Take Three: Paul Dano

Craig from Dark Eye Socket here with Take Three. Today: Paul Dano

Take One: The King (2006)
Disgruntled discharged Navy man Gael García Bernal rules the roost in James Marsh’s dark religion-themed indie The King. But Dano, as the dutiful square peg brother/son in the family Bernal infiltrates, does attempt a one-man, god-fuelled backyard coup, much to his own expense. The film is partly a hothouse take on Cain & Able and partly a nod to bad-couple movies like Badlands (brooding Bernal and Sissy Spacek-a-like Pell James doing bad things in cars). Dano’s Paul Sandlow, a pastor's son, sings and plays guitar in a Jesus-heavy, quality-light church rock band. That’s when he’s not pressuring the school heads into accepting his curriculum on Intelligent Design over Evolution. Paul’s doe-eyed sappiness appears to hide a certain cleverness yet, oddly, he’s one of the most sympathetic personalities in the film.

Dano’s performance is savvy. His dorky, modest Jesus freak teeters around the periphery of the action – spouting glassy-eyed school speeches about Him upstairs, defining smugness in a four-wheel-drive graduation gift – until emerging prominently as the plot hots up. Dano plays it all with a calm curiosity. By intuitively holding back, he manages to convey more, swerving cliché to deliver a turn replete with discomforting nuance. He may be a timid teen in a Christ crisis, but the threat of censure glints in his eye. He shouldn’t have banked on the promise of a “brother’s” honour. After his fateful face-off with Bernal halfway in, Paul’s merely a face on a missing poster and the subject of Bernal’s less-than-guilty conscience. But he makes each scene count before being sent down the river.

Take Two: Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
Dano must love dust. He’s sure seen enough of the stuff on screen in recent years. He saw blood and oil spilt in it in There Will Be Blood (see below) and stomped soil on the pioneer trail for Kelly Reichardt in Meek’s Cutoff earlier this year. And in theatres over the past few weeks he’s been kicking up a fuss in the stuff in genre mashup Cowboys & Aliens. Dano pops up early on as Percy Dolarhyde, the troublesome drunk son to local grump-on-horseback Harrison Ford. Their rocky filial relationship is a part of the background to the alien-busting action. But when Percy is lassoed by the rootin’ tootin’ extra terrestrial braggarts, and whisked away for some probably dubious shenanigans, it allows Ford’s character some plot momentum.

I missed Dano’s slapdash spoiled and cowardly presence, though, and wished he’d stayed for the duration. The movie required a dependable human villain throughout, to split the difference between the ramshackle townsfolk and the interstellar menace. A late, cheeky crowbar plot device means that we can’t resume our hiss-boo heckles at Percy’s clumsy tomfoolery, but at least he re-enters the movie. In his meagre handful of scenes Dano shoots it up then shrieks it up with barmy abandon. Percy is ultimately sold short, but Dano adds another fine small performance to his filmography. As a now well-established yet still young character actor he’s continuing to pay his dues in often largely peripheral roles. Cowboys & Aliens shows, alongside Meek’s Cutoff, that he’s cornered the market in sly and sheepish movie-dust slingers.

Take Three: There Will Be Blood (2007)
It took two roles (brothers Paul and Eli Sunday) for Dano to go up against maniacal oil plunderer Daniel Day-Lewis (as Daniel Plainview) in Paul Thomas Anderson’s explosively oily There Will Be Blood. The religion theme is again present but here Dano’s graduated to fully-fledged preacher. The role very nearly wasn’t his, however. Dano only had a few days to rehearse his role as Eli, the bigger of his two parts. Kel O'Neill was originally cast, but was replaced with Dano (who was only originally down to play the smaller role of Paul) two weeks into the shoot; a total of three weeks of scenes featuring Eli and Plainview had to be re-shot with Dano instead of O'Neill. However, any casting interruptions don’t at all impede him on screen. If anything, the immediacy adds to the fevered vitality of his performance.

Paul Sunday's polite staccato-voiced calm is miles away from the disingenuously bilious bluster of Eli Sunday. Dano expertly differentiates his roles, but also allows small drip-fed shreds of doubt to enter into both Plainview’s and the audience’s minds: are they both the same brother? Neither we, nor Plainview, ever truly know. Eli’s scenes of evangelism, his casting devils out of the congregation with screams that seem to break his voice and weird, fierce strain-faced air grabs, are riveting. He’s scarily good, too, in the epilogue, when he visits Plainview with an offer. When Plainview asks “I want you to tell me you’re a false prophet,” Dano’s unblinking, knowing gaze is priceless; one expression reveals the core falsity of Eli’s faith. His opportunism and barely-concealed weakness, here as elsewhere in the film, tells us just as much about what Anderson was striving for as Day-Lewis’ performance does. Dano didn’t strike gold like Day-Lewis did, but he mined the film for all its worth – and, through one means or another, he made good on the promise of that title.

