Recent Movie Roundup 16

The films of 2011 are coming in hard and fast this February, a deluge before the pre-spring effects films of 2012 show up.  There are still a few of last year's films yet to come, but here are my thoughts on the most recent batch.

1. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) - I gulped down Lionel Shriver's bestselling novel a few years ago, but for all that I couldn't put the book down, I also couldn't get around my core difficulty with it--that a story purporting to discuss the difficulties of motherhood and the way that women feel pressured into it oversimplified itself by deciding that the title character was born evil.  Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Shriver's novel addresses and defuses this difficulty by leaning into it, suggesting at almost every turn that Kevin, who just before his sixteenth birthday shot half a dozen students at his school, and his mother Eva (a magnificent Tilda Swinton), who narrates the novel and is the film's main character, are inhuman and perhaps even demonic. By stepping away from Eva's point of view, so dominant in the book, Ramsay let's us see that Eva is not only as bad at being a mother as Kevin was at being a human being, but that they have more in common with one another than they do with anyone around them.
   
   The film returns again and again to images of damnation.  The opening scene introduces us to Eva as part of a writhing mass of bodies slathered in thick red tomato paste (establishing the film's slightly overdone fascination with the color red, which also appears in jam, paint, and of course blood).  In a later scene, set after the shooting has occurred, Eva drives home on Halloween and flinches repeatedly as her headlights illuminate children in monstrous costumes, creating the sense of that she is surrounded by ghouls.  But these images are also complicated--Eva is in ecstasy, not agony, at the tomato festival, and the costumed children are entirely innocuous while Eva's own normal-seeming child was the true monster.  Most importantly, the film's most stifling sense of damnation is actually to be found in those scenes that establish Eva's comfortable, middle class life before Kevin destroys it--a life that Eva only tolerates because of her love for her painfully conventional husband Franklin (John C. Reilly, who on paper is an obvious choice for this role but somehow doesn't work here, perhaps because it's hard to imagine him and Swinton as a couple, and the film doesn't work hard enough to establish their relationship), and that Kevin reviles.  Ramsay's adaptation thus shows us Eva and Kevin as, simultaneously, devils whose presence poisons their quiet suburban community, and lost souls wandering through a hell of their own making.
   
   The film is impressionistic, cutting sharply between past and present, hazy recollection and cold fact.  Even more interesting is Ramsay's choice to cut away from the most dramatic and gruesome moments of the story, chiefly the murders at the school, alluding to them only obliquely, or concentrating on their lead-up and aftermath without showing the event itself.  Both of these choices may mean that people who have not read the book will find themselves a bit lost (though as someone who did read the book I thought the film's main weakness as an adaptation was that losing the structure of Eva's letters to Franklin had the effect of defanging the story's final twist), but they, and Swinton's performance as someone who is both pitiable and offputting, help to create a troubling and deeply affecting movie.


2. Margin Call (2011) - I went into this film expecting a fictionalized take on the early hours of the financial crisis, and nominally that is what Margin Call delivers.  But the film takes it as a given that anyone watching it understands at least the basics of how the crisis came about, and the characters--analysts, traders, and executives at a brokerage house who realize what's coming just before the bubble pops--refer to the technical details in only the most oblique, generalized ways.  The film's emphasis is instead on the characters' emotional reactions to the catastrophe that they are about to experience--and in many ways, cause--which seems like a reasonable choice until one realizes just how narrow a gamut these reactions run.  Margin Call shows us its characters acting shocked at the realization that the party is over, shifting blame and trying to justify their failures, feeling sorry for themselves for the soft, cushioned fall (complete with gold parachute) they're about to experience, and justifying the choice to dump the firm's toxic assets on an unsuspecting Street before the crash happens.  Often these beats are well done, and the cast--anchored by Kevin Spacey as a grizzled veteran who struggles, and ultimately triumphs, over his conscience, Paul Bettany as his nihilistic underling, and Zachary Quinto as the analyst who first realizes what's coming--delivers some great moments, for example a late scene in which Spacey essentially bribes a room full of junior traders into wrecking their credibility and careers by knowingly selling a worthless product in order to save a company that plans to fire them all by the end of the day.  But ultimately there's just not enough material here to support a two hour film, and the film ends up repeating itself, delivering slight variations on the same scene again and again.  Even worse are the moments in which the film reaches for cheap sentimentality--when the characters lament the more productive, more constructive lives they might have led had they not gone into the business of making money, or when it borrows significance from history by having the characters muse ominously about the coming disaster and the people who are about to be destroyed by it.  There are moments of genuine sharpness in the film--right before they begin their fire sale, Quinto's character asks Spacey if he's spoken to his son.  Later we find out that the son is a trader for a rival firm who is badly burned by his father's actions.  But too often Margin Call chooses to hammer in its points, and seems to do so less because of their significance than because it ultimately doesn't have enough to say to fill its running time.


3. The Artist (2011) - Every year there's at least one film that starts out as a plucky underdog buoyed by accolades on the festival circuit, parlays them into name recognition, and rides a wave of momentum all the way to the major league movie awards.  And every year around this time those of us who don't go to film festivals finally get to see that film and, almost invariably, leave the movie theater scratching our heads, wondering why such a slight, inoffensive work is gaining such enthusiastic acclaim.  This year that film is The Artist, currently a shoe-in for the best picture Oscar.  It's not that The Artist is bad.  It's a very sweet, very enjoyable, if slightly overlong movie, and its handling of its central gimmick, the fact that it is a black and white, silent movie, is skillful and intelligent.  Writer-director Michel Hazanavicius effortlessly eases a modern audience into the conventions of silent cinema in an early scene in which matinee idol George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, perfectly channeling the smarmy charm of silent film icons like Rudolph Valentino or Douglas Fairbanks) waits nervously for the audience's reaction to his latest picture.  The credits roll but the soundtrack doesn't change from its background music, which we assume means a deafening silence from the audience. Then George smiles in relief and the camera shows us the audience clapping enthusiastically, driving home the point that in this movie we can only rely on our eyes.  For the rest of the film Hazanavicius and his actors remain true to the conventions of silent film--the exaggerated gestures, the operatic emotions, and of course the title cards--without veering too far into over the top clowning and mugging.  (It is, however, amusing to note that as much as Hazanavicius expects to go along with these outdated conventions, he does not expect us to tolerate a fixed camera.  The film features plenty of tracking and crane shots, which would not have been possible in the 1920s.)
   
   After about half an hour of this, however, the novelty of The Artist's gimmick wears off.  What's left is a cross between Singin' in the Rain and A Star is Born, in which the advent of talkies kills George's career just as his love interest Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, who as the saying goes does everything Dujardin does, backwards and in heels, and pretty much walks away with the movie) becomes a star.  But The Artist has little to add to these classics, and its version of their story is curiously eager to indulge George's self-absorption.  He spends the film either basking in his own wonderfulness or, once his career tanks, wallowing in self-pity, while Peppy is made to feel guilty both for her success and for her efforts to help George--which, we are told, wound his pride.  One senses that Hazanavicius wants us to view the end of the silent film era as a tragedy on a scale that justifies George's depression and his unwillingness to either accept the end of his career or adapt to new standards, but The Artist, for all its technical accomplishments, doesn't do enough to sell this argument.  On the contrary, its most effective scenes are the ones that utilize modern sound techniques--a nightmare in which everything around George makes noise but he still can't talk, or the movie's final scene--and drive home just how much this technology has contributed to our enjoyment of cinema.


4. Take Shelter (2011) - I thought this film would be a companion piece to Melancholia, but instead it feels like a counterpoint.  Melancholia establishes, almost from its outset, that it can be read as either a genre work or an allegory, and draws its strength from the way those two readings clash against each other.  Take Shelter keeps its genre closet to its chest, and most of the tension of the film is drawn from our uncertainty about which reading protocol to apply to it.  Curtis (Michael Shannon) and Sam (Jessica Chastain) are a working class couple with a young daughter whose life seems charmed--Curtis has a steady job, they have a nice house and take yearly vacations at the beach, but most of all they love and cherish one another.  Then Curtis starts having terrible nightmares about a storm that will destroy his home, turn his friends and neighbors against him, and endanger his family.  Even as considers the possibility of mental illness, Curtis is so overcome by these visions (which soon start creeping into his waking life) that he begins building a storm shelter in his back yard, and soon becomes obsessed with it, alienating and terrifying Sam and their daughter.
   
   It's pretty easy to read Take Shelter as an allegory.  The film places a huge emphasis on Curtis's role as a provider, and in its early, happy segments, his good life is largely defined by being financially secure--Curtis and Sam are up to date on their loan payments, and the insurance that has just kicked in from his job will pay for their daughter's cochlear implant.  Curtis's visions of calamity are also strongly shadowed by a more mundane, and more present, financial calamity that he courts by building the storm shelter--he takes out a risky loan to pay for the shelter, and when he loses his job because of it the money for the surgery is lost.  Especially in this present moment, it's tempting to take the film as a depiction of the state of the American working class, poised on a knife's edge and ready to plunge into poverty at the slightest setback--to which Curtis's anxieties seem like a reasonable reaction.  Though there is some truth to this reading, it also feels a little glib, and doesn't quite account for the film's Donnie Darko-ish sense of portent.  We're left, therefore, with a sense of unease as Take Shelter proceeds towards its conclusion, not knowing what to root for.  If Curtis us merely delusional then the film might come off as mocking a character who despite his obsessive behavior is deeply sympathetic, but to reveal that he was right would be an equal mockery of the ultimately blameless (and entirely reasonable) people around him.  Take Shelter's final fifteen minutes, and its solution to this dilemma, reveal the film as neither a genre work nor a psychological drama, but a love story.  In all his visions Curtis faces calamities without Sam (in one of them she even attacks him), and in his waking life he conceals from her, for as long as he can, both his dreams and his reactions to them.  This is due partly to machismo, partly to a fear that Sam will leave him, but mainly because there is a lesson that Curtis needs to learn.  The film's final minutes reveal that both his and Sam's greatest asset is their devotion to one another--even, and especially, when they don't trust each other's judgment.  It is that devotion, Take Shelter concludes, that will allow them to endure any calamity they encounter.


