Short Term 12 (2013)

28 Friday Jul 2017

Tags

Abuse, Brie Larson, Care home, Catch Up movie, Destin Daniel Cretton, Drama, John Gallagher Jr, Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek, Review

D: Destin Daniel Cretton / 97m

Cast: Brie Larson, John Gallagher Jr, Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek, Lakeith Stanfield, Kevin Balmore (as Kevin Hernandez), Stephanie Beatriz, Frantz Turner, Alex Calloway

Some movies catch you by surprise, literally as you’re watching them. Sometimes it’s like a switch going on inside your head, a moment when everything suddenly falls into place, or is lit up like the night sky at a fireworks party. Everything about what you’re seeing and hearing now makes perfect sense, and everything continues in that same vein, rewarding you more and more and more. Short Term 12 is one of those movies, a small-scale, low budget feature expanded by its writer/director, Destin Daniel Cretton, from his 2009 short movie of the same name. It begins simply enough at a group home for troubled teenagers, with new member of staff, Nate (Malek), being regaled on his first day at work with a story that involves a runaway teen, a support worker, and an unfortunate bowel problem. It’s a funny story, well told by the support worker himself, Mason (Gallagher Jr), but interrupted by an attempt at escaping by one of the children.

As the day progresses we’re introduced to the home’s facilitator, Jack (Turner), who advises another of the support workers, Grace (Larson) that a new girl, Jayden (Dever), will be coming to stay for a while. Grace already has plenty of children to look after at the home, from nearly eighteen year old and ready to leave Marcus (Stanfield), to the would-be escapee, Sammy (Calloway). Away from the home she and Mason are in a relationship, but Grace has recently discovered that she’s pregnant, something she hasn’t told him or anyone else. As she deals with that issue, Jayden’s arrival and her background cause Grace to assess her own past, something that she hasn’t done for some time (she and Jayden share similarities in behaviour and the emotional trauma they’ve experienced). She and Jayden start to get to know each other, but it’s not all plain sailing.

Grace eventually tells Mason that she’s pregnant, and though he’s initially shocked, he’s pleased as well, and at a party to honour Mason’s foster parents he asks Grace to marry him. She accepts, but the next day her happiness is deflated by news relating to her father. The news upsets her, but not as much as the news that the previous night, Jayden was collected by her father and won’t be returning. She berates her boss and nearly loses her job over it. Things become even worse when one of the children tries to commit suicide. With everything piling on top of her, Grace becomes withdrawn and uncommunicative with Mason, and tells him she can’t marry him or have his child. But hope comes in an unexpected form, as Grace makes one last effort to help Jayden, and by extension, herself as well.

A movie about the staff and children at a group care home that could have turned out to be mawkish, unconvincing, and trite, instead is sincere, moving, and pleasantly unsentimental. Based on writer/director Cretton’s own experiences working at a group facility for teenagers for two years, Short Term 12 (the name of the home) is a marvel of concise, effective storytelling, restrained yet emotive direction, and features a clutch of heartfelt, honest performances. It’s a movie that avoids the cliché trap with ease, and never once talks down to its audience or undermines its characters by making their issues and problems stereotypical or sensational. From Sammy’s borderline autism to the abuse Jayden is subject to, each child is given a background and a history that informs their behaviour and neutralises any notion that their actions aren’t credible. Cretton found most of the children through open casting calls (Stansfield is the only returnee from the 2009 version), and it’s a tribute to the casting team of Kerry Barden, Rich Delia and Paul Schnee that they were able to find so many children with little or no acting experience who were able to portray these characters in such a realistic manner.

