and reading other scripts with a keen interest for his next film to be a comedy. Actress Elizabeth McGovern once advised him to work with Kloves and was given Kloves’ screenplay. He was told that Michael Douglas was interested in playing Grady and was impressed by the way in which the characters were presented and “the lack of judgment on their actions and eccentricities.” In addition, Hanson told the Globe and Mail that he “fell in love with these characters – and they made me laugh.”

In an interview with the Boston Globe, Hanson said that he told Rudin, “it’s too bad you can’t have Jean Renoir or Hal Ashby direct this.” Once Hanson was attached to direct, Kloves met with him and was relieved that they were both on the same page in terms of their approach to the material. Chabon encouraged Kloves to make the material his own and this included changing Grady’s Jewish in-laws to gentiles. Additional changes were made once Hanson came on board. For example, he felt that James Leer would be a fan of Douglas Sirk’s films as opposed to Frank Capra as he is in the novel. The studio wasn’t interested in making a quirky, character-driven comedy/drama until Michael Douglas agreed to work well below his usual large fee. One of the challenges for Hanson was to take a plot that he called “meandering and, apparently, sort of aimless,” and a character that “does things that even he doesn’t really know why he’s doing them,” and try to create a “feeling of focus” to keep the audience interested. Another challenge was working on actual locations in very cold weather and constantly changing conditions.

Hanson’s other concern was if Douglas would be willing to take on the role without a hint of vanity but also do it in a truthful way and not in a way that would draw attention to the fact that he was playing an unattractive character. To his credit, the actor disappears completely into this role. He’s not the first person you’d think of to play Grady. When he tries too hard to be funny it can come across as pompous, but he tones it down here and looks completely at ease, comfortable as the frumpy Grady. Douglas hits just the right notes of world-weary cynicism but with a romantic streak buried underneath. For the veteran actor it’s an unglamorous role – he gained 25 pounds for the role, eating pizza, subs and drank a lot of beer. He always looks rumpled, unshaven with unkempt hair and often wearing a ratty old housecoat when he writes. Grady has the capacity to do something about his miserable lot in life and during the course of the film his character undergoes a fascinating arc. In some ways, Grady is a pot-smoking burn-out like the Dude from The Big Lebowski (1998) only with slightly more ambition. He lives outside of normal society in the rarified atmosphere of academia—puttering around, writing his novel and teaching his writing class, but when he crosses paths with James Leer, Grady realizes that he's got to change.

Wonder Boys also marked a break-out role for Tobey Maguire. Before he garnered massive mainstream exposure with Spider-Man (2002), he was known mostly for roles in small, independent films. Like everyone else in the cast, he has his memorable moments, like when his character laughs at Q’s pretentious speech at Wordfest with a high-pitched giggle that reverberates through the large auditorium. The blissfully stoned expression he gives afterwards is priceless. Everyone in the film keeps harping on what a genius writer Grady is, but it gradually becomes apparent that James is the true genius. He writes pages and pages of beautiful prose in minutes. And like any true talent, it just comes pouring effortlessly out of him. What makes James such a good writer is that his whole life is essentially a lie – he lies about his parents’ past, how they met and where they came from. He even maintains this air of a tortured artist but as we find out that too is a lie. James has it pretty easy, living in a large house in an affluent neighborhood. Good fiction writers have to be masters at making things up.

As always, Robert Downey Jr. knows how to make an entrance, meeting Grady at the airport with a transvestite as his date. The exchange between Terry and Grady quickly establishes their long-time friendship by the familiarity between them. Downey is able to take the most mundane, ordinary line and give it his own unique spin and make it funny or give a look that is memorable. His rapport with Douglas is excellent and they play well off each other as both sides of the comedic equation. Downey was on probation during the winter of 1999 when Hanson considered him for a role in Wonder Boys. The director was cautious because of the actor’s drug history and was concerned because it would be a tough film shot in sequence in Pittsburgh in the winter. Downey flew to Pittsburgh and had a long dinner conversation with Hanson where they addressed his problems. The actor demonstrated a commitment to the film and the director hired him. According to Hanson, Downey acted in a professional manner for the entire four-and-a-half month shoot but after it ended and he returned to Los Angeles, the actor violated his parole.