5. Another Earth (2011) - 2011 seems to have been the year of the genre-tinged psychological drama in which troubled characters look up at the sky and see a slowly-approaching menace, but perhaps because of the way it incorporates the fantastic into its world, Another Earth is the only one of these films to have been generally discussed as a science fiction film.  Unlike Melancholia, there's no incongruence here between the fantastic and mimetic aspects of the film--the appearance of a second Earth, seemingly populated with our doubles, in the solar system is handled in a low-key but largely realistic fashion and folded into the film's story.  And unlike Take Shelter, the film doesn't leave space for a symbolic or allegorical reading that would defuse the strangeness of its central concept.  Earth 2 symbolizes many things to the film's characters, most importantly a chance for heroine Rhoda (a magnificent Brit Marling, who also co-wrote the script) to escape her feelings of guilt and shame over a car accident that left a woman and child dead, but the film makes clear that this is a meaning Rhoda and others are imposing on what is actually a perfectly real, perfectly ordinary--but for the circumstances of its appearance--planet.
   
   There's no way around reading Another Earth as a science fiction film, which is actually a bit of a shame, because the film is weakest when viewed through a genre lens.  The filmmakers don't seem very interested in developing their premise in SFnal directions, touching only lightly on the social and scientific implications of Earth 2, and it's only at the very end of the film that the presence of this fantastic element in their lives opens doors that a naturalistic story couldn't.  The film works a lot better, though, if you take it as a drama with just a sprinkling of science fiction.  Before the accident derailed her life, Rhoda was an aspiring scientist, and Marling ably conveys, with a minimum of dialogue, Rhoda's unquenchable scientific curiosity, as well as her belief that she no longer deserves to pursue an interest that gave her so much joy, creating an unusual and compelling character.  The relationship she strikes up with John (William Mapother), the man whose family she killed, is more than a little by the numbers, but well drawn despite this, and just as the film seems to paint itself into a corner frequented by so many other indie films about grief and misery, the fantastic element of Earth 2 offers the characters, and the film, another out.  Of the three films to play with the intersection of genre and realism in 2011, Another Earth is probably the least successful, but it is nevertheless worth watching for Rhoda, and for Marling's performance.


6. Haywire (2011) - In my corner of the internet this film has been touted mainly as an action film that not only has a solo female lead, but whose lead is played by an actress who looks like she might be able to throw a punch, and actually knows how to do so.  Which is all true, but what the emphasis on heroine Mallory Kane, a private security contractor who is framed and sets out to find out who is responsible and why, and her portrayer, MMA fighter Gina Carano, obscures is that Haywire is also a Steven Soderbergh film, and that his pedigree guarantees certain things.  So, like most of Soderbergh's films, Haywire is low-key and a little light on plot, quite deliberately averse to the melodramatic tropes of its genre, stylish, and a little bit empty.  The film is essentially a series of set pieces, in each of which Mallory squares off against a male antagonist who either wants to kill her or bed her, but will usually plump for the former just to be safe.  These are all well done, but they peak relatively early in a sequence in which Mallory is matched against Michael Fassbender, playing a British intelligence agent named Paul.  It's clear that Paul is relying on his own considerable charms, and on the fact that she's been dragooned into playing the slightly unfamiliar role of high-society eye candy, to destabilize Mallory, which is in fact what happens.  But it soon becomes equally clear that Paul has underestimated Mallory's resilience and adaptability.  Her momentary discomfort, however, gives the character a hint of humanity that she lacks in the rest of the film, in which her competence starts shading into detachment.  By the end of the film, it's not even entirely clear why Mallory is working so hard to find all the men who framed her--she doesn't really seem that angry at them.  This isn't the first time that Soderbergh has jettisoned the emotional component of his film in order to stress style, but he usually compensates for this with a more substantial, wittier story than Haywire delivers.  It's nice to see a character like Mallory Kane on screen, but here's hoping that next time she gets a story that's worthy of her.

Review: Chronicle

My review of the found footage superhero film Chronicle appears today at Strange Horizons.  I was initially dubious about mashing together two such tired concepts, but despite some weaknesses on the character front Chronicle revitalizes a subgenre I'd long since thought had lost its sense of immediacy.  Definitely worth a look.

This is Getting to Be a Tradition

The 2011 Locus poll is open, and for the fourth year running Locus is giving non-subscribers half a vote for every subscriber vote (actually it's for the fifth year running, but in 2008 the change was made retroactively, after the votes had been received and tallied).  I wrote about this at greater length in 2010 and 2011, so I'll just be brief this year: I don't plan to vote for an award whose organizers think I'm only worth half a vote, and if you're not a Locus subscriber, I don't think you should vote in the poll either.

I should also say that I've been considering purchasing a Locus subscription for my Kindle, but that much like last year, the fact that this miserable voting system hasn't yet been rolled back leaves me utterly disinclined to give Locus my money.

In happier, but still Locus-related news, Liz has a great list of links to the stories on the Locus recommended reading list that are available online.

Rewarding News

The nominees for this year's BSFA awards have been announced, and I'm very pleased to report that my review of Arslan by M.J. Engh has been nominated for best non-fiction.  I'd like to take this chance to thank the BSFA and the award's administrators, as well as everyone who nominated my review, and to congratulate the other nominees.

I don't expect to win, nor do I think that I should.  As proud as I am of my Arslan review, and as gratified as I've been by the positive response that it has engendered, I can't hold it up against the entire third edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, or the SF Mistressworks project, or the other, more "conventional" nominees such as the blog Pornokitsch, the catalogue for the British Library's much-lauded Out of This World exhibition, or the essay collection The Unsilent Library.  The BSFA's nonfiction award casts a wide net and has a history of producing rather esoteric shortlists.  Which makes it a lot of fun and thus a good award to be nominated for, and that's more than enough for me.  I look forward to learning, when the award is handed out, which of the fantastic and deserving works with which my review has the honor of being nominated gets to take the award home.

The Big Guns: Thoughts on Sherlock's Second Season

Two seasons into its run, I'm having trouble deciding whether Sherlock is a brilliant show or a terrible one.  The episodes themselves seem to alternate between the two extremes, with little in the way of middle ground--devastatingly clever updates on Sherlock Holmes tropes alongside plots so full of holes that they barely hold together, gags that make you gasp with laughter alongside lines so leaden and overwrought that you hardly know where to look, characters you fall in love with in a single scene alongside one-dimensional harpies.  My reaction to these episodes is similarly bi-polar--sometimes the credits roll on what seems like a perfect story, but thirty seconds later the whole thing has collapsed into a pile of contradictions, implausibilities, and contrivances; other times, you switch off an execrable story and the only thing that sticks in your mind is that one hilarious scene.  When writing about Sherlock, I invariably find myself making laundry lists of its faults, then concluding that I really like it.  If I weren't so frustrated, I'd be very impressed.

Sherlock's second season is very much of a piece with its first, which is--predictably--both a very good and very bad thing.  The things that worked in the first season--Martin Freeman, Benedict Cumberbatch, the relationship between Sherlock and John, the witty overlaying of Holmesian tropes and stories over the 21st century--are still very much in evidence (though somewhat muted in that last case).  Equally, the flaws that marred the show and held it back from greatness--its messy plots, the unwieldiness of the 90-minute format, the horrible writing for female characters--are back in force (though again, there has been some marked--if, ultimately, insufficient--progress on that last front).  The one key differences is in the stories that Sherlock has chosen to tell in its second outing.  Though the first season appropriated many of Holmes and Watson's most famous attributes, only a few of Conan Doyle's original stories made it onto the show, and those that did were fairly obscure ones and only faintly referenced--a brief nod to A Study in Scarlet in "A Study in Pink"; "The Bruce Partington Plans" as a subplot of "The Great Game."  In its second season, Sherlock has broken out the big guns--the two most famous one-off characters in the Holmes canon, Irene Adler and James Moriarty, what is arguably the best-known Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the most iconic incident in Holmes's career, his confrontation with Moriarty and seeming death alongside him.

