Paper Man

Paper Man - Dirs. Kieran & Michelle Mulroney (2010)

Indie films sure love odd, emotionally damaged characters. First-time filmmakers Kieran & Michelle Mulroney throw their lot into the mix with Paper Man, which started as a script they workshopped at the Sundance Institute.

Jeff Daniels plays Richard Dunn, an author struggling to write his second novel, a book about the extinction of the heath hens. His wife (Lisa Kudrow), a successful vascular surgeon, rents him a cottage in a seaside town in Long Island to give him a chance to clear his writer's block and a break from their rocky marriage. However, Dunn spends most of his time wallowing in self-pity and talking to his childhood imaginary friend, Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds), a garishly-clad superhero. He also builds a couch out of copies of his first novel and rides around on a children's bike because it's all so wacky. Dunn bumps into the resident brooding teenager in Abby (Emma Stone), who has a mopey best friend (Kieran Culkan) and a Neanderthal for a boyfriend (Hunter Parrish). He hires Abby to be his babysitter for the night, despite the fact that he has no kids. When Abby learns the truth, she shrugs it off as well as any form of common sense. And thus begins a strange and platonic friendship between two fellow outsiders.

Paper Man is like a patchwork cobbling of Lost in Translation with a 21st century hipster version of Harvey. It's filled with indie movie clichés like the quirky, paper-cut title sequence and the Elliot Smith-esque, sullen guitar score. Daniels is solid in the lead, but he's already portrayed the stunted, intellectual writer in The Squid and the Whale and The Answer Man. We're supposed to feel for his crumbling marriage, but it's a difficult proposition to sympathize with a couple of whiny, well-off Manhattanites. Emma Stone basically plays the Kat Dennings/Olivia Thilrby role. To her credit, she brings a warmth and soulfulness to an ironically paper thin and stereotypical character.

Ryan Reynolds certainly looks the part of a superhero with his bleached blonde hair and goofy looking tights. He does his best, but the Captain Excellent scenes are just a car wreck. They are just astoundingly unfunny and simply shoehorned into the narrative. He could have easily been cut from the picture, if not for the fact that the Mulroneys deemed it necessary to add another eccentric layer to their film.

Paper Man deserves to be tossed into the recycling bin. It recycled ideas from better movies without capturing any sense of raw emotion.

Rating: * ½

Away We Go

Away We Go - Dir. Sam Mendes (2009)

Sam Mendes made his feature film debut with the Academy Award-winning American Beauty, a film that is practically the dictionary definition of the suburban malaise subgenre. Mendes would return to that subject matter with the relentlessly dour Revolutionary Road. Mendes decided to follow that up with lighter fare while still touching on similar topics with Away We Go. The screenplay was written by the husband-and-wife duo of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida who likely tapped into their own lives for this dramedy about the anxiety of raising a family.

John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph star as Burt and Verona Farlander (get it?), an insurance salesman and a medical illustrator who await the birth of their first child. The couple is in their mid-30’s and live a low-budget Bohemian lifestyle in their ramshackle home. Verona’s parents passed away while she was in college and is apprehensive about becoming a mother. She worries that they are “fuck-ups” as she stares at a piece of cardboard where a window should be. They look towards Burt’s parents (played by Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara) for help with impending parenthood until Ma and Pa Farlander announce they’re moving to Belgium. With an anchor no longer tying them down, Burt and Verona head off for a road trip to find the perfect place for their unborn child’s upbringing.

Their quest first brings them to Phoenix where they meet Verona’s former boss, the loud and abrasive, Lily (Allison Janney), and her subdued and henpecked husband, Lowell (Jim Gaffigan). Their next stop is Madison, Wisconsin, where they stop by to see Burt’s old college friend, Ellen (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who is now an ultra-pretentious, New Age hippie professor known as LN. Along with her pony-tailed husband, LN still breast feeds her children and her whole family sleeps in one, big bed. She believes in having sex in front of them, but not in strollers. ”Why would I want to push my child away?” The trip takes a positive turn when they hit Toronto to visit Tom (Chris Messina) and Munch (Melanie Lynskey) who seem to be the most well-adjusted and content of their friends. They’re happily married and raising a large family of adopted children, but there’s pain hidden beneath their otherwise blissful exteriors.

