MY MOVIE SHELF: Looper

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 36 Days to go: 26

Movie #404:  Looper

It’s back-to-back Emily Blunt pictures! And it’s another example, incidentally, of the complex and fascinating characters Emily Blunt plays on the regular. In Looper, Blunt plays Sara, a tough and enigmatic woman who lives alone on a farm with her son Sid (Pierce Gagnon). It’s a small yet pivotal role, and Blunt gives her shading and depth that would be completely lost and overlooked in a lesser actor. Sara is a woman who feels she’s made mistakes in her past and she’s trying to make up for them. She’s no-nonsense and formidable, but she has a softer side and a sexier side as well. She’s also trying to protect her son and protect herself from potential futures she’s better not even contemplating. But in Looper, the future is everything.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, living in the not-too-distant future. He’s a junkie and a killer — known as a looper — working for local boss Abe (Jeff Daniels). Abe is from the future (a future where time travel has been invented but is highly illegal) and he’s here to recruit young vagrant boys to the business. What a looper does is simple — basically, he’s just a hitman, only he’s one that doesn’t have to do any kind of legwork. He shows up at the appointed place and time and kills whoever the crime lords send back to Joe from the future. It’s easy enough work, and Joe gets paid handsomely for it. Not only that, but at the end of his contract he gets a big payday and is released from duty for 30 years, when he’ll be sent back in time to be killed by his younger self. It’s called closing the loop.

Looper is one of the tightest and most original concepts to come along in a while. Everyone quoted that “Time is a flat circle” line from True Detective, but that was a lot of malarkey in a lot of places. Here, time really is a circle, and it just keeps going around and around. When Old Joe (Bruce Willis) comes back, instead of Young Joe killing him (as he did when Old Joe was Young Joe), Old Joe evades the shot and knocks Young Joe out. Suddenly, Old Joe has a mission. There’s a new crime lord in the future — an unseen menace called The Rainmaker — who’s closing all the loops, and his rush to send back Old Joe resulted in Old Joe’s wife (Qing Xu) being killed. So Old Joe isn’t going to die quietly. He’s going to go back and find The Rainmaker and kill him, so his wife never has to die and he won’t be sent back. It’s a twisted, intricate puzzle of the film, but everything is explained clearly and succinctly handled to avoid confusion. Even when Young Joe tries to open the Pandora’s box of questions time-displacement naturally brings forward, Old Joe shuts him down. “It doesn’t matter,” he shouts, and goes on to make a very meta statement about how if he starts asking questions they’ll never get anywhere. They’ll just sit there forever making diagrams with straws trying to figure the whole thing out, and he has a point. One of the keystones of time travel stories is to keep confidently moving through the plot; never ask too many questions.

Not that the mythology of Looper doesn’t hold it to scrutiny, because it absolutely does. Events that occur earlier in the film feed into what will come up later, such as a fantastic sequence when Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) — who sets the stage for Joe’s own troubles — fails to close his loop and his older self (Frank Brennan), while on the loose, starts losing body parts to history. It’s fantastic, and Joe uses it later when he needs to get a message to Old Joe. He simply carves the message into his arm.

I’m not going to lie, the make-up used on Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make his facial features more like Bruce Willis is somewhat disconcerting. It doesn’t really look like anyone to me, though I can kind of see where they were going with it. However, Gordon-Levitt completely integrates Bruce’s tone and manner of speech — his cadence, his style, even his squinty-eyed delivery — in a way that is lies somewhere between eerie and impressive and definitely helps drive home the fact that these two men are tied together by fate and time, that their lives are one.

And in the end, it turns out there’s more than one way to close a loop.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Pleasantville

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 170  Days to go: 166

Movie #213:  Pleasantville

Disguised behind a terribly goofy fantasy premise — twins David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are fighting over the television remote when it flies into a wall and busts, at which point a magical TV repairman (Don Knotts) shows up at their door, discovers David’s deep abiding love and knowledge of a stock ’50s TV show called Pleasantville, and gives them a magical remote that transports the two into the lives of the main family’s brother and sister duo, Bud and Mary Sue Parker, where they must try to fit into this plain and literal black and white world — Pleasantville is a subversively brilliant study on the nature of progress, changes and growth in society.