It will probably come as no surprise if I say that the results of bringing these stories into the Sherlock universe are mixed, but what's interesting about the ways in which the second season is terrible is that they give the impression that Sherlock is eager for the cachet of its source material, but doesn't entirely trust it.  "A Scandal in Belgravia" starts out like gangbusters, cleverly updating the story of a shady woman with damning information about a powerful man who may be more than Holmes can handle.  The episode's first half, which is very nearly a play-by-play of "A Scandal in Bohemia," is Sherlock at its best--tense, funny, fast-paced, and peopled with indelible characters.  When that story runs out, however, Sherlock appends to it a complication in which Irene Adler's actions go from naughty-yet-understandable to villainous and potentially disastrous, and "Belgravia" devolves into a muddled mess.  The sharp, quick-moving plot turns episodic, and the story seems to take forever to come to its close--not least because it has so many false bottoms.  (This structural complaint does not address the equally valid, and equally damaging, problem of "Belgravia"'s handling of Irene herself, about which so much virtual ink has been spilled that I could hardly contribute anything to the discussion, certainly not in the face of Steven Moffat's own rather revealing response to the accusation that "Belgravia," and Sherlock in general, are sexist.)

"The Hounds of Baskerville," meanwhile, carries over little from the original novel but its basic premise--the legend of the Hound and the young heir who fears that he is its next target--a few character names, and the theme of pitting Holmes's rationalism against the other characters' superstitions.  The story itself is scooped out and replaced with what initially seems like a clever inversion--few people are credulous enough to believe in spectral hounds anymore, but many would be willing to at least consider that the secret weapons lab next door is unleashing its test subjects on the local population--but whose execution is sloppy, rooted in the stupidity of its players (a top secret military facility allows its highest-ranking officers to choose a password as weak as "Maggie"), their inexplicable willingness to accommodate Sherlock (Mycroft just gives Sherlock the credentials he needs to enter Baskerville for the second time), and plain coincidences (John happens to wander into a room where the crazy-making gas is leaking), and whose resolution offers a "rational" explanation to the legend of the Hound that is in fact significantly less plausible than the original, supernatural one.

I don't mean to suggest that Sherlock's problem is that it deviates from its source material, but I do think that the ways in which "Belgravia" and "Baskerville" deviate from their sources are telling, and shed a light on the show's actual problems.  "A Scandal in Bohemia" is an interesting story not simply because Holmes is beaten, and not even because the person who beats him is a woman, but because Irene Adler is so thoroughly uninterested in Holmes.  She's in the middle of her own story that is far greater than him, and he is but one of the impediments on her path to a happy, private life with the man she loves.  What's more important, however, is that by the end of the story Holmes recognizes this, and realizes that his client is the villain in Irene's story and that he, Holmes, is on the wrong side.  Irene beats him less because she's smarter than he is--does anyone doubt that he could have tracked her down after she gave him the slip?--than because he's realized that letting her go is the right thing to do.  It's a story that shines a light not only on Holmes's appreciation for intellect, but on his fundamental decency, and is thus completely unsuited to Sherlock, which has chosen to recast Holmes as an amoral sociopath.  Sherlock is far from the first Holmes adaptation to have reworked Irene Adler into a villain, Holmes's requited love interest, and Moriarty's ally (Guy Ritchie's first Sherlock Holmes movie did all three just a few years ago), but its emphasis on Sherlock's need to be the smartest guy in the room--in the pursuit of which, not justice or the greater good, he humiliates Irene and leaves her to a gruesome fate--makes him seem a great deal crueler and less heroic than I think the episode intends him to be, even taking into account the "happy" ending in which he saves Irene's life.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, meanwhile (which I feel I ought to say is my very favorite Holmes story, and whose mangling at Sherlock's hands I am finding it hard to get over), does two things that Sherlock could never have countenanced.  First, it sidelines Holmes for most of the story, sending Watson to gather evidence and meet the various players while Holmes observes from afar, only appearing to solve the mystery in the novel's final chapters.  Second, despite its Gothic premise, the novel is in many ways a cozy mystery, driven by the tightly-woven, longstanding relationships between individuals and families in a small village, into which both Watson and Sir Henry Baskerville blunder.  The plot is driven and eventually resolved by those relationships--by Miss Stapleton's confused feelings towards Sir Henry, or Mrs. Barrymore's devotion to her criminal brother.  Sherlock is too invested in its title character and his antics to spend the bulk of a story away from him (a fact that "The Hounds of Baskerville" amusingly comments on when it has Sherlock pretend that he is about to send John to investigate on his own, then dismiss the idea as lunacy) or root that story in the emotional lives of one-off characters.  I'm not enamored of the choice to make Sherlock both a sociopath and the emotional center of the show, but having made those choices, it was surely incumbent on Sherlock's writers to choose stories that would complement them.  Neither "A Scandal in Bohemia" nor The Hound of the Baskervilles do, and it's hard not to conclude that they were chosen solely for their name recognition, with very little regard for whether they suited Sherlock's vision of itself and the kind of stories it was trying to tell.

Happily, "The Reichenbach Fall" does a better job of marrying Holmes to Sherlock.  It helps that hardly anyone remembers what precedes the ending of "The Final Problem."  The salient points about that story are that Holmes is determined to stop Moriarty, that he sends Watson away to keep him safe, and that he realizes that the only way to kill Moriarty is to lay down--or at least pretend to lay down--his own life.  All of which is perfectly congruent with the way that Sherlock has built up both Sherlock and Moriarty.  The episode itself, though by no means perfect, is probably my favorite since "A Study in Pink."  True, the plot relies, like too many Sherlock stories, on coincidences and stupidity--Sherlock entertains, if even for a second, the possibility that a few bytes might comprise a computer program sophisticated enough to break into any computer in the world; the police are said to be stumped by Moriarty's break-ins but apparently never bothered to consider the possibility that he had help on the inside; Mycroft happily chats about his brother with an arch-criminal who has made his animosity towards Sherlock abundantly clear; no one ever explains how the kidnapped children were made to fear Sherlock--but these are in the way of go-homers, the kind of plot holes that only make themselves felt after the credits roll.  And the story works, credibly suggesting a threat that could easily get under Sherlock's skin, and tying that threat to a series of well-crafted challenges that only lead him closer to his doom.  "Reichenbach" is a sort of cross between "A Study in Pink" (it restores John, at least partially, as our point of view character, bookends the beginning of his relationship with Sherlock, and echoes the question of how a person can be forced to kill themselves) and "The Great Game" (which like it features Sherlock jumping through Moriarty's hoops on the path to his own destruction), and though it doesn't deliver the sort of highs that these (or "A Scandal in Belgravia") do, neither does it plumb their depths.  The pacing, which is Sherlock's most consistent bugbear--most of its episodes lose steam around the one hour mark--is kept at a steady clip that obscures all but the most egregious plot holes without shortchanging the characters and their interactions, and the plot handles its high stakes in a way that is plausible and that doesn't veer into melodrama until very near the end.

Something else that "Reichenbach" does, however, is to drive home just how thoroughly Sherlock is committed to its vision of Holmes as the Doctor.  That Moffat's Doctor and Moffat and Gatiss's Holmes shared a lot of their DNA was obvious already in "A Study in Pink," and in the intervening two seasons Sherlock has taken a very similar approach to its storytelling and character work as Doctor Who, emphasizing its central character, a superexcited blur of furious, and extremely funny, intelligence over his more recognizably human companions, and using moments of cleverness to distract from an incoherent overarching plot.  The two series's most recent seasons even wrapped up in largely the same way, with the main character, who has for a while been aware that he is marching towards his death, faking that death in part in order to get away from the attention that put him in danger in the first place.

Which raises an interesting question: given that I find Who basically unwatchable at this point, why am I still--and despite all the flaws that I've noted in this review, and which have aggravated me over the course of this season--won over by Sherlock?  Why, in other words, am I still debating whether Sherlock is brilliant or terrible rather than coming down, as I have in Who's case, on the latter side?  Like Who, there's almost always something worth watching for in Sherlock--a particularly funny scene, an especially clever bit of plotting, and of course the two leads--and it could simply be that after a mere six episodes, Sherlock's novelty hasn't worn off yet.  But the real reason, I think, that I'm still invested in Sherlock, and that "The Reichenbach Fall" works for me as a whole while "A Scandal in Belgravia" and "The Hounds of Baskerville" do so only intermittently, is Martin Freeman.  Freeman is Sherlock's secret weapon--so secret that it sometimes seems that even the show's writers have forgotten about him.  With hardly enough screen time or material to work with, he not only constructs a complex character--tough and vulnerable, bumbling and terrifyingly competent, fussy and adventurous, exasperated with Sherlock and deeply devoted to him--but gives the show something that Who lacks, a beating, human heart.

Season two, and especially "The Reichenbach Fall," make much of Sherlock's moments of emotion.  These, however, often seem either calculated and cheap--as if, having built up the character's inhumanity to such great heights, even the most basic emotions, such as anger at a thug who beat up Mrs. Hudson or shame at having humiliated Molly, count as major development--or overwrought--not to bring this back to Doctor Who, but the final confrontation with Moriarty has more than a whiff of David Tennant and John Simm chewing the scenery at the end of Who's third season.  It's John's emotions, which are on a more human scale--modulated by his awareness of society's conventions, and rarely operatic--that give Sherlock real resonance, especially when he's stripped raw, as he is at the end of "The Reichenbach Fall."

