Review: Before Midnight, The Lone Ranger, This Is the End, The Internship, Camille Rewinds, The Place Beyond the Pines and Thérèse Desqueyroux

As is so often the case at this time of year (usu­ally related to 48 Hours com­mit­ments) I am a little behind on my review­ing. This week­end I caught up on a lot the actu­al watch­ing (although apo­lo­gies to John Davies who sent me a screen­er of Remembrance that I haven’t yet sat down and watched) so now I will try and rustle up anoth­er one of my trade­mark col­lec­tions of “Capsule Reviews of Questionable Utility”.

Of all the movies I’ve seen so far this year, Linklater, Delpy and Hawke’s Before Midnight (after three movies I think it’s fair to cred­it author­ship sev­er­ally) is the one that has stuck in my brain the longest. In it, we catch up with the lov­ers from Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) as they reach the end of an idyll­ic vaca­tion in Greece. Hawke’s Jesse is won­der­ing wheth­er he should try and spend more time with his teen­age son who lives with his moth­er in the States. Delpy’s Celine is about to start a dream job back in Paris where they cur­rently reside with their two ador­able daughters.

They are at a cross­roads but, as the film makes clear, when are we ever not? Delpy is mag­ni­fi­cent, cre­at­ing a won­drous, beau­ti­ful, insec­ure, infuri­at­ing and right­eous woman who is sim­ul­tan­eously proud and frus­trated at the role she has found her­self play­ing. Watching her I was think­ing about a couple of rela­tion­ships of mine that I ended. Maybe I was a little bit hasty. Maybe I was­n’t really listening.

I’ve no idea how much The Lone Ranger actu­ally cost to make but a review­er can only judge value-for-ticket-money not value-for-budget-money and I think audi­ences on, say, Cheap Tuesday can feel con­fid­ent at get­ting their money’s worth. Johnny Depp plays an aged Tonto in a car­ni­val sideshow telling a wide-eyed young kid (Mason Elston Cook) the “truth” about the adven­tures he shared with a masked man when the West was still a law­less frontier.

The Ranger him­self (Armie Hammer) is a reluct­ant hero, a law­yer who prefers non-violent forms of justice but who soon gets the hang of things. The film relies heav­ily on Depp, as it has to when Hammer is so bland and the sup­port­ing cast – includ­ing the always over­rated Tom Wilkinson – are so clearly out­gunned. For a major Hollywood block­buster, this film tries to do the right thing by Native American polit­ics. The bad guys are pretty clearly the money-mad rail­road tycoons and the psy­cho­path­ic min­er­al exploiters, while the indi­gen­ous people are por­trayed as the inev­it­able vic­tims of a colo­ni­al and cor­por­ate struc­ture bent on des­troy­ing their way of life. Hard to do that in a fam­ily com­edy but I felt they got close enough.

In The Internship, two middle-aged men (Owen Wilson and co-writer Vince Vaughan) are made redund­ant due to chan­ging tech­no­logy and decide that if they can­’t beat ’em they should join ’em – they sign on for the sum­mer intern­ship pro­gram at Google. Some fairly tame fish-out-of-water hijinks then ensue as the two ami­able sales guys learn to nav­ig­ate the mys­ter­i­ous ways of today’s young people as well as the inform­a­tion super-highway. The fun­ni­est scene is when Google tries to pre­tend that they have a call centre where cus­tom­ers who are hav­ing trouble get­ting into their email can ring and talk to someone. That was hil­ari­ous.

What else have we got? Is this use­ful? Camille Rewinds is a body-swap com­edy in which a heavy-drinking act­ress (played by co-writer and dir­ect­or Noémie Lvovsky) blacks out at a party and magic­ally returns to her teen­age years to try and fix the mis­takes of the past. There’s plenty of 80s nos­tal­gia but the drama leans towards the mawk­ish side of sentimental.

In This Is the End a bunch of pampered movie stars dis­cov­er they have been left behind after the Apocalypse and have to deal with a smoul­der­ing Hollywood inhab­ited by demons, as well as their own repel­lent nar­ciss­ism and enti­tle­ment. Having fun play­ing ver­sions of them­selves (or in James Franco’s case play­ing a ver­sion of his slightly eccent­ric pub­lic per­sona) are Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride (thor­oughly and inten­tion­ally unpleas­ant) and Craig Robinson. Best of the many celebrity cameos comes from the great Emma Watson who shows, once again, that she was the most tal­en­ted of that Harry Potter trio.

Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines takes itself very ser­i­ously indeed but does­n’t bring enough big guns to jus­ti­fy the swag­ger. A manip­u­lat­ive screen­play that fails to hide its work­ings is the biggest prob­lem, almost undo­ing the fine work Cianfrance does with his act­ors and his cine­ma­to­graph­er (Sean Bobbitt). Ryan Gosling relies heav­ily on his soul­ful eyes and smirk to por­tray a young motor­cycle stunt rider who, return­ing to an upstate New York town one year on, dis­cov­ers he has a baby that he did­n’t know about.

Quitting the cir­cus, he finds new employ­ment as a bank rob­ber until the law, in the shape of nervous Bradley Cooper, inter­venes. The reper­cus­sions from their fate­ful meet­ing will be felt for anoth­er fif­teen years and it is the self-conscious tying up of the many strands – it’s like Dickens for all the coin­cid­ences – that this review­er found so frus­trat­ing. Final obser­va­tion: Mr Gosling should keep an eye out over his shoulder for young Emory Cohen who plays Cooper’s teen­age son, A.J. He looks like the real deal, get­ting under the skin of a char­ac­ter the way that Gosling used to do before he dis­covered cool.

There’s anoth­er set of pines loom­ing over Claude Miller’s Thérèse Desqueyroux, a melo­dra­mat­ic adapt­a­tion of a well-known (in France ) French nov­el. Audrey Tautou plays Thérèse, con­tent to be mar­ried to anoth­er loc­al landown­er (Gilles Lellouche) so their two fam­il­ies can be enriched even fur­ther. When her sister-in-law (and best friend) falls head-over-heels in love with a hand­some but unworthy loc­al, Thérèse helps break them up but falls into a deep depres­sion, per­haps real­ising that the her friend’s pas­sion is well bey­ond any­thing that she has ever experienced.

This is the kind of thing that I usu­ally hate – worthy, lit­er­ary, French, Tautou – but some­how, against my bet­ter judge­ment, I was engaged with it to the very end. I think because it nev­er strays from a healthy ambi­gu­ity, and because Tautou’s opaque and unknow­able coun­ten­ance actu­ally seemed like a choice rather than rub­bish act­ing. Worth hav­ing an argu­ment about afterwards.

[Portions of this review first appeared in FishHead Magazine.]