David is unhappy with his life in the modern world. His parents are divorced, he’s not close with either of them, and he has very few friends or prospects at high school. Even his twin sister disdains his massive dorkiness. That bone-deep unhappiness is why he gravitates to the Pleasantville show, where everything is, naturally, pleasant. There are only happy families, happy kids, and happy neighbors. Mom Betty (Joan Allen) is home all day cooking and smiling beatifically at her adoring children, while dad George (William H. Macy) comes home every day at six with a hearty “Honey, I’m home!” Bud has a job at Bill Johnson’s (Jeff Daniels) soda shop, and Mary Sue is a star student who goes steady with Skip (The Fast and the Furious’s Paul Walker). It’s an idealized life in an idealized world, and David wishes it was his.

It’s like a miracle, then, when he finds Jennifer and himself transported into the television show. He’s in awe of how great it is, and he wants to savor it. Jennifer is unimpressed, however, and David must try to preserve it in spite of her flippant attitude. What he learns, however, is that Jennifer is right to educate the townspeople. She’s right to expand their horizons. And he learns that he can’t stop her because it comes from who she is — just as it comes from who he is. They can’t help broadening the world of Pleasantville, because they already know a world beyond it.

The winds of time and change are always blowing, always moving. Just as in real life, change starts with kids curious about the world — what’s out there for them, what all can they experience — and manifests in experiments with sex and clothes and music and even reading (the books start out blank, but fill themselves in when David and Jennifer talk about what they remember of the plots). Discussion and conversation about other lives, other worlds, other possibilities becomes their drug, and it fuels them. They do what kids have always done, but because it’s in this comically limited world of a 1950s TV series the changes are more stark, more dramatic, and more noticeable. Women, often marginalized in such a world where they have no creative or personal outlet of their own, are the next to seek greater understanding, and this is manifested in the world of Betty herself. Artistic types like Bill, who looks forward all year to the one time he gets to paint his shop windows at Christmas, also reach out for more. And as the changes continue, resistance builds.

Unsurprisingly, the members of the establishment are the ones most threatened by these changes. The mayor, Big Bob (J.T. Walsh), pontificates about how things used to be pleasant and now they aren’t, when what he really means is that things are no longer pleasant and easy for him. In a particular stroke of brilliance, people who have “changed” from the traditional black and white palette into full technicolor are referred to as “colored people,” with some stores posting signs saying “No Coloreds,” and suddenly the film takes on the very real tinge of the Civil Rights movements of the actual time period this fictional world was masquerading as. And this is when David-Bud realizes how crucial it is to encourage these changes, to seek them out and to embrace them.

Margaret (Marley Shelton) is a girl from school who, in the original series, is “supposed” to go out with another boy, but once David and Jennifer show up, she finds herself drawn to Bud and his knowledge of the greater world. She’s fascinated by what it’s like and it’s her influence (along with Betty’s) that helps David-Bud see that while his world might be “louder and messier and more dangerous,” it’s also infinitely better and richer and more alive. And despite the denials of those railing against the colorization of Pleasantville (which is seriously some of the most beautiful special effects shots ever such a large part of a film), David-Bud knows it’s in all of them, and it’s inevitable that it will emerge. Whether it’s longing or rage or passion or curiosity or lust or self-reliance, “you can’t stop what’s inside you.”

Even the ending, in which Betty is seen with both George and then Bill, is left intentionally uncertain and questioning because life is uncertain, and life is full of questions. It’s a brilliant and impassioned defense of accepting and embracing change and growth. It’s a resounding declaration that nostalgia about “the good old days” are memories of a life that never existed, of a fantasy built in the minds of those afraid of anything new or different. It’s a celebration of our world and our life, because for all its faults and messiness is the true beauty and purpose of life itself. It’s what’s inside us, and what drives us, and what makes us great.

Beyond that, life, Pleasantville tells us, is “not supposed to be anything.” It just is.