What season two, with its emphasis on the big guns of the Holmes canon, has brought into focus is that what's wrong with Sherlock is, well, Sherlock.  Not the character, who is great, nor Cumberbatch, whose showier role makes him easy to dismiss but who handles what is actually a tough job with aplomb, switching easily between funny Sherlock, amazing Sherlock, and terrifying Sherlock and making great meals of all of them.  No, the problem is the show's infatuation with Sherlock, and its willingness to set all considerations of plot and character aside in order to let him do his thing.  That infatuation is the reason that "A Scandal in Bohemia" and The Hound of the Baskervilles are neutered in their Sherlock versions--because this is not the show whose main character can realize that he is a minor character in someone else's story, or step back to let John drive a story.  The problem, however, runs deeper than simply a bad choice of source material, as "The Reichenbach Fall" demonstrates.  Sherlock only comes together when it's told from John's point of view, when his normal, ordinary perspective is allowed to mediate Sherlock's extraordinary one.  But the show is too in love with Sherlock to ever let that happen.

I think I'd be alright with Sherlock if it were simply a show that sometimes seems brilliant and at other times is just terrible.  But it's getting harder and harder to watch the show veer between those two extremes knowing that it has the potential to be consistently great, and absolutely no willingness to fulfill it.  That knowledge makes watching Sherlock one of the most nail-bitingly frustrating experiences I've known--it's probably a good thing that its seasons are only three episodes long or I'd go nuts.  But hey, if nothing else, whether brilliant or terrible, at least it's never boring.

2011, A Year in Reading: Best and Worst Books of the Year

I read 59 books in 2011, a bit of a drop from previous years which is mainly due to Strange Horizons and the SF Encyclopedia taking up a lot of my time, but also, as I mentioned yesterday, because commuting by car rather than pubic transport has cut into my reading time.  Probably the most interesting thing about this year's reading is that for the first time since I've been keeping track, I've read more books by women than men.  This is mainly due to my Women Writing SF project from early in the year (though a reread of the entire Harry Potter series in August, inspired by the release of the last movie, also helped).  If you look at the gender breakdown of best and worst books, there's a clear indication that I should strive to maintain, and even increase, this preference for women writers.

All told, 2011 was a good reading year but not a remarkable one.  I read many books I enjoyed, if few that I loved unreservedly, and not many that I hated.  Most of all, I didn't read nearly as many books as I wanted, and going into 2012 there are at least a dozen books that I'd like to be my next read, and that I would have loved to have gotten to this year.  Which is not a bad place to be in, I suppose.  Without Further ado, then, the best books of the year, in alphabetical order of their authors' names:

• The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
  
  Once again, NYRB Classics delivers the year's hands-down winner.  Bengtsson's invented Viking saga, which follows the adventures of the sardonic, cheerfully bloody-minded Red Orm as he is kidnapped into slavery, becomes a royal bodyguard in Muslim Spain, escapes and makes his fortune pirating, and returns to his home to become a great chieftain, is an effortlessly fun adventure story, full of wonderful characters--including some memorable and prominent female characters such as Orm's mother and love interest.  Bengtsson tells his story with enough of a straight face that it comes across like a Tolkien-esque recreation that chucks overboard the tools of modernist fiction in favor of plotty, adventurous fun, but he also has a sense of humor about his subject, and doesn't mind poking fun at either his characters or the conventions of their story.  A thought-provoking discussion of religious conflict in the story's era, with pagans, Christians, Muslims and Jews vying, at certain points, for supremacy, and at others, for survival under an inhospitable regime, and constantly making the case for their own way of life, gives the story some heft, but even this is leavened by Bengtsson's sense of humor and Red Orm's practical approach to all matters, the spiritual included.  When I started The Long Ships, I worried that I would find nothing human enough in it to grab onto and interest me, but by the time I turned the last page I was heartbroken at the thought that I could spend no more time following the adventures of its wonderful characters.


• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
  
  At the very other end of the genre scale, Egan's literary novel par excellence is a reminder of why I continue to read literary fiction and of the pleasures that can be found in it.  A Visit From the Goon Squad is quintessentially literary--plotless and focusing on character and affect--but it uses its leaps back and forth through the lives of large cast of loosely connected characters, taking the old and dissipated back to their innocent youth, the young and hopeful forward to disappointed middle age, to land a hell of a punch.  Slowly and almost obliquely, Egan drives home that point that time and its ravages spare no one, and the characters she subjects to those ravages are so human and so relatable that by the time her scheme becomes apparent the novel is nothing short of heartbreaking.  The segment set in the future works less well than the ones in the present and past, but it serves as a reminder that time doesn't stop for those of us who are still young--like it or not, the goon squad is waiting for us as well, and just around the corner.


• Gullstruck Island (The Lost Conspiracy in the US) by Frances Hardinge (review)
  
  I read a lot of YA in 2011, and enjoyed most of it, but Hardinge's novel puts the rest of her field--and a lot of novels for adults--to shame.  Most YA reaches for a sense of familiarity, through the characters' worldview and reactions, if not through its setting and premise.  Hardinge not only reaches for foreignness, but makes it the crux of her story.  The titular setting, a tropical island, has a rich history of colonization and cultural mingling that is a pleasure to discover, and the plot revolves around cultural differences and misunderstandings.  The heroine, Hathin, is as much a product of her culture as everyone else in the novel, which makes her slightly foreign to us, and her decisions sometimes a little hard to understand.  Over the course of the novel she struggles, first for survival, then for revenge, and finally for the future of Gullstruck itself, but the real struggle, for her and for the rest of the cast, is to find a balance between respecting tradition and being bound by it, and between holding on to one's own culture and trampling the culture of others.  It's a weighty subject, but Hardinge handles it as lightly as she does the novel's twisty plot, which sees Hathin escaping the massacre of her village and trekking across Gullstruck while other point of view characters slowly grasp the danger facing everyone on the island, and which makes Gullstruck Island an utterly engrossing read.

Honorable Mentions:

• God's War by Kameron Hurley - The setting grabbed me more than the plot or characters, but it is original and clever enough to make this novel a highlight of the year.


• Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness (review) - A fittingly dramatic conclusion to the excellent Chaos Walking trilogy, though it sadly fumbles the theme of gender introduced in the first volume.


• Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine (review) - Like God's War, more impressive for its setting than its plot or characters, but also a novel that does interesting things with the clichés of steampunk and its circus setting.


• The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman (review) - Not as impressive as Goodman's masterpiece Intuition, but the novel's depiction of the late years of the dot com boom has stayed with me, and resonated through much of my SF reading in the last few months--pretty impressive for an Austen-tinged romance about cookbooks.

A special, collective honorable mention goes to the Women Writing SF reading project and the authors whose science fiction I discovered through it for the first time: Joanna Russ, Gwyneth Jones (strictly speaking, a 2010 author), Mary Gentle, and even M.J. Engh, whose Arslan remains one of the most frustrating and challenging books I read this year.  I'm planning a second project, probably a little later in 2012, and hopefully its results will be as engrossing and illuminating.

And, since you can't have the good without the bad, the worst books of the year:

• The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
  
  I had planned to write a long post about Orringer's well-received debut novel and why it put me off so completely, but time and the complexity of the task put that project off long past the point where I could do it justice without rereading the book.  Still, I can't let 2011 come to a close without saying something about this book, which encapsulate, to me, the corner that Holocaust fiction has turned in recent years, from fiction aimed at illustrating the horror of the Holocaust to fiction that uses the Holocaust as a backdrop to an adventure, or a coming of age story, or, in Orringer's case, a romance.  Orringer has the excuse of basing her story, in which Hungarian architecture student Andras falls in love with an older woman, Klara, during his studies in Paris, and brings her back to Hungary just as the war kicks into gear, trapping them both in a Nazi-friendly country, on the lives of her grandparents, but whether out of love and family loyalty, or simple tone-deafness, she has cast those lives into the mold of an insipid romance.  Not only are Andras and Klara inhumanly perfect, never selfish or angry or craven or forced to do anything unsavory to survive, but Orringer so valorizes and prioritizes their love story that the awfulness of the Holocaust becomes the fact that it might tear these lovers apart.  One of the most horrifying crimes of the twentieth century is thus reduced to a romance trope, the obstacle that must be placed in the lovers' path so that their inevitable happy ending feels earned, while the deaths of other characters feel like dramatic necessities, heightening tension or sweeping a now-pointless character off the board, not the crushing blows they must have been in real life.  It's pretty obvious that Orringer thinks that she's honored her grandparents and acknowledged the horror of what they and their families experienced, but what she's created is so glib and so devoid of any real horror that I found it nothing short of disgusting.


• The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
  
  As I've already written, Rachman's implausibly well-reviewed debut feels like the antithesis of Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad.  Like that novel it moves back and forth through time and through the lives of reporters, administrators, and hangers-on at a Rome-based international paper, leading up to the paper's collapse along with the rest of its industry in the early twenty-first century.  But Rachman, instead of creating human and believable characters, trades in stereotypes and in crude, too-obvious jokes, reaching for dramatic irony--a character who has romanticized their free-thinking best friend discovers that he is now conservative and small-minded, a woman strikes up a romance with an employee she's just had fired only for their connection to turn out to be a cruel prank--but landing, again and again, on clomping, leaden, unfunny endings that only stress how unlikable and unsympathetic everyone in the novel is.  Rachman not only completely fails to sell the grandeur of print journalism and its vanished era or greatness, but by the time he reaches the end of his story, his elegiac tone feels so incongruous with the unpleasant, cliché-ridden stories he's been telling that one wants nothing more than to drive a final stake through the medium's corpse.