Three more films for the taking: L.I.E. (2001), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), The Extra Man (2010)

Global Box Office: Monks, Assassins, Maids & Trophy Wives

To speak in gross generalities the last weekend in August is Hollywood's last chance to nab easy-to-please summertime dollars before the films get more "depressing" (read: statue-hungry) and people get back to careerism/schooling in September. But with Hurricane Irene shutting down NYC's unshutdownable mass transit and keeping people locked up in their homes (or other people's homes) this weekend all over the Northeast the box office will probably be way down. The Help will try to fend off three wide release newcomers seeking different audiences be that the horror crowd (Don't Be Afraid of the Dark),  the action-hungry (Colombiana), or comedy seekers (Our Idiot Brother reviewed). We probably won't be discussing box office tomorrow -- especially if we get a power outtage tonight! -- so let's talk about a related topic today.

Let's talk about movies that box office reports elsewhere never talk about: non-English language movies. Which are the highest grossers worldwide? The figures are drawn from various box office mojo charts as of Friday 08/26. I'm assuming that India doesn't release figures since Bollywood is a huge industry and you'd think they'd factor into the first chart more than they do if they did.

UPDATE: After compiling the list I discovered through the comments -- thanks Kin -- that the "Yearly Worldwide" chart that was my primary source of information contradicts the "Overseas Total Yearly Box Office" chart to quite an insanely large degree (what gives box office mojo?). Some titles are totally absent from either list though that makes no literal sense as "overseas" by any definition is part of "worldwide". NEW UPDATED LIST AND APOLOGIES AFTER THE JUMP.

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I Love Paris in the Fall.

Jose here. Words can not describe how much I loved Midnight in Paris (and I mean it -- after having seen it three times in six days, I still haven't finished my review!) and today you lucky people in North America can have the privilege of watching it on the big screen again!

As part of what might be the year's kickstart to Oscar campaign season, the film is being re-released in the United States in order to take advantage of the word of mouth that has made the film perhaps the most beloved movie so far this year. It's also Woody Allen's biggest moneymaker and I kid you not, I've yet to attend a screening of it that isn't completely packed. People down here even applaud and cheer when the film ends! 

In order to celebrate its re-release and to urge you to go see it in a movie theater (Blu-ray will not make justice to the warmth and magic that it exudes on the big screen) I'll go ahead and share what might be my favorite thing about it.

I don't know where Corey Stoll came from and what he did before, but he's perfect as a young, fiery Ernest Hemingway in the movie. He might give the film's most underrated performance but my favorite thing isn't how he possesses the exuberant allure of the iconic writer, but how every single actor in the film take Woody's words and make them their own.

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure. 

Like his actors, Allen too makes famous literary voices his own, the way in which he crafts words that sound both familiar and strangely "normal" and feeds them to his characters is altogether more surprising because instead of feeling like a total intellectual snobbery fest, the film is charming ebcause of its desire to share with us and invite us to become more familiar with these artists.
Midnight in Paris might have the Woodsman's most enchanting writing since the 80s and like The Purple Rose of Cairo and Manhattan before it, manages to turn the ordinary into pure poetic joy. 

Anyway, before my love for it gets too out of control, I ask you: what was your favorite thing about Midnight in Paris?

Our Idiot Brother

If Willie Nelson had ever done a cover of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" a simple name change to "Ned" would provide the perfect theme song for Our Idiot Brother. Like Maria, who just wasn't an asset to that abbey, sweet stoner Ned (Paul Rudd) has good intentions but is always in trouble; he's a headache, a flibbertijibbet, a clown. At the beginning of Our Idiot Brother we learn that Ned is both gentle enough and dumb enough to take pity on a sad uniformed cop and sell him some weed. See Ned go to prison.

Ned is lamb enough to not put up a fight when his lion-maned hippie girlfriend Janet (Kathryn Hahn) boots him off of their farm. His short prison stint was time enough for her to replace him with another manchild boyfriend (their similarity pays off in a fun sideways ways later on). Ned can deal with being homeless and jobless but is heartbroken about losing custody of his beloved dog "Willie Nelson". When he returns to his family in New York and begins couch-hopping, his only goal in life is to earn enough money to get Willie Nelson back.

...read the rest at Towleroad.

P.S. I hope I didn't give off the impression that I didn't enjoy but that I only wanted to enjoy it more fully.

