Women on their own

The only unfortunate thing about Something, Anything (MC-72, NFX) is its title, which I find difficult to remember and quite opposite to the film’s effect, which is precise and specific.  Paul Harrill, in his debut as writer and director, reminded me of Fassbinder (particularly Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) in the simple clarity and logic of each shot and scene, telling what is necessary and leaving out what is not.  And he was especially fortunate in his lead actress, Ashley Shelton, who’s quietly magnetic as the centerpiece of the film, a newlywed trying to find meaning and purpose in her life, after a miscarriage.  I simply feel on the same wavelength as this film, with a shared iconography.  I love that in her transition from Peggy to Margaret, she gives up a successful job in Knoxville real estate to become an assistant librarian, that her quest takes her to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where Thomas Merton lived, that her greatest epiphany comes when she goes up in the Smokies to watch fireflies at twilight.  I totally identify with this character’s drive toward simplicity and focus, and the film’s avoidance of so many obvious traps.  Perhaps it won’t connect so directly with you, but I promise you an hour and a half in the company of a lovely young woman of transparent honesty and quiet depth of feeling.

You really can’t beat the variety of landscapes along the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild (MC-76,NFX), from sun-baked desert to snow-covered mountain to deep Northwest rainforest.  And Reese Witherspoon makes good solitary company along the trail, but the director Jean-Marc Vallée is too literal with the explanatory flashbacks, overburdened by the source material of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir.  Laura Dern is good as the deceased mother, and Cheryl’s divorce is plausible enough, but the heroin addiction is a little much.  More mystery would have suited the character and the film.  Nonetheless, this is a trek worth taking.

If Wild is wildly over-determined, then Tracks (MC-78, NFX) may be a bit under-determined, not showing the tracks of the protagonist’s mental processes, but concentrating on the immediate reality of her long solitary camel trek across the Australian desert to the sea.  Robyn Davidson’s originating book was probably a drier affair than Strayed’s, and John Curran’s film follows suit.  But Mia Wasikowska is amply up to the task of supplying subtle subtext to the adventure.  We never quite grasp why she is compelled to this quest, and yet her compulsion adds up, makes sense, without showing all the calculation.

A different sort of lonely trek befalls Oscar-deserving Julianne Moore in Still Alice (MC-72, NFX), struggling (not suffering!) with early-onset dementia.  Effective as a real-life horror story, this film by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland remains rather sanitized as a portrayal of Alzheimer’s, failing to rise definitively above disease-of-the-week melodrama.  One of the coupled directors was deteriorating from ALS as the film was being made, so we can’t fault them for any lack of sympathy or sincerity, but it’s still a stacked deck they’re dealing from.  The trump card is Julianne Moore’s performance, which betrays not a false note as her mind leaves her body behind, the 50-year-old linguistics professor who begins to lose one word, and then all of them but one -- “love.”  Alec Baldwin as husband and Kirsten Stewart as prodigal daughter offer the best support they can, but sugarcoating can’t change where this story is headed.

If you think Mulholland Drive was a great film (and many do), then you might like David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars (MC-67, NFX).  I don’t, and I didn’t -- despite the presence of Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska, who give the proceedings some interest.  The former, an obnoxious Hollywood star who has seen better days, hires the latter as her “chore whore,” and gets more than she bargained for.  And we get more than we care for, of odious celebrities and noxious show business.  Sunny SoCal is dark and decadent, we get it, but the satire is queasy and almost humorless.

Amy Adams stands alone as the only reason to see Big Eyes (MC-62, NFX).  She plays Margaret Keane, the real-life painter of those big-eyed kids so ubiquitous in the Fifties, which her husband Walter presented as his own.  Tim Burton offers a nice pictorial evocation of the period, but allows Christoph Waltz to deliver a cartoonish performance as Walter.  That matched poorly with Adams’ more soulful take on her character, and tilted the story off its axis, made it more a rigged game than the pre-feminist fable it wanted to be.  Burton is amusing in airing his gripes about the differences between critical and popular appeal in art, but watch this only if you find Amy always adorable.

Even though the song says, “No One is Alone,” several women are lost by themselves in Rob Marshall’s adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods (MC-69, NFX), including Anna Kendrick, Meryl Streep, and Emily Blunt.  This live-action mash-up of fairy tales -- including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and others – is from Disney, but not too Disneyfied.  Sondheim’s sharp wit dominates, and the filmed musical provided one relative newbie to his work with a nice taste of his music and lyrics.  More tuned-in viewers might find more fault.

Hillary Swank is a woman ranching alone on the Nebraska Territory prairie in The Homesman (MC-68, NFX), and does a credible job in portraying someone on the verge of becoming an old maid, rejected by one hoped-for suitor as “plain as a tin pail.”  She’s still better off than the three married women driven mad by the hardships of frontier life, whom she contracts to deliver to an asylum back across the river.  She seeks the assistance of an old reprobate played by Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed.  Within the traditional framework of a Western journey, in reverse, the film provides a bleak, but welcome, feminine perspective on the settling of the American frontier.  It takes some turns I couldn’t or wouldn’t follow, but the trip does go places and see things.