• Reamde by Neal Stephenson (review)
  
  Strictly speaking, Reamde isn't entirely a bad novel.  The early chapters have some typically Stephenson-ian excursus on the relationship between MMORPGs and economics, and the middle chapters are essentially one long action scene spread out over several days and locations, but nevertheless quite exciting.  But the novel is too long, and by its end both the neat inventiveness of its beginning and the cool action of its middle have faded away, several hundred pages before the story actually shuffles to its close.  Still, what's bad about Reamde is less the novel itself and more the way that its failures as a piece of fiction lay bare Stephenson's limited, self-satisfied, ethnocentric worldview, which in turn spurred a, perhaps long overdue, reevaluation of his past fiction, which suffers from the same flaws.  Reamde is on this list, then, because it may very well have put me off Stephenson for good.

Dishonorable mentions:

• Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber - What I had hoped would be a cool mystery starring a female scientist turned out to be a weepy romance with a self-absorbed protagonist and a nonsensical plot.


• Snuff by Terry Pratchett (review) - Poorly written and harping too hard on themes already worn into the ground, this latest Discworld volume turns Sam Vimes into someone who is more concerned with his own image as a class warrior than with actually being a class warrior, and treats slavery with an infuriating glibness.

That's it for 2011, then.  Have a nice (and safe) New Year's Eve tonight, and happy reading in 2012.

2011, A Year in Reading: Kindled

Whatever the opposite of early adopter is, I'm it.  I tend to stick with what works, and am rarely in a rush to discover how a new gadget might improve my life.  I started this blog in 2005 when the format was already starting to get a bit stale (and am still plugging away at it going into 2012 when it's become positively antiquated).  I've only had a Gmail account for a year.  I got my first smartphone last week (and by "got," I mean that my mother, who is an early adopter extraordinaire, was first in line when the iPhone 4S became available in Israel and bequeathed me her old iPhone 3G).  Accordingly, it took a while for me to wrap my mind around the notion of an electronic reader as a viable alternative to paper books, and as something that I might enjoy and get a lot of use out of, and it wasn't until Amazon announced the Kindle 3, at a price point that seemed reasonable for what still felt, at the time, like a dubious endeavor, that I decided to take the plunge.  That was a year ago (in the interim Amazon has released a whole new Kindle, and the Kindle Fire), and the end of 2011 seemed like a good time to summarize my reactions to this device and the ways that it has affected my reading.

Before I say anything about my reaction to the Kindle, I should probably explain my choice of this particular device.  Even given that I prefer electronic ink to backlit displays, there were other options (albeit none that are as easily accessible in Israel).  Amazon is in such bad odor these days, both for its hardball tactics against authors and publishers, and for clinging to DRM in the face of the public's disdain, that one feels the need to justify buying into their model rather than anyone else's.  Or maybe I do, because though I do understand and accept that Amazon are now the Evil Empire, and that they may very well be doing real damage to authors and the publishing industry, I can't shake my love and loyalty to that company.  It is in no way an exaggeration to say that Amazon changed my life.  Without it and the access it gave me at a time when my local bookbuying options were severely limited, I would not be reading the books that I read today, and I would certainly not be writing this blog, or going to conventions, or editing the Strange Horizons reviews department.  Amazon made me the reader--and thus, the blogger and reviewer--that I am, so when the time came to pick an e-reader there was never really any question about which one I'd choose.  And it doesn't hurt that the Kindle is a really great device--comfortable to hold, easy to navigate and read from--and that the bookbuying end is as convenient as buying from Amazon has always been.  I'd be happier if Amazon had different business practices, but nothing they've done yet is enough to overcome the combination of my loyalty and their fine engineering.

On to the device itself, perhaps the biggest change that the Kindle has made to my reading habits is that it has made them more spontaneous.  I've been buying books from Amazon since 1996, but for most of that period, the costly, time-consuming physical process of getting those books to me imposed a calculated, bean-counting mentality on the way I purchased books.  Before the Kindle, I would hear about an interesting book, and if I couldn't find it in local bookstores (which was usually the case) it would go on my Amazon wish list.  The next time I placed an Amazon order (three or four times a year, usually), that book would vie with all the other books that had caught my eye in the previous few months, and the ones that had been on my wish list longer, to be one of the six or seven actually ordered.  Then several weeks would pass before I actually had the book in my hands--a procedure, all told, almost calculated to either cool my enthusiasm for a book, or stoke it so high that there could be no chance of satisfying it.  By removing the issue of shipping, the Kindle has short-circuited that entire process.  Niall Harrison started rhapsodizing about Kameron Hurley's God's War in early summer, and I was able to buy an electronic copy and see what all the fuss was about almost immediately.  Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad won the Tournament of Books, and instead of waiting two months for the paperback to appear in Israeli bookstores I just bought the Kindle edition.  Access and availability have been the bugbears of my reading life for the better part of twenty years, and even more than online bookbuying, the Kindle has helped to eliminate them.

There are several caveats that should be mentioned here, the first and most frustrating, to me, being that my access is still not complete.  Some books don't have Kindle or other ebook editions.  Worse, some have Kindle editions that are not sold in my region.  For newer books, stores like Weightless and Baen, as well as publishers like Angry Robot, help to plug some of the holes, but there are a lot of older and out of print books without electronic editions.  Especially with so many other books readily available to me, it's hard not to fly into a foot-stamping rage when the one particular book I'd like to read is still limited to dead tree form.  Another caveat is that for all that I'm pleased with my Kindle and enjoy reading with it, I'm still reading a lot of physical books as well.  In fact, only a third of the books I read in 2011 were ebooks.  Partly this is due to the fact that around the same time that I purchased a Kindle, I also bought my first car, which has made my commute infinitely more convenient but also cost me a lot of reading time.  And when reading at home, the Kindle found itself fighting for prominence with my TBR stack (seen here, amazing as it may seem, in its younger, smaller days).

This will change in future years, I'm sure, but I think that it will be a while yet before ebooks make up most, or even half, of my reading.  And that's because one of the strangest and most unexpected effects that the Kindle has had on my reading habits is that it has instilled in me a new respect for the book as a physical object.  I've never really cared what my books look like and what condition they're in.  I preferred paperbacks to hardcovers because they were cheaper, lighter, and easier to stuff in a bag and carry around.  For the same reasons, I preferred beat-up, used paperback to new ones.  And I let myself feel a little superior for having these preferences--I care about the words, not how they're bound and printed!  Then the Kindle comes along, and all of a sudden I'm saying to myself: maybe this book I want in paper.  Because as everyone says, when you buy an ebook, you've really just rented it.  This has nothing to do with DRM, by the way--as the old joke goes, the book is a format that has lasted for centuries, while computer platforms and file formats are lucky to live to be a few decades old.  And even if DRM or file formats or the obsolescence of your platform don't get you, the short half-life of electronic storage will, long before the books on your bookshelf have done anything but get a little yellow.

Which, given that I read most books only once, is fine for most of my reading, but I've found that there are certain titles and authors that I want on my shelves.  I could have bought Kindle editions of China Miéville's Embassytown and Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, for example, but I preferred physical ones.  And conversely, after hearing less than stellar reports about Neal Stephenson's Reamde, I bought a Kindle edition so I could find out if it was as bad as all that without being left with a behemoth to clog up my shelves.  Even worse, having enjoyed God's War and A Visit From the Goon Squad immensely, I now find myself wondering if I should buy physical copies of them.  The end result of which will no doubt be a sort of two-tier system of reading, where physical books are still the primary format, and the only reliable means of storage.  As much as I enjoy my Kindle, then, and though I anticipate using it more and more in the years to come, I can't say that it has ushered me into a new era of digital reading.  If anything, it seems to have cemented my loyalty to the analog.

Recent Movie Roundup 15

A bumper crop of films as the year draws to its close--this write-up doesn't even include The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, which I watched only a few weeks ago and already can't remember a thing about.  And there's more to come--the next month sees The Artist, Margin Call, Hugo, and We Need to Talk About Kevin opening in Israeli theaters.  My thoughts at this interim point:

1. Moneyball (2011) - For brief moments in this tedious, inert film one gets a sense of the very interesting work it might have been, a darkly cynical anti-sports movie.  The film, which follows baseball manager Billy Beane (a typically good Brad Pitt in a run of the mill performance whose Oscar buzz is utterly baffling) as he tries to use statistics to get out from under the huge budget disparity between his team and the league leaders by identifying cheap but under-appreciated players, works to undermine the romanticism of the form.  Gone are the homilies about teamwork--Beane horse-trades his players with barely a thought spared for their fate or feelings--or about the power of heart or the magic of the game, replaced by pages upon pages of incomprehensible numbers and inscrutable acronyms.  This could have made for an interesting story, one that acknowledged that big sports is a business where money wins championships, and where a new business model can (temporarily) rock the boat.  But Moneyball, on top of being rather slack and taking too long to tell what is ultimately a rather thin story, doesn't quite have the guts to follow its premise to its logical conclusion.  It tries to be soulful and triumphant as it charts the "revolution" that Beane is leading in baseball and hints at the way that that revolution would go on to leave him behind--once the effectiveness of Beane's methods had been demonstrated, the bigger, richer teams adopted them and the same inequality that had relegated his team to the bottom of the league reasserted itself.  Which means that the film fails to acknowledge what is obvious even to someone who doesn't care a bit about baseball--that what Beane is doing is ripping the soul out of the game, prioritizing cautious, defensive point-scoring over athleticism.  The suggestion that this is all that baseball ever was--a mass of statistics and meaningless trivia, like the record for most consecutive wins that Beane's team breaks during the season charted by the film--is, like so many other Moneyball's interesting ideas, something that is hinted at, but quickly discarded.


2. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) - For several years now I've been meaning to read something by John Le Carré, and the release of a star-studded and critically-hailed adaptation of one of his best-known novels seemed like the perfect excuse.  I liked the book well enough (though I can't help but wonder if it relies too much for its effect on associations with Empire and with the Cold War that I just don't possess), but reading it shortly before seeing the film turned out to have been a mistake.  As well made as the new Tinker Tailor is, and as stuffed with fine actors whom I like and who give good account of themselves, it is undeniably shoddy as an adpatation, not simply because there just isn't enough room in even a long film to do justice to the novel's twisty yet episodic plot, which is here alternately absurd and incomprehensible (and that as a result a large portion of the cast, including Colin Firth and Ciaran Hinds, are wasted), but for the less forgivable sin of filing away a lot of the novel's cynicism and despair.  So Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), the young MI6 agent who is recruited to help disgraced senior agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman) ferret out a mole in the organization, is a callow youth instead of an older man gracelessly crossing into middle age and perhaps losing his edge, and Ricky Tarr's (Tom Hardy) recruitment of a Soviet spy is romantic rather than exploitative.  The disconnect between the film and novel's tones comes to a head in the former's ending, in which the discovery of the mole--in the novel a necessary but ultimately hollow victory that only reinforces the moral bankruptcy and exhaustion of the main characters--is a cheerful triumph.
   
   I was so disappointed in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the film, that I searched out Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the 1979 miniseries which has become the stuff of legend.  It addresses many of my complaints about the film, largely because the broader canvas gives the writers the chance to address the novel's complexity and its ambivalence towards the intelligence war between MI6 and Moscow Center--Ricky's romance with Irina the soviet spy, for example, is here given an episode to itself, which allows us to see the way that his initially mercenary pursuit of her grows into romance, and how that romance is nevertheless tinged with his fundamental selfishness and immaturity.  The miniseries also preserves the novel's episodic structure, with Smiley tracking down former agents who witnessed the events that got him chucked out of the service--events which, he is now convinced, were orchestrated by the mole--and listening to their narratives.  The film tries to rejigger these narratives into a standard three-act structure and makes a mess of them, and the miniseries is much more coherent (though oddly both the film and the miniseries move the failed overseas mission that sets the story's events in motion to their prologue, which makes for an exciting opening but undercuts the character of Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong in the film, Ian Bannen in the miniseries) when he turns up near the end of the story to tell his part in it and has little left to say).  Another interesting--and amusing--difference between the two adaptations is that the film is trying so consciously to be historical that it overshoots its period--set in 1974, its settings, interiors, and even costumes look more suited to the 1950s.  The miniseries, filmed only a few years after the book's events take place, feels freer to show us 1970s fashions--the billboards and neon lights of central London, or the horribly moddish decor of Smiley's living room.
   
   The one point that I will grant the film over the miniseries is that I much prefer Gary Oldman's Smiley to Alec Guiness's.  Guiness's performance is supposed to be iconic, and he's certainly very good, but I find his Smiley too cold and cerebral.  Oldman's Smiley is a man in the grips of depression, having lost the job that defined him and the wife he's never been able to hold on to, and the film is a chronicle of his slow escape from that depression as he rediscovers his purpose in life.  It's a more human performance than Guinness's (without being any less intelligent) and it gives the film around it, incoherent as it is, meaning and heft.


3. Drive (2011) - In its opening act, Drive seems like little more than a well-made, slightly off-beat variant on a familiar theme.  Stunt driver by day, wheelman by night Ryan Gosling (whose character remains unnamed throughout the film and is referred to as Driver in the credits) forms an intense connection with his neighbor (Carey Mulligan) and her young son.  When her husband is released from prison, Driver agrees to help him pull once last job to pay off his former associates, and things naturally go very wrong from there.  The film's early scenes, which mostly revolve around Gosling and Mulligan gazing at one another with barely suppressed yearning, work hard to suggest the canonical form of this type of story, in which the criminal character is just dangerous enough to be appealing, but really a softie deep down.  As Driver's predicament deepens, however, it quickly becomes clear that far from being a rogue with a heart of gold, he is actually an angel-faced psychopath, whose sweet infatuation with a pretty girl and her cute son does nothing to diminish (and perhaps even intensifies) the violent impulses that lead to some truly gruesome and horrifying scenes of violence in which he works his way up the totem pole to the people responsible for the bungled robbery.  But Drive doesn't aim for full-on realism.  It plugs this increasingly scary character into a fairly standard action movie plot (underpinned by a healthy dollop of Western), in which Driver is the vector for several tense, thrilling, and impeccably shot action and chase sequences, as well as the only person trying to protect Mulligan and her son.  By the end of the film, it's hard to know whether to root for Driver or recoil from him, whether to wish for his happy ending with Mulligan, or his death.  The result is a film that manages to burn through many of the callouses I've developed where action movies are concerned, to deliver genuine thrills and make me feel truly anxious about its characters' ultimate fate.


4. The Muppets (2011) - From the very first days of The Muppet Show there's been a level of metafiction to the Muppet concept, in which the show within a show, an old-fashioned variety show with celebrity guests, is created by the characters, who play themselves as Hollywood insiders.  The movies extended that gag by pretending that the Muppets were show business newcomers trying to get their big break by staging a Muppet Show-style variety show, and achieving fame and fortune.  In all the discussion surrounding Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller's revival of the Muppet franchise and whether it would capture the "essence" of the characters and show, I've found myself wondering whether the people involved hadn't fallen for that metafictional gag a little too hard.  How else to explain the pedestal on which they place the Muppets, which not even the original series and movies could probably reach?  In its first half hour, The Muppets seems to have fallen into the same trap.  It tries too hard to charm, and spends too much time telling us that the Muppets--who are here forgotten superstars trying to make a comeback--are awesome rather than showing us that they are.  A lot of this is down to the new Muppet character Walter, whose Muppet-mania sparks the events of the film but who comes off as annoyingly, even selfishly needy rather than sweet.  As Walter is the audience identification character and strongly positioned as Kermit's potential heir, this is a problem, and one can't help but wish that the film had focused instead of Segel's Gary and Amy Adams's Mary as its main characters.  But then, around the time that the old Muppet gang turns up and starts cranking the familiar Muppet movie "let's put on a show" plot, the magic happens, and what was a film trying too hard to tug at our heartstrings becomes genuinely heart-tugging, funny, and lovable.  There are some very good jokes (a sequence parodying The Devil Wears Prada, with Miss Piggy in the Anna Wintour role and Emily Blunt reprising her role from that film, is sheer brilliance), and some good songs (though all are slightly outshined by the reprise of "Rainbow Connection" from the first Muppet movie).  The Muppets will probably not make the Muppets into superstars again, but then that's never what they were.  It may or may not introduce them to a new generation of kids, but then that's not really what I'm interested in.  What it does is capture the sweetness and charm of the original characters and show, and do so for an entertaining, heartwarming 90 minutes.  Plus, Chris Cooper raps.  What more could you possibly ask for?


5. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) - The latest installment in this intermittently fun but consistently soulless series gets the first half of the equation gratifyingly right.  It's less a movie than a sequence of ingenious, outrageous, impeccably staged action sequences strung together with some very flimsy connective tissue masquerading as plot.  Someone in the writers' room even bothered to look at the title this time around, so the crisis in this film is quite a bit more than the characters can handle, and the set pieces are enlivened, and made extremely tense, by failures of planning, equipment, or just a lot of crap landing on our heroes' heads.  For all that, the fun does wear a bit thin about halfway into the film--how many times can you watch these people skate just out of harm's way at the very last minute before it becomes tedious?--and with Tom Cruise's charisma-suck of a character, Ethan Hunt, still at the center of the film, and encouraging this installment's Designated Girl, Paula Patton, to embark on tandem flights of emo over the deaths of their respective partners, there hardly seems to be anyone worth investing in.  Happily, the franchise brings in Jeremy Renner, a live wire where Cruise is inert, to play a character much more interesting and more amusingly human--he spends much of the film freaking out over just how close to the wire the team flies.  (Simon Pegg, as the team's tech, is also fun but doesn't get a lot to do.)  If I knew that the Mission: Impossible films were being handed over to Renner, I'd be excited about the next one developing a soul to go along with the fun action.  Judging by the end of Ghost Protocol, however, Cruise is staying in the lead, so I guess the series will continue to live and die by its directors and stunt coordinators.


