Get on Up

Get on Up - Dir. Tate Taylor (2014)

It's too bad Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story didn't make more of a cultural impact. The Judd Apatow-produced parody lampooned the staid conventions of the music biopic as seen in films like Walk the Line and Ray. Walk Hard should have blown up the biopic the way Austin Powers tore down the spy genre. While nobody makes a spy movie in the campy style of the old school Bonds, the standard formula for the music biopic still remains.

The story generally begins with the subject, in his old age, preparing for a major concert and reflecting on his entire life. This is followed by flashbacks of all their highs and lows. Get on Up starts off true to formula with an elderly James Brown (Chadwick Boseman) walking alone down a solemnly lit corridor. The muffled roar of an excited crowd is the only accompaniment to his footsteps. Brown is ready to look back on his life. Surprisingly, Get on Up doesn't go directly to Brown's childhood, but one of his lowest points. In 1993, a drug-addled Brown accidentally discharges a shotgun while berating the unsuspecting attendees of a seminar after someone used his private bathroom. He'd eventually lead police on a high speed chase before spending three years in prison.

From there, Get on Up unfolds in a non-chronological fashion almost as if it were a greatest hits album, except not everything was a chart topper. We see glimpses of Brown as an impoverished child (played by twins Jamarion and Jordan Scott) living in a ramshackle homestead with an abusive father (Lennie James) and a mother (Viola Davis) who abandoned him at a young age. In a disturbing sight, Brown is amongst a group of black boys who are blindfolded and forced to box in a battle royal at a white country club's charity event.

Brown rose from these humble beginnings to worldwide fame as the Godfather of Soul. He upstaged the Rolling Stones in 1964 at The T.A.M.I. Show, strutting offstage and boldly challenging Mick Jagger to top him. Of course, Brown would be a big influence on the Stones frontman to the point where Jagger is actually a producer for Get on Up. Brown performed in front of troops during Vietnam, despite his cargo plane nearly being shot down, and he calmed an angry crowd at Boston Garden the night after Martin Luther King's assassination.

The Hardest Working Man in Show Business would hit his dark patches as well, but you'd hardly know it judging by the film. Brown's problems with drug addiction and domestic abuse are dealt with in the most perfunctory manner. Only one scene a piece is devoted to these issues. Still, Get on Up could hardly be considered hagiographic as Brown's ego and financial blunders are attributed to driving a wedge between he and his fellow musicians.

Get on Up was written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, the brothers who knocked it out of the park with Edge of Tomorrow. The Butterworths made a smart move by shuffling the events to make the movie stand out. Otherwise, taken chronologically, this is a typical biopic that attempts to encapsulate an entire life into two hours. There's also a slightly surreal touch, a surprising element given that the director is Tate Taylor, who presented racism in a mainstream multiplex manner with The Help. In a recreation of the Frankie Avalon picture Ski Party, Brown performs "I Got You (I Feel Good)" in an ugly Christmas sweater and surrounded by smiling, plastic faces. The action slows down as Brown laments that he's trapped in a "honky hoedown."  On occasion, Brown breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera with the payoff being a shamed man who cannot look the audience in the eye after striking his wife.

Chadwick Boseman had a star making turn as Jackie Robinson in 42 and he was reluctant to tackle yet another true-life story. Luckily, Boseman had a change of heart. This is a complete 180 from the stoic Robinson. As Brown, Boseman goes beyond mere mimicry. He captures the electrifying presence of Mr. Dynamite and seamlessly performs all of his fleet footed dance moves. The understated Nelsan Ellis serves as a counterpoint to the outlandish Brown as his best friend Bobby Byrd. The long-suffering pal stood by Brown's side for decades until their falling out. Although, she's only in a handful of scenes, Viola Davis blows everyone away as the estranged mother Susie Brown. Her uneasy reunion with her son is the most powerful scene in the film.

Get on Up doesn't do much to defy the tired conventions of the musical biopic. However, the film is able to rocket up the charts courtesy of a stellar performance by Chadwick Boseman. This is an enjoyable picture, just not one you should go out of your way to see.

Rating: ** (*****)

A Serious Man

A Serious Man - Dir. Joel & Ethan Cohen (2009)


Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in suburban Minneapolis as the sons of academics. So it is that the Coen Brothers took inspiration from their own pasts to create A Serious Man. Much like O Brother, Where Art Thou? was inspired by Homer’s The Odyssey, Serious Man was likely inspired by The Book of Job.

The film opens with a strange prologue set in the 1800’s where a Jewish-Polish couple encounter a rabbi who the wife believes is a dybbuk, a spirit highjacking the body of a deceased individual. She believes they have been cursed and it appears that curse manifests utterly in the life of one man in 1967. Stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a Physics professor who has always tried to do the right thing and act as a good man, a “mensch,” if you will. So why is it that everything suddenly seems to go wrong in his life? His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick) asks for a divorce in order to marry her lover, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Ableman is an unctuous man who acts like Larry’s best friend while he steals his wife and boots him out of his own home.

Larry’s kids are selfish and self-involved. His daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), spends all her day washing her hair and stealing money from her parents in order to pay for a nose job. His son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), pays no attention in class instead listening to Jefferson Airplane on his transistor radio (the iPod of its time). While his dad deals with a painful divorce, Danny bugs him about being unable to get good reception for F-Troop. He attends his bar mitzvah completely stoned. Larry’s quest for tenure is endangered by anonymous letters slandering his integrity even as a South Korean exchange student simultaneously bribes and blackmails him over a bad grade. Larry’s shiftless brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), crashes on his couch and hogs the bathroom in order to drain a cyst on the back of his neck. Larry’s neighbor, Mr. Brandt (Peter Breitmayer) is a hunting aficionado who is encroaching on Larry’s property in order to build a tool shed. Brandt appears to have no love for Jews though he does have Larry’s back when confronted by the student’s father. Most likely he cares for Asians even less. Larry is also receiving incessant calls from the Columbia Record Club demanding payment for a subscription he has no clue about. He’s got doctor’s appointments, legal fees piling up, and a nude sunbathing neighbor tempting him off the righteous path.

Poor Larry is mostly a reactive individual. He hardly ever initiates action and avoids conflict whenever he can. He’s such a passive viewer of his own life; he may as well be sitting in the audience with us. It’s no coincidence that Larry’s wife left him for a fellow named Ableman.

All these problems lead to Larry questioning God’s purpose for him. His attempts to consult a series of Rabbis yield nothing. The first (Simon Helberg) asks him to admire the beauty of a parking lot, but poor Larry can only see desolation. The second (George Wyner) tells him a long story about a dentist who finds a message from God in the teeth of a patient. The story (like the film) has no ending. The third and most prolific, Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell), can’t even be bothered with him.

As the gods of Larry’s world, the Coens seem to delight in tormenting their hapless creation. They pile it on and on to the point where we can’t help but feel pity for Larry Gopnik just as we laugh at his misery. The Coens’ flair for irony and dark humor is fully on display. The film’s dialogue is written with deft precision. There’s incredible wit and multiple layers behind every word. The Coens have also utilized a cast of unknowns rather than their usual troop of actors making it easier for us to buy these people AS people and not just actors in roles.

A Serious Man is the Coen Brothers’ most idiosyncratic film since Barton Fink. It is likely to be their most polarizing as well. Serious Man combines the bleak isolation of No Country For Old Men with the oddball humor of Fargo. If you thought the ambiguous ending of the former was aggravating, the non-ending to Serious Man might have you demanding a refund from your local theater. However, in real life there are no easy, pat answers. Everything isn’t wrapped up in a neat, little bow and neither is A Serious Man.

Rating: ***