P.P.S. If you're in a more serious mood this weekend, check out Vera Farmiga's Higher Ground for some strong actressing. More on that one this weekend.

Cinema de Gym: 'While You Were Sleeping'

Kurt here. This week saw the rare screening of a romantic comedy at the gym. The film was While You Were Sleeping, Sandra Bullock's first effort following her bomb-on-a-bus breakthrough. An extremely nice movie with minimal ambitions, its key function was to introduce the world to Bullock: Girl Next Door, soon to be Bullock: Queen of Ubiquity. Seen retrospectively, it's a major career indicator. Even the first 20 minutes – which are the minutes I saw – are teeming with the Bullockisms that Americans have been gorging themselves on since the film's 1995 release. Bullock is Lucy, a ticket booth operator at a Chicago train station who has many of the traits we've come to know so well: unlucky-in-love aura, frumpiness that barely hides her beauty (unkempt hair, choppy bangs, oversized sweaters), unladylike behavior (she dips her Oreos in her cat's milk), peripheral support system of surrogate family members, and an everyday earnestness so complete it seems exhausting. There's even a calories-be-damned mention of the local Chinese food guy, a la Two Weeks Notice.

I've never had the pleasure of an end-to-end While You Were Sleeping sit, but as I and most of you know, this is a Big Secret movie hinged on a well-intended lie that will surely come out in the wash at the close of the second act. Lucy is nuts about Peter (Peter Gallagher), the dapper businessman who visits her window each day but barely knows she exists. When he's mugged and tossed onto the tracks, Lucy saves the day and rushes his comatose behind to the hospital, only to have her out-loud thoughts of marriage get her mistaken for his fiancée (or, as the fib-spreading nurse memorably repeated in the TV spots, his "FEEE-ahn-say"). In a charming bit of farcically contrived, old fashioned group hysteria, Peter's family fawns over Lucy after funneling into the hospital room, wholly believing and embracing the made-up engagement news as a desperate means to relieve some alluded-to family drama. As is typical, Lucy is too overwhelmed – and far too kindhearted – to wreck the mood and spill the truth.

A joy of the earlier scenes is seeing the many older actors who play Peter's relatives, at least a couple of whom are no longer with us. The late, great Peter Boyle is Peter's father (Peters, Peters, everywhere); character actor Jack Warden, who passed in 2006, is Peter's godfather; and Glynis Johns, who's still going strong at 87, is Peter's grandmother. The latter, who was indeed the one and only Winifred Banks in Mary Poppins ("votes for women!"), is at the center of the earlier portions' best jokes. Suffering from a heart condition that's been troubling the fam, she's the key reason Lucy needs to keep up her act. "When my mom found out I wasn't getting married, her intestines exploded," says Lucy's co-worker and lunch partner (Jason Bernard). "If you back out now, you may as well shoot grandma." The biggest laugh comes when the relatives arrive at the hospital one morning to find that Lucy spent the night with her faux beau. Abruptly and inexplicably, the godfather, addressing Lucy, says of the grandmother, "You're like her – she can sleep anywhere. And believe me, she has."

Such a nasty little zinger sticks out like a scarlet letter in this squeaky-clean star vehicle. Most of the time, we're awash in Lucy's goodness, and asked to nibble our nails as that goodness pulls her deeper into uncharacteristic dishonesty. Of course, what ends up happening is Lucy falls for Peter's brother, Jack (Bill Pullman), while Peter's conked out, but I didn't make it that far. What I did see was a sweet bedside confessional that Lucy offers to Peter, a gooey romcom monologue that really showcases Bullock's then-blossoming powers. With an almost impossible cuteness, she exudes mainstream-friendly desperation and self deprecation, which somehow seems both put-on and very true at the same time. You can see the career of a lovable superstar taking shape in that moment. It's no wonder Lucy's earnestness became a career staple. Bullock's so good at it, she does it too well.

Conclusions?

1. For a while, it seemed Bullock was destined to star alongside vehicles: Bus (Speed), Train (While You Were Sleeping), Boat (Speed 2). It's totally a metaphor for her meteoric rise. Faster than a speeding Bullock!
2. During that same time, it also seemed she was destined to share the screen with Jacks: Keanu Reeves in Speed (Jack), Jeremy Northam in The Net (Jack), Bill Pullman in While You Were Sleeping (Jack).
3. Revisiting a film from the early days of a star's career can reflect a lot in terms of how said star's career panned out.
4. If you really want to make it as a leading lady in Hollywood, it might not be a bad idea to act opposite Sister Suffragette.

Do you like early Bullock? Or will you never get over that Oscar win?