6. Melancholia (2011) - Lars von Trier's latest film is made up of two distinct segments that, seemingly quite deliberately, mesh with each other only haltingly and partially.  In the first and shorter of the two, new bride Justine (Kirsten Dunst) arrives at her sister's enormous estate for a lavish and expensive wedding celebration.  Though she initially seems radiantly happy, Justine's mood soon sours--which is partly due to the influence of her awful, awful family, but mainly because she is coming back under the sway of a depression that, it is strongly implied, has dogged her for her entire life.  Try as she might, and strongly exhorted as she is, to feel happy, Justine eventually can't fake it anymore, and the evening collapses into a disaster.  The second half of the film takes place some unspecified time later and concentrates on Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), as a nearly prostrate Justine is brought back to the estate to be cared for.  Claire is also fretting about a rogue planet, Melancholia, which scientists say is going to pass by the Earth, but which Claire fears, and Justine insists, is going to hit it.  You could try to read the second half of the film, and the approach of the doomsday planet, as a metaphor for depression--inescapable, undeniable, crushing--but this doesn't quite fit (for one thing, Justine, who turns out to be far more capable than her "normal" relatives of dealing with her impending death, actually snaps out of her depression towards the end of the film and helps them to cope).  You could, on the other hand, take Melancholia as a literal-minded film about the end of the world, but this too is a creaky reading--who, for example, would name a planet Melancholia?
   
   The film is thus suspended between these two interpretations, at one end a story about depression, at the other a story about the end of the world, which both do and do not fit together.  The film works as well as it does because of this tension and slight disconnect, but--and I am probably showing my colors here--I prefer its second half.  Dunst is very good as Justine (and she can join Homeland's Claire Danes on the list of actresses who portray mental illness in all its offputting, exhausting glory without obscuring the real person whom the illness afflicts--trying as she is, Justine is smarter and more forthright than most of her family, and probably better company even when she's losing her grip on sanity), but unhappy families, in this case, turn out to be all alike, and the implosion of the wedding party is alternately too familiar and over the top.  The second half of the film is, for all its understated concerns and familiar beats--at one point, Claire tries to escape the estate to the nearby village, as though this will make any difference--something new, and its version of apocalypse is one of the most stunning, because so bleak and merciless, that I have ever seen.  (For this reason, I'm a bit baffled by the fact that Dunst is being talked about quite seriously for an Oscar nomination while Gainsbourg--who arguably has a tougher job as a normal person faced with abnormal circumstances, while Justine spends the second half of the film as a superior cipher who "just knows" that the end of the world is coming--has not been.)  Melancholia is worth watching no matter what reading protocol you apply to it, but I for one would be happy to see it on this year's Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo ballot.

No Place Like: Thoughts on Homeland

It's late December, which for the last few years has been the time for my annual Dexter write-up.  That's not going to happen this year or, I suspect, any year in the future.  If you've watched the last season of Dexter, you know why.  If you haven't, do yourself a favor and avoid it.  Watch Homeland instead!  One of the biggest problems plaguing Dexter's sixth season was that it aired on the same channel, and back to back, with what is by now widely acknowledged as the best new show of the fall, if not all of 2011.  The contrast between the two shows only served to highlight the fact that Dexter is over, and Homeland is where it's at.

The basic premise--CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) believes that rescued American POW Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) has been turned by his captors and is part of a planned attack on US soil--is fairly well known, but Homeland is nevertheless hard to talk about as a piece of storytelling because it takes its story through so many twists and turns over the course of a mere twelve hours.  The season's opening episodes establish what seems like a framework for the rest of the story: Carrie has (illegally) placed hidden cameras and microphones in Brody's house (it's a little galling to refer to a female character by her first name and a male character by his surname, but hardly anybody on the show, not even his friends and family, calls Brody Nicholas) through which she searches for proof of his terrorist affiliations while observing his halting reintegration into his old life, and a family who have lived the last eight years of their lives without him.

These episodes establish Homeland as a sort of show-within-a-show, an espionage thriller coating surrounding a family drama interior.  The latter, incidentally, is one of the few shows on TV to use nudity and sex in an intelligent way that advances our understanding of the characters, an effective counterpoint--and challenge--to Game of Thrones's sexposition.  Brody's disastrous attempts at sex with his wife Jessica (Morena Baccarin) when he first returns home are graphically depicted--in one scene, she tries to seduce him only for him to become visibly distressed, then throw her on the bed and thrust into her for a few seconds, rolling away while the camera remains trained on her face, as it crumples with the realization that her husband has just used her as an aid to masturbation; in another, he rejects her renewed advances and instead masturbates in front of her, and an initially game Jessica slumps further and further as it becomes clear that she might as well not be in the room.  The dysfunction and emotional sterility of these encounters drive home both the psychological damage that Brody has suffered and the gulf between him and his wife.  Both are sharply contrasted with our first introduction to Jessica, in which she has enthusiastic, deeply affectionate sex with the lover she's taken in Brody's absence (who is also Brody's best friend), in the warm afterglow of which she receives the news that Brody is coming home, and with Brody's more intimate sex scenes, later in the season, with Carrie--whom the show positions from the outset as someone who understands his experiences because she's had similar ones, and has been similarly damaged by them--and act as a shorthand to our understanding of all three characters.  (All that said, it is no doubt telling that Baccarin is topless in most of her sex scenes, while Danes is not.)

One could easily have crafted a twelve-episode season out of this scenario--the Brodys struggling to become a family again as Carrie watches, half embarrassed and half fascinated, gleaning clues to Brody's true affiliation--without wanting for interesting events, so it comes as something of a shock when Homeland overturns it after only a few episodes.  Carrie's surveillance equipment is removed; Brody learns about Jessica's affair and leaves home; Carrie's pursuit of the master terrorist Abu Nazir heats up and she becomes part of a CIA task force pursuing him, her conviction that he and Brody are allies taking a back seat to more concrete intelligence.  Homeland is characterized by these lightning-quick shifts in its storytelling.  After she loses her insider perspective on Brody's life, Carrie strikes up a friendship with him, pretending to be a sympathetic ear, and this quickly turns into an affair.  Again, we might have expected the show to draw this story out for the rest of the season, with Brody's realization that Carrie suspects him of being a terrorist (and Carrie's realization that she has genuine feelings for Brody) coming in episode 10 or 11.  Instead, the show moves through all of these beats in a single hour, and remarkably, does so without feeling rushed and without shortchanging either plot or characters. Which is the season in a nutshell--a complicated, multi-stranded story with many different personalities and moving parts that constantly delivers shocking moments while building up towards a thrilling finale, and does all this so elegantly that it's easy to forget just what an incredible accomplishment it is.

What grounds Homeland through all the twists and turns of its plot are its central duo, Carrie and Brody, two of the most complicated and fascinating characters to grace a television screen this year.  I've grown quite tired, in recent years, of the fashion for "unsympathetic characters," which too often feels like an excuse for throwing melodramatic, over the top bad behavior at the screen and treating it like high drama (while decrying viewers who recoil from it as children who can't cope and are only looking for shining heroes).  Carrie and Brody are something much rarer and more satisfying--they're deeply sympathetic people who do awful things for reasons that are depressingly mundane and understandable. 

Carrie is smart, determined, and very good at her job, but her confidence leads her to reckless, heedless behavior, a profound impatience with anyone who doubts her, and a conviction that any action, no matter how hurtful, that she takes in pursuit of that truth (her illegal surveillance of the Brodys being but a mild example) is ultimately justified.  Underpinning all of this the fact that Carrie suffers from bipolar disorder, which she self-medicates and has concealed from her employers in order to keep her security clearance.  I don't have enough real-life experience with mental illness to know how accurate Carrie is as a depiction of a bipolar person, but she feels real, and the show's treatment of her is respectful and compassionate without losing sight of the damage Carrie does, to others and to herself.  Homeland never suggests that Carrie's behavior is justified or mitigated by her illness, but it also doesn't allow us to dismiss her because of it.  In the season's early episodes, Carrie's demeanor verges on manic; her utter conviction that Brody is a terrorist, on irrationality (though all without obscuring the fact that she is very good at her job).  Later in the season, a head injury throws Carrie's brain chemistry out of alignment, and we get a glimpse at full-on crazy Carrie.  After the initial shock, it's easy to see where the two states shade into one another, and the full tragedy of Carrie's situation becomes apparent--for a person whose job requires them to make connections, spot patterns, and rely on their intuition to suffer from an illness that renders their intellect and confidence unreliable.  What the end of the season reveals, however, even as Carrie and the people around her become more doubtful of her abilities, is that she was always right--even in the grips of madness, she was making connections that no one else could see, and doing so despite the growing cost to herself, as her illness is revealed and she loses her job.  So a person who starts out the season profoundly off-putting becomes deeply heroic without amending their behavior.  Despite, in fact, growing more unattractive as they sink into their worst traits (Danes has taken some ribbing for Carrie's "ugly cry" face, but her work as Carrie loses her grip on sanity is the highlight of an all-around riveting performance).

What's most interesting about all this is, of course, the choice to make Carrie a woman.  Insanity, and particularly the kind of irrational, hysterical insanity that Carrie demonstrates towards the end of the season, is often linked with women and used to dismiss them and their opinions.  So much so, in fact, that perfectly sane women will work hard to suppress anger and high emotion, no matter how justified, knowing that these are often used as "evidence" of their irrationality.  And yet Homeland gives us a heroine who is irrational, who is not in control of her emotions.  What's more, it gives us a heroine who is tripped up by her heart and her sexuality.  The beats of Carrie's relationship with Brody--which begins as a calculated maneuver and grows into genuine feelings that she recognizes too late--are familiar from a million romantic melodramas.  Later in the season, Carrie pathetically yearns for Brody even as he reconciles with Jessica, and is then punished for their relationship when he uses it to discredit her with the CIA.  Homeland never goes so far as to suggest that Carrie is persecuted for her gender (though it is telling that most of her professional confrontations are with type A men who obviously resent having to listen to her input, while many of her professional achievements are the result of gaining the trust or sympathy of women--the paid consort of a Saudi prince, the wife of one of Brody's fellow Marines, the wife of a recalcitrant imam, Brody's teenage daughter).  What it does instead is create a character who revels in just about every cliché of the pathetic, irrational, emotionally driven woman, and makes her into a hero, who is very good at her job and who, by the end of the season, saves a lot of lives and is the only person willing to see the truth about Brody.