Frances McDormand knows how to react to those around her, like when she meets Grady, Terry and his date at a party. Watching her react to the charming transvestite is priceless. She and Douglas also have excellent chemistry together as evident in the short hand, the give-and-take between their characters. This is nicely established in their first scene together where Sara tells Grady that she’s pregnant. The music sets a slightly melancholic even whimsical tone as the two characters reveal that they are trapped in relationships that they don’t want to be in. They want to be together but Grady won’t show her how serious he is about them. Ultimately, Grady has to save himself and to in order to do this he must convince Sara that he does love and he want to be with her.

Steve Kloves' script is a solid piece of writing as he does a great job of adapting Chabon’s book, trimming it of its excess narrative fat (as he also did so well with the Harry Potter books). It has clever, memorable dialogue that speaks volumes about these characters. There is a pleasant mix of off-kilter humor and poignant drama as we are presented with all sorts of colorful characters, like Grady’s bisexual editor and the famous and pompous writer known as Q (played to haughty perfection by Rip Torn) and then have them played by equally eccentric characters actors. The dialogue is humorous and offbeat in one scene, touching and thoughtful in the next. For example, in one scene, James rattles off a list of celebrity suicides in alphabetical order, the dates and how they did it in a mechanical monotone as if he’s reading off a grocery list that adds to humor of the scene because it is such an unusual moment.

Kloves also wisely avoids the usual clichés. like Katie Holmes’ character, the young, nubile co-ed who, in a lesser film would have had a fling with Grady. This would have broken the magical spell that this movie casts and so the filmmakers wisely avoid it. Instead, she helps Grady realize that his book is going nowhere and that he needs to make some choices about it and his life. One of the film’s major themes is about making choices. Grady’s problem is that he is indecisive. He can’t make up his mind about how he feels about Sara and he can’t figure out how to end his wildly out of control novel that is ultimately a metaphor for his life. Grady’s life is in a holding pattern, like his book and both get more complicated as life goes on. As the days go on so does the page count increase on his book. However, the key to his salvation lies in his mission to reach James and nurture his talents. Grady sees some of himself in James – a wonder boy in the making while he is a wonder boy who has lost his way. Terry is the third wonder boy in the film and his luster has been fading over years, unable to find another breakthrough novel like The Arsonist’s Daughter and is generally regarded as a joke at work.

Hanson strips color from the palette, presenting Pittsburgh in blues and grays, a romantic, post-industrial setting that we see through Grady’s car window. It’s subtly presented as Hanson doesn’t hit us over the head with obvious landmarks. He excels at creating just the right mood and atmosphere. For the director, the city mirrors the characters in the film as he commented in an interview with Empire magazine, “it’s a city with this glorious past that went into decline…That’s why I wanted to shoot here. I think the city’s so emblematic of the characters’ problems.” The city was experiencing a mild winter during their shoot and they had to use a lot of artificial snow.

The best films are the ones that you lose yourself in completely. There is a scene where Grady sneaks a smoke outside of the Gaskill house at night and a light snow falls. He spies a greenhouse in the distance and it is illuminated in the night looking like “heaven” as James puts it. This is in contrast to the warm, gold interior of the nearby Gaskill house. This is a wonderful little moment frozen in time and the beginning of the friendship between Grady and James.

The attention to detail—a snowy winter in Pittsburgh—is beautiful realized. Hanson does a great job of conveying a sense of place, utilizing locations well. There is the warm, red and gold of a blues bar that Grady meets Terry and James at. It’s a small place packed with people and they sit in a booth that create an intimate feel. There’s a great moment where Grady and Terry spot an odd looking guy across the bar and create an elaborate and colorful backstory for him, including a name – Vernon Hardapple – and who is, among other things, “president of the James Brown Hair Club for Men.” Grady later encounters the man on a couple of very memorable occasions including a funny scene where Grady, Q and Terry try to evade Vernon outside of the bar that ends with the man jumping on the hood of their car with his butt. We see Q and Terry laughing and having fun as Grady tries to escape and in turn it is fun for us to watch.

Hanson had been a fan of Bob Dylan’s music since childhood and a great admirer of his soundtrack for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). As it turned out, Dylan was a fan of Hanson’s previous film, L.A. Confidential and after a lot of convincing screened 90 minutes of rough footage from Wonder Boys. Hanson wanted Dylan because “who knows more about being a wonder boy and the trap it can be, about the expectations and the fear of repeating yourself?” In addition to Dylan, Hanson built the score around nine singer-songwriters including Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. The entire soundtrack is integrated into the film and Hanson even played some of the songs for the actors on the Pittsburgh set to convey a scene’s “aural texture,” as the director put it in an interview with USA Today.

