Dances With Women
The Upside of Anger
Directed by Mike Binder
About 10 years ago, Kevin Costner, who rose to stardom playing realistically flawed adults, appeared in a string of pictures where he played mythic figures-Waterworld, Wyatt Earp, The Postman and the like. The movies weren't nearly as bad as the media suggested. Wyatt Earp, in particular, deserves a second look, and it's fair to suggest that HBO's savage-melancholy Deadwood might not exist without its example. But the point had been made: Costner became less exciting, less alive, when playing heroic abstractions.
His lively supporting turn as a thieving, murderous Elvis impersonator in 3000 Miles to Graceland-a real man behaving like a fantasy bad boy-implicitly critiqued such roles. But his performance as pothead ex-ballplayer turned radio host Denny Davies in writer-director Mike Binder's domestic drama The Upside of Anger brings his career full circle-all the way back to sarcastic catcher Crash Davis in 1988's Bull Durham.
Watching Costner move warily around depressed suburbanite Terry Wolfmeyer (a sexy-skeptical Joan Allen)-a mother of four, abandoned by her husband-one finds oneself admiring not just Costner's easygoing physicality (two-day beard, question-mark posture, visible potbelly) and his droll stoner delivery, but the equation that's governed his best performances: real is good.
Denny's home is a warehouse for beer and baseball mementoes. He's not much more grownup than his producer, Shep Goodman (Binder, playing the usual sweet-irritating Binder character-a man-boy skirt chaser). Yet Denny finds himself drawn toward domesticity like an iron filing tugged by a magnet. He eases into the Wolfmeyers' life as if he was always meant to be there; even Terry's steely, argumentative daughters (Keri Russell, Erika Christensen, Alicia Witt, Evan Rachel Wood) think twice before mocking his devotion, because his love is sincere and his presence really does improve their lives.
With its mix of romance, farce and tragedy, Upside wants to be Terms of Endearment, but lacks the latter movie's mix of middle-American naivete and showbiz shamelessness. Binder's dialogue blunders into sitcom cuteness and Mars-Venus baloney ("You're just all very female," a cowed Denny tells the Wolfmeyer women), the twist ending feels like a deleted scene from Desperate Housewives, and the daughters' subplots feel rushed and incomplete. But Upside is still a pleasure because Costner's chemistry with Allen feels real and rings true. It's thrilling to see a couple of sexy but weathered, over-40 actors flirting, fighting and screwing. Enjoy it while you can.
The Pacifier
Directed by Adam shankman
"We're gonna do it my way-no highway option." So says Shane Wolfe (Vin Diesel), cranky hero of the mediocre Disney kidflick The Pacifier, about a Navy SEAL assigned to guard the children of a man who died on his watch during a secret mission. It seems churlish to gripe about plausibility in a film where a commando assumes direction of a community theater production of The Sound of Music, yet I still don't buy the bit where this seen-it-all soldier recoils in horror at the sight of a poopy diaper. Ditto the scenes where Shane is supposed to be smitten with the school principal (Gilmore Girls star Lauren Graham, fetching as always); no contemporary leading man is less credible in love scenes.
The Pacifier generates suspense only in regard to the star's career track, which took a hard right turn a few years ago, thanks to Diesel's breakthrough as Riddick in Pitch Black, which erased the public's memory of Diesel's strong supporting work in Boiler Room and Saving Private Ryan and encouraged him to avoid further challenging roles. Taking a page from the Stallone-Schwarzenegger playbook, he now kids his association with roles he rarely seemed to enjoy in the first place.
It should also be said that as outwardly dumb-harmless as The Pacifier is, the premise has a sinister undertow. To protect a suburban family from foreign enemies, Shane transforms their home into a heavily surveilled bunker, institutes boot camp discipline, fits the kids with tracking devices and reassures them that paranoia is natural-and he's proved right. Mrs. Doubtfire by way of The Great Santini, The Pacifier depicts the militarization of domestic life as inevitable and good.
Hostage
Directed by Florent Emilio Siri
In Hostage, an endearingly haggard Bruce Willis plays Jeff Talley, a down-on-his-luck Los Angeles hostage negotiator serving as chief of police in a podunk Southern California town. His chance at redemption comes when three punks invade a mansion inhabited by a widowed mob accountant, Mr. Smith (Kevin Pollak), his teenage daughter (Michelle Horn) and his prepubescent son (Jimmy Bennett). Unbeknownst to said punks, the accountant was supposed to deliver encrypted information to his all-powerful criminal masters. These evil men kidnap Tally's own wife and daughter and threaten to murder them if Tally doesn't retrieve the disc.
Loosely adapted by Doug Richardson from Robert Crais' bestseller, Hostage aims to offer viewers psychologically intense characterizations (and plenty of emoting) along with the usual explosive action. The invading punks are poor, the cops middle-class and the accountant rich, which permits Hostage to acknowledge class resentment more bluntly than most thrillers. The young tormentors evoke not Die Hard but Rebel Without a Cause, with marginalized teens playing house in someone else's home. The script's constellation of shattered families promises social criticism as well as standard-issue action setpieces. Yet this promise and others remain unfulfilled.
Hostage gets lost inside its jumbled narrative. It only becomes convincing-almost powerful-when it abandons conventional action film elements ("surprise" twists, Mexican standoffs, last-minute rescues) and indulges in superheated expressionist filmmaking. Director Florent Emilio Siri (The Nest) and his inventive cinematographer, Giovanni Fiore Coltellacci, employ desaturated colors, deep black shadows, geography-collapsing transitions, sinuous SteadiCam moves and flamboyant God's-eye-view shots; if Walter Hill had directed a Nine Inch Nails video, this is what it would have looked like.
Before I was a journalist, I was a film student. After 15 bylined years, I've finally circled back around to my roots by writing, editing and directing a feature, Home, a microbudget romantic comedy with 24 characters. The movie makes its theatrical debut March 10 at Cinequest in San Jose (and will also play there on March 12), and will appear in other venues as well, including the Boston Independent Film Festival and the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival in April.