But ultimately, and with no disrespect to Gallagher Jr or Dever, who both put in exemplary work, this is Larson’s movie, pure and simple. She is simply magnificent in her first leading role, imbuing Grace with a caring, resilient nature that’s slowly eroded by the overwhelming feelings that she tries so hard to avoid or ignore, feelings that are brought to the fore by becoming pregnant and meeting Jayden. Larson offers a performance that is never less than truthful, and which is fearless in presenting the emotional devastation that Grace experiences, and the pain that keeps her from enjoying any happiness beyond helping the children at the home. And as Larson explores the depths of Grace’s increasingly dissociative behaviour, she also ensures that the lifeline offered to her by helping Jayden isn’t taken up for purely selfish reasons but because Grace genuinely needs and wants to help others like her. Just the various degrees of subtlety that Larson employs is impressive enough, but she also transforms herself physically, turning in on herself as things get worse for Grace and her survivor’s guilt begins to gnaw at her. She’s aided by Cretton’s decision to frame her in close up for much of the movie, so that we get to see in detail the effect everything is having on her.

Making only his second feature, Cretton shows an assurance and a confidence in the material that some directors who’ve been making movies for far longer never achieve. In conjunction with DoP Brett Pawlak, Cretton uses a hand-held camera to tremendous effect, following his characters around as they peer into rooms and travel down hallways and gather together at break times to shoot the breeze and reestablish some sense of normalcy (if that’s at all possible) in the face of days where they’re run ragged by the demands of both the chidren and the system they’re stuck with. Cretton is clever enough not to criticise the system and its failings directly, either in relation to the staff or the children, but he does throw in some well aimed barbs that hit home with stunning accuracy. Also, he takes the issue of parental abuse and makes sure that there is no attempt to understand or condone such abuse, or to put it into a context that might offer an excuse for it. There are broader issues here that could have been addressed, but Cretton leaves them be in order to concentrate on the terrible trials endured on a daily basis by a still traumatised young woman and a devalued teenager. And it’s the best decision he could have made by far.

Rating: 8/10 – a small miracle of a movie that stumbles only once or twice in its search for emotional and social verisimilitude, Short Term 12 is impressive in a restrained, deliberate way, but it’s also one of the most emotionally honest movies seen in recent years; with an incredible performance by Larson, and the kind of intuitive screenplay that only comes along once in a while, this is a dazzlingly simple yet powerful movie that lingers in the mind long after you’ve seen it. (26/31)

Buster’s Mal Heart (2016)

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Concierge, DJ Qualls, Drama, Home invasions, Kate Lyn Sheil, Rami Malek, Review, Sarah Adina Smith, The Inversion, Tragedy

D: Sarah Adina Smith / 98m

Cast: Rami Malek, DJ Qualls, Kate Lyn Sheil, Mark Kelly, Sukha Belle Potter, Lin Shaye, Sandra Ellis Lafferty, Nicholas Pryor, Toby Huss, Bruce Bundy

The eponymous Buster (Malek) is a vagrant who breaks into empty vacation homes in a remote mountain community, and who stays in each property for as long as he wishes. The authorities, led by a local deputy named Winston (Huss), have been trying to catch him for some time but Buster is wily and elusive. Buster has also gained his name thanks to his regular calls to radio stations where he rants and raves about the upcoming “Inversion”, an impending celestial event that will have a serious impact on everyone on Earth. But Buster’s real name is Jonah, and the events that have brought him to this place and time in his life are shown in flashback.

A night concierge at a less than busy hotel, Jonah is married to Marty (Sheil), and has a young daughter, Roxy (Potter). He doesn’t like working nights as he can’t always sleep during the day, but staffing problems at the hotel prohibit Jonah from changing to days; also his duties are dull and repetitive, and add to the overwhelming ennui that he’s begun to feel. When a stranger (Qualls) tries to get a room for the night but has no I.D. or other way of confirming his identity, the man’s talk of being free and able to do whatever he wants strikes a chord in Jonah, and he agrees to let him stay for just the one night. The man tells Jonah about the Inversion, an event that will coincide with the expected chaos of Y2K, and his impassioned speech has a profound effect on Jonah, who finds an unexpected succour in the idea.