Away We Go is like the Voltron of bad indie films. It’s as if they took five smaller independent films and combined them into one. Away We Go is full of self-consciously quirky situations set to a soundtrack of college radio folk rock. Almost everyone the Farlanders meet in the first half of the film are caricatures. Burt’s parents are self-absorbed and bourgeois, the others are wacky for wacky’s sake. When LN is introduced, the story veers way off course and into a whole other picture. Her character is so ridiculous it breaks any boundaries of believability. She also throws the film off-balance when the story shifts towards a more grounded and melancholy approach. The acting is strong across the board with Allison Janney being particularly funny as the obliviously obnoxious Lily. Krasinski displays the same goofy charm he does on The Office here and gives some of the film’s best moments during a pair of mock arguments in an attempt to get the fetus’s heart rate up. Maya Rudolph is the revelation of Away We Go. Most people will know Rudolph for her comedic talents on Saturday Night Live. Here, she displays a subdued sense of humor and a knack for the more dramatic scenes. But, the cast just isn’t enough to support the weight of a weak, derivative script that lacks any genuine emotion.

When Mendes departs from the suburbs, he can make some great films (Road to Perdition, Jarhead). He’s currently working on an adaptation of the Preacher comic book series with screenwriter John August. The project has been in development for years and I hope they can pull it off.

Rating: * 1/2

State of Play

State of Play - Dir. Kevin Macdonald (2009)

Just like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, State of Play was based on a BBC mini-series. Having not seen the origin British production, I can’t speculate as to how the American remake matches up to it. I will say that State of Play is a perfectly acceptable thriller that tries to evoke the themes of 70’s classics such as All the President’s Men with a hint of The Parallax View.

State of Play begins with a young African-American male with a history of drug problems and felonies being murdered in an alley late at night. The police probably would have let this one fade away if not for a bicyclist witnessing the shooting and also being killed. Cal McCaffrey (Russell Crowe) is the veteran reporter assigned to the case by the Washington Globe and his tough-as-nails editor Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren). That very morning, Sonia Baker (Maria Thayer), the beautiful aide to Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) is killed in a supposed accident on a subway platform. Collins is a rising star in political circles as he heads an investigative committee looking into the inner workings of PointCorp, a private security firm and obvious stand-in for Blackwater. Young and handsome, he’s the type of TV-friendly politico that John F. Kennedy Jr. may have been if not for his premature death. Alas, Collins is more John Edwards than John John as it comes out he was having an affair with Baker. Robin Wright Penn plays Collins’ dutiful wife, Anne, who reluctantly chooses to stand by her man for the big press conferences.

McCaffrey was once Collins’ roommate in college and it’s hinted at that he also had an affair with Anne years ago. Lynne wants to use McCaffrey’s relationship with the tarnished congressman to assist in the story being written up by the Globe’s online blogger, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams). McCaffrey and Frye begin working together in an adversarial capacity. The elder journalist feels she is a glorified gossip monger and can’t stand that she has a high-tech laptop and doesn’t seem to own a pen. Eventually she takes on a mentor role and teaches her to get out from behind a desk and use old-fashioned legwork to get the scoop.

Though the film takes a uniquely American point-of-view to the proceedings, it is the Scottish Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) who helms the picture. Macdonald is backed up by a script written up by a team of crackerjack screenwriters all of whom are well-equipped to handle these ripped-from-the-headlines, twisty turny story. Among those who contributed to the script include Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom, Lions For Lambs), Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), Billy Ray (Breach, Shattered Glass), plus an uncredited rewrite from Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon). They manage to find some balance between the wealth of characters and subplots. There are a few bumps in the road that may take you by surprise and a few you can see coming. Perhaps, the weakest point in the film is the third act resolution which tries to fit in a few too many twists while wrapping all the dangling plotlines far too neatly.

The political scandals may make up the meat of the story, but the underlying themes of print versus online media are a far more fascinating aspect to State of Play. The clash between the old-school and the new-school. Further on point is the added effect of the economic slump to the financial viability of the newspaper. My local paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, recently laid off just under 200 workers following similar layoffs last year. Filmmakers added an extra layer of resonance as we watch the latest headlines move through the massive printing press on its way to the public. If only there were a lame-legged newsie hawking copies on the local street corner, shouting ”Extry, extry.”

During early development, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton were attached to the roles of McCaffrey and Collins, respectively. We may not have gotten a Fight Club reunion, but Russell Crowe is more believable as the weary, slovenly McCaffrey than Pitt. It’s not a surprising role for Crowe following similar ones in American Gangster and Body of Lies. Affleck has the good looks for Collins, yet lacks the range of Norton to bring the character truly to life. Some of his line readings are flat. The best performances out of the A-list ensemble belong to supporting players Jason Bateman as a sleazy, drug-addled PR man and Jeff Daniels as an oily elder statesman.

State of Play isn’t the ingenious thriller the cast and crew had hoped it would be. It is, however, a popcorn film for those seeking something deeper than expensive CGI and loud explosions.

Rating: ***