To the Stars

There are plenty of better-than-average sections of Ad Astra. The trouble is that the movie itself is just mostly average. It manages to hit all of the basic generic tropes of the loner-in-space film, and if there are a couple of cool sequences that seem novel in the movie, these are overwhelmed by the generic basicness of the whole thing. Brad Pitt is excellent, of course. His performance is wonderful, and honestly I quite liked this film. It just doesn't really ever hit its stride or soar; it plods along instead, stubbornly refusing to surprise us and confident that we are happily along for the ride.

The Lost City of Zed

The Lost City of Z was an astoundingly ambitious film. I am not sure it actually works, but I was really taken aback by it, and I respected it very much. I don't think I've seen a movie like this since, like, the 1950s.

Nobody really makes big epic melodramas like this movie, and I think that is what I found so shocking about it. It felt like an old school Mark Robson picture or something: a giant epic like The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. James Gray takes his movies very seriously, and there is no hint of irony in this kind of moviemaking. I didn't think this worked at all with his last movie The Immigrant – I thought the acting was just terrible – but The Lost City of Z is much more successful, and Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland do great work. Charlie Hunnam is less successful; the main part is a role made for someone like Brad Pitt, really, and Hunnam doesn't have the dynamism of a Colin Farrell or, say, Russell Crowe. He does his best, but the part just never quite jells.

To be honest, though, The Lost City of Z had other problems as well. The end is unsatisfying and not well designed: if you're going to make an old-fashioned melodrama, you need to have an old-fashioned happy ending. And the movie drags in its center, as the players search for their lost city and are bogged down by an absurd character played by Angus Macfadyen with Alfred Molina levels of absurdity.

In short, I can't really recommend this movie. I was excited to see it, and I found the whole thing rather stunning, if I'm honest. But in the vein of something like Richard Linklater's Boyhood, it turns out that the ambition and the idea behind the thing are more interesting than the picture; all that work and the movie just isn't that great.

The Immigrant

The only reason it occurred to me to watch James Gray's The Immigrant was because people started talking about Marion Cotillard's performance and Darius Khondji's cinematography when it came time for Oscar season. I found out The Immigrant was on Netflix Instant, and (as I didn't have this service at home) wound up watching the movie when I was at my parents' house over the Christmas holiday.

I started watching the movie and was immediately bored. It took itself way too seriously, I thought, and I didn't believe the main character's struggle one bit. I also didn't know anything about her – the director and screenwriter plunged her into crisis immediately before I had a moment to understand who this woman was.

After 25 minutes I had to stop. This movie was a sentimental, cheaply made mess.

So then I thought: what am I missing? The New York Film Critics' Circle and the Boston Film Critics singled out The Immigrant as the best performance by an actress this year.

I decided to read some reviews. Maybe some of the critics would validate my opinion. Nope: raves by both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. I also realized the director was James Gray, who made The Yards many many years ago, which had a fight scene with Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix that my friend Tom and I had called (back in October 2000) one of the best fight sequences ever put on film.

So I decided to finish the film – I usually finish films, in fact – with a new outlook. The NYT promised that Jeremy Renner's appearance in the movie would lighten things a bit. He did, indeed.

But not enough to make this movie worth watching. Maybe I just didn't get it, but what occurred to me as I finished The Immigrant was just how fragile the ability to believe in a picture actually is. I simply didn't buy Cotillard, Phoenix, and company in all of their finery and period garb. They looked like they were playing dress-up to me. (Incidentally I almost always feel this way about Leonardo DiCaprio.) And so I never dropped into the film emotionally or even intellectually, because I just found the whole picture so preposterous.

Not that I don't believe stories like the story in The Immigrant occurred in the U.S. – they probably occurred numerous times. But just that I didn't believe Gray's way of telling this story. The suspension of disbelief is just so delicate. Apparently the critics for the NYT and the LAT were able to drop into the movie; I wasn't.