The man returns the next night, and against Jonah’s better judgment, he allows him to stay until the morning. This leads to a tragedy that affects Jonah greatly, and causes him to abandon his life and take to the mountains where in time he becomes Buster. He stays one step ahead of the authorities, until one day the owners of the house he’s hiding out in arrive home unexpectedly, forcing him to deal with their presence and the attentions of a neighbour who comes calling one afternoon. Soon Buster is on the run, and cornered in a cave in the mountains…

The first thing to realise about Buster’s Mal Heart, the second feature from Sarah Adina Smith, is that the Inversion is the movie’s idea of a McGuffin: it never happens, it’s assigned too much importance by the stranger and Jonah/Buster, and it acts as a catalyst for certain events that Jonah becomes involved with. As a plot device it’s fairly simplistic, and as a way of providing or assigning motivation to the characters, it’s undermined by a plot development that Smith throws in towards the end of Jonah’s story. But what it does do that’s quite important is that it allows the movie to retain an air of mystery that, without it, would leave the movie looking and feeling a lot less mysterious and a lot more straightforward than it appears.

Smith introduces us to Buster from the start, then switches back to when he was Jonah, and in an attempt to make the movie seem more elliptical, shows him as another version of Buster but one stranded in a rowboat on the ocean. Smith then interweaves all three stories in an effort to explore the notion of a fractured, possibly irredeemable psyche, and the ways in which it tries to circumvent the overwhelming feelings brought on by a terrible tragedy. It’s powerful, humane stuff, made all the more powerful by Smith’s languorous, dream-like direction, and Malek’s emotive yet disconnected performances. The movie attempts to show that even when someone tries to beat an emotional retreat from the world, they’re still tied to it, no matter how hard they try and break away. Jonah becomes Buster out of necessity and lives a life of housebreaking and reclusivity. But in a moment that resonates deeply, Buster watches a news story about a message in a bottle that has washed up on a beach and been found. It’s a message his ocean-stranded alter ego created and sent out into the world – a lifeline, perhaps – and it precipitates an end to Buster’s life of crime.

This of course begs the question, is either of Jonah’s new identities “real”, or are they just avatars that his mind has come up with to help him deal with his agony and despair. Smith offers no easy answers (as befits a mystery), but can’t help but litter her screenplay with clues as to the likelihood that Jonah is experiencing a psychic split, or conversely, that it’s all a waking dream. It’s left to the viewer to make up their own minds, but in reality, the movie doesn’t need too close an inspection for it to reveal its secrets. Smith is an original, visually competent director, but in attempting to make Jonah’s journey more compelling, she makes the mistake of assigning depth to sections of the movie that don’t deserve them. In the end, Jonah’s breakdown is only that: a breakdown, and no matter much Smith tricks it out with cinematic sleights-of-hand, it’s not a puzzle that needs too much investigation to solve.

As Jonah, Malek’s constrained performance perfectly fits the bewilderment the character is experiencing in his daily life, while as Buster his wild man of the mountains appearance reflects the anguish that Jonah must be feeling. Malek is also on form as the version of Jonah who finds himself “all at sea”, a handy metaphor for how the character must be feeling overall. Some viewers may find all this too obvious for their liking, but what can’t be denied is that Smith, along with cinematographer Shaheen Seth, has created a number of milieus for Jonah to inhabit, and while they all spring from the same grounding in reality, they also serve as a jumping off point for the more surreal elements in Smith’s screenplay.

The ending is unsurprisingly designed to make viewers question their assumptions, but it’s one last parlour trick that is likely to evoke frustration rather than admiration. By doing so, Smith allows for yet one more outcome of Jonah’s breakdown, but though it ties in neatly with the notion that what we’ve witnessed is an allegory based on the story of Jonah and the whale, it’s not as effective as it first seems. Still, Smith is to be congratulated for creating a tale that is confidently handled for the most part, and which requires its audience to contemplate whether or not Jonah’s tri-lateral existence is a boon or a hindrance when it comes to reconfiguring his damaged psyche.

Rating: 7/10 – a somewhat dour narrative benefits greatly from Smith’s ambitious directing style and Malek’s propitious performance, making Buster’s Mal Heart an intriguing movie to watch but not necessarily one to revisit; the cinematography, editing (also by Smith), and soundtrack all add lustre to the movie’s tone and point of view, and though it all seems unnecessarily tricky, there’s heart and warmth here too, even if it’s in short supply.