Brody's character arc, meanwhile, takes the opposite journey.  At the beginning of the season, it's hard not to pity him, not just for his ordeals in captivity but for the difficult welcome that greets him at home, and for the near-total lack of support he receives from his superiors, who seem eager to exploit him as a propaganda tool (though this part of the story strains credulity--I know that the lack of adequate support services for returning American soldiers is a serious issue, but is it really likely that a man who spent eight years in brutal captivity would not even receive counseling for post-traumatic stress?).  Lewis is an actor who knows how to elicit sympathy without being showily damaged or pitiable, and it's impossible not to want good things for Brody, and thus to hope that Carrie is wrong about him.  Which puts us into conflict with ourselves, because as viewers of Homeland we know that for Carrie to be proven wrong would be a bit of damp squib.  Still, when, at the season's midpoint, Homeland seems to confirm that Brody is innocent, it's hard not to feel a bit of relief.  Which is of course the perfect moment for the show to pull the rug out from under us yet again.  The brilliance of Danes's performance is that she is so demonstrative that we think we know everything about her, even as the true depths of her character, and her dedication, remain hidden.  Lewis does something similar with very different tools.  He's so reserved about such obviously hurtful things--his wife's affair, his children's estrangement from him, his government's exploitative attitude towards him--that we think we know what's going on beneath the surface.  The truth is that we have no idea.

Just as Carrie embodies a stereotype of damaged, hysterical femininity that belies her strengths, Brody performs a type of hyper-masculinity that conceals not just the extent to which he has been emotionally compromised by his captivity--during which, as we learn, he became attached to Nazir, who showed him kindness, a part of his household and tutor to his young son (he also converted to Islam, a potential pitfall that Homeland is clearly aware of and manages to sidestep by separating Brody's religious belief from his political ones, but which also stresses the ways in which he's rejected the all-American stereotype)--but also a shocking cruelty.  Homeland gives us some justification for Brody's choice to become a terrorist--when the boy he taught and grew to love was killed by an American drone attack, he swore revenge--but the truth is that blowing yourself up is so irrational an act that no rational reason can truly explain it.  This in itself is not a problem--the very fact that what Brody is doing is inexplicable justifies Homeland's failure to explain it.  But the smaller acts of cruelty that Brody performs as he prepares for his attack--the lies he tells his family and the manipulations he performs on them, and even worse, the way he steps back into the role of loving husband and father in the full knowledge that he is about to kill himself and destroy his family's lives--are hard to fathom.

Brody's greatest moment of hypocrisy comes at the end of the season when he meets Carrie for the last time and berates her for coming to his house, half-deranged, and confronting his daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor, who starts out as a typical annoying teen and becomes the season's breakout character) with the information that her father is a terrorist, in the hopes that Dana can contact Brody and dissuade him from going through with his plan.  "You broke into my house.  You terrified my daughter.  She's sixteen years old, by the way.  Sixteen."  What Brody knows and Carrie doesn't is that her plan worked.  Carrie not only saved the lives of Brody and his would-be victims, but she saved Dana--for the time being--from the shame and horror of living the rest of her life as a terrorist's daughter, the fate to which her now so-concerned father was willing to subject her to.  Carrie is so steeped in self-doubt at this point that she accepts Brody's censure, and Brody takes advantage of that to grind her even further into the ground--all in the service of his mission.

And yet for all that, it's impossible to hate Brody entirely.  We know that he loves his family, that for all that what he's doing is evil, he has non-evil reasons for doing it, and that he is genuinely conflicted about his choices.  I was talking up Homeland online a few weeks ago and someone replied that their hesitance about picking it up was rooted in the concern that "no possible outcome would really please me: either that the female lead is CRAZY or that the convert to Islam is a TERRORIST."  As I predicted at the time, what the show has actually revealed is that the truth is both and neither.  Carrie is crazy.  Brody is a terrorist.  But both are more complicated, and more sympathetic, than these one-word descriptions imply.  There's a hidden center to both characters--the line between who Carrie is and what her disease makes of her, the justifications that Brody gives himself for his terrible acts--that makes them more fascinating, and more human, than I could ever have expected.  At the end of the first season, Brody and Carrie are irretrievably opposed to one another--one's success will inevitably mean the other's failure, and probably their complete destruction.  It's a testament to how well Homeland has constructed and taught us to love both characters that it is impossible to know who to root for.

There is a danger, however, in focusing too much on Carrie and Brody--it can lead one to forget the fact that Homeland is a series about important, timely issues, and to ignore the question of how it handles them.  Homeland was created by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon (based on the Israeli series Chatufim), best-known for executive-producing 24, and the series often feels not only like penance for that reactionary, torture-happy show, but as a deliberate response to it.  Some of Homeland's plot points seem lifted from Gansa and Howard's earlier show, but with a twist that thumbs 24's nose in its simplistic assumptions.  A mid-season plotline involves a possible associate of Nazir's, a Saudi-born academic, whose white, American girlfriend turns out to be the actual terrorist.  This recalls Marie Warner from 24's second season, but where her story ended with her sister sadly telling their father that there is no possible explanation for Marie's decision to become a terrorist, and with the show concluding that she is simply evil, Homeland's analogue, Aileen, turns out to have painfully mundane reasons for her actions.  Over the course of a long road trip with Carrie's mentor and sole ally Saul (Mandy Patinkin, in a performance that is a revelation, not least because it's a rare instance of a character whose Jewishness is neither downplayed--Saul looks more like a rabbi than a CIA agent, and one almost expects to see the fringes of his prayer shawl peeking out from under his shirt--nor the sum of who he is), Aileen first retreats behind sullen superiority, then slowly reveals that it was really anger at her father's racism, and sympathy for her Saudi boyfriend's impoverished background, that led her on a path that has destroyed both their lives.

Later in the season, Carrie tries to secure the cooperation of a Saudi diplomat who has been helping Nazir by threatening his children.  This was a familiar ploy from 24--one of the most shocking moments in the first season involved Jack Bauer killing a terror suspect's child, then revealing, once the man had broken, that the death was a fake.  What Carrie does is at the same time more civilized and more cruel.  She threatens to have the diplomat's daughter, a promising student at an Ivy League university, deported and made unwelcome at all Western institutes of learning: "We would make sure that she had no choice but to go back to Saudi Arabia, and get fat and wear a burka for the rest of her miserable life."  Even when it's not deliberately recalling 24 (though I dropped out of that show after two seasons so it's possible there are other references I've missed) Homeland repeatedly challenges its ethos--that people are either good guys or terrorists, that torture is not just an effective means of getting information but the best, that terrorists are an all-knowning, all-seeing menace who have penetrated to the very heart of Western civilization, lying in wait for the moment when their triumph will be at hand.

This is gratifying as far as it goes, but it also has the effect of making Homeland seem a little schematic, and worse, of its having little to say besides that counterpoint to 24.  When one considers how much of American entertainment in the last five years has concerned itself with doing just that and how uniform those responses have been--all hitting beats quite similar to Homeland's, most notably pointing the ultimate finger of blame at shady American politicians and their strong-arm tactics in the Middle East--it's hard not to feel that Homeland's distinction is not in what it says but in the fact that people are actually listening.  It is an undeniable hit after years in which film and TV dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the War on Terror, in a less than entirely gung ho way have failed to find audiences.  Which may mean that its points are landing on some ears for the very first time, and that is no doubt a worthwhile thing.  But for those of us to whom its arguments are not new, Homeland--for all that it is an excellent story and a truly magnificent character piece--seems to have very little to say about terrorism, the US's involvement in the Middle East, and global politics.

Perhaps it's asking too much, at the end of such a thrilling and successful season that got so much right on the plot and character front, for a show to also have a meaningful and original statement.  What I'm thinking of, however, is Homeland's longevity.  With the example of Dexter before me it's impossible not to be aware that brilliant series often devolve into terrible ones, and that this is a particular danger for shows that allow themselves to become consumed by a story, or a character arc, without a strong awareness of what they are actually about.  Homeland's first season ends as a chapter, not a complete story.  Carrie has lost her job, her reputation, and her confidence in her abilities, and discovers a concrete piece of evidence linking Brody to Nazir's son just as she's drifting into unconsciousness, about to undergo electroconvulsive therapy.  Brody has failed in his mission but has convinced Nazir that his burgeoning political career is an opportunity to sow even greater mayhem.  This is clearly just the middle of the story, and assuming that the writers can maintain their high standard of quality, the second season will probably be just as satisfying as the first.  But after that?  Will I be sitting here in five years' time, lamenting how far Homeland has fallen at the end of its sixth season?  Maybe that doesn't matter--most TV series die too soon or too late, after all--but I'd like Homeland to have a long, successful life, and in order to do that, it has to figure out what it wants to say.