The studio decided to release Wonder Boys in February, notoriously the month where films no one cares about are unceremoniously dumped, and while it connected with critics, flopped at the box office. It came out a week after the Academy Award nominations were announced. The studio spent a lot more money promoting the films of theirs that were nominated and not enough on Wonder Boys. The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern praised Douglas' work in the movie, but criticized the movie poster, which featured a headshot of Douglas: "a raffishly eccentric role, and he's never been so appealing. (Don't be put off by the movie's cryptic poster, which makes him look like Michael J. Pollard.)" The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan also slammed the poster: "The film's ad poster brings Elmer Fudd to mind."

Hanson was not happy with how the film was marketed, in particular the poster, which he said in an interview with The Observer, made Douglas look “like he was trying to be Robin Williams.” In an interview with Amy Taubin for the Village Voice Hanson said, "The very things that made Michael and I want to do the movie so badly were the reasons it was so tricky to market. Since films go out on so many screens at once, there's a need for instant appeal. But Wonder Boys isn't easily reducible to a single image or a catchy ad line." The director disagreed with the studio over the film’s original release date and advertising campaign. To make matters worse, the marketing was criticized in the press and in an unprecedented move, the studio canceled the lucrative video contract and pulled the film out of theaters. Hanson and Rudin lobbied to have the film re-released. A new campaign was designed that emphasized the ensemble cast and the film was released in theaters where it promptly flopped at the box office again.

Despite the studio’s mishandling of the promotional side of things, the film was warmly received by critics. The Boston Society of Film Critics voted Frances McDormand as Best Supporting Actress for her work in the film and Steve Kloves received Best Screenplay accolades. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association voted Michael Douglas for Best Actor and McDormand picked up another Best Actress award. Roger Ebert praised Wonder Boys as "the most accurate movie about campus life that I can remember. It is accurate, not because it captures intellectual debate or campus politics, but because it knows two things: (1) Students come and go, but the faculty actually lives there, and (2) many faculty members stay stuck in graduate-student mode for decades." USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and praised its “drollery, which was a hallmark of the book as well, had gotten a booster shot from Kloves.” Philip French, in The Observer, wrote, “The picture has a marvelous sense of the contrasted worlds of Pittsburgh, the interior warmth and the damp, biting cold outside of a Pennsylvania winter.”

Every scene in Wonder Boys feels warm and inviting and filled with interesting characters that inhabit this world and that allows you to be in it for the duration of the film. By hanging out with James, Grady regains that wonder boy spark while also guiding his young protégé to becoming one himself. What better teacher than someone who was once one? At one point, Grady says that most people don’t think and that books aren’t important anymore. He’s jaded and cynical about the world but over the course of the film James reaches him and changes his outlook on life.

SOURCES

Angulo, Sandra P. “Penn Stationed.” Entertainment Weekly. February 25, 2000.

Carr, Jay. “Wonder Boys Gets A New Lease on Life.” Boston Globe. November 23, 2000.

Chumo II, Peter N. “No Wonder Boy.” Creative Screenwriting. January/February 2001.

Dawson, Jeff. “Boy Wonders.” Empire. December 2000.

Gunderson, Edna. “Dylan Sets the Tone for Wonder Boys Soundtrack.” USA Today. January 20, 2000.

Heuring, David. “Dante Spinotti Talks about Shooting Wonder Boys.” International Cinematographers Guild.

Kehr, Dave. “At the Movies.” The New York Times. November 3, 2000.

Ojumu, Akin. “Success is Better Late Than Never.” The Observer. October 22, 2000.

Portman, Jamie. “Robert Downey Jr.’s Unfortunate Incarceration.” Ottawa Citizen. February 24, 2000.

Rickey, Carrie. “Wonder Years for Reborn Michael.” Sunday Telegraph. June 18, 2000.

Sragow, Michael. “L.A. Noir or College Comedy, The Genre is Real Life.” The New York Times. February 13, 2000.

Strauss, Bob. “From B-Movies to Hollywood’s A-List.” Globe and Mail. February 25, 2000.

Wrathall, John. “Everything That I’ve Done is to Do with Darkness.” The Independent. October 29, 2000.