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: Little Miss Sunshine

 

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: 38 Days to go: 28

Movie #402:  Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine is a portrait of a family. Not an Every-family, though. A very specific family. Uncle Frank (Steve Carell) has just attempted suicide and is being sent home to Albuquerque to live with his sister Sheryl (Toni Collette), who is a working mom doing her damndest to be supportive of her children and her husband and to keep everything running as smoothly as possible, be it dinner or activity scheduling or what have you. Sheryl’s husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who is neither renowned or successful but who is dead set on practicing what he preaches and therefore insists on everyone presenting themselves as winners at all times. They have two children, Dwayne (Paul Dano) — who hates everyone and has taken a vow of silence until he can join the Air Force to fly jets in what is no doubt several years, as he is only 15 — and Olive (Abigail Breslin), who is a sweet and unassuming seven-year-old who has won her way into the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California. Last but not least is Richard’s dad Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin) — inappropriate in every conceivable way while also being pretty amazingly loving and generous to Olive (and to his son as well, when necessary) — who, because he got kicked out of his retirement home for shooting heroin and God knows what else, also lives with them. In short, these are not universal characters defined by tropes, stereotypes and clichés. These are very particular people with a very particular story. And that story is failure.

Richard having the career aspirations that he does, he does not accept failure. He gives endless lip service to the differences between winners and losers and what it takes to differentiate yourself as one of the former. Never, ever, ever let yourself be the latter. And yet as the family travels from New Mexico to California for Olive’s competition (which she has sworn, at her father’s insistence, that she can win), they are inundated with indignities, humiliations, let downs, setbacks, and utter, inescapable failures, one after another.

As these failures mount, and everyone’s spirit but Olive’s is broken, it becomes crucial that they get her to her pageant on time. It’s imperative that something good come of their trip. However, when they arrive they are faced with the shocking and unsettling reality that Olive doesn’t fit in with the other contestants. Olive is seven, and she looks it. She has long, unstyled hair. She wears no make-up. And her only curves are those associated with childhood, like the roundness of her perfectly proportioned belly or the lack of any “womanly” hips. Comparing Olive to the garishly dolled-up appearance of her competitors, Olive’s family fears she’s about to suffer her own disappointing failure, and they seek to stop it. Sheryl, however, knows how much this has meant to Olive (and to Grandpa, who choreographed Olive’s dance), so she gives her a choice. Does Olive want to compete, or does she want to go home? Either is okay. Both paths still lead to her parents being proud of her. Olive, God bless her, chooses to compete, and she proceeds to perform the most inappropriately sexualized dance — to a highly sexualized song — this pageant or any other has ever seen. And it’s fantastic.

Olive’s performance is honestly one of the funniest moments in film just on its merits, but it’s also incredibly thoughtful and heartwarming. Here is a girl not at all sexualized in the way literally every single other seven-year-old in the competition is, and yet it’s her overtly sexual dance to “Superfreak” — which, to be clear, Olive doesn’t get the meaning of AT ALL — that offends the parents, contestants and organizers of the event, with a few awesome exceptions. Meanwhile, her family knows how off-putting this is, and they see clearly how uncomfortable everyone else is, but as long as Olive doesn’t see it, doesn’t feel singled out by it and isn’t made to feel uncomfortable about it, her family is okay with it. So they clap. And they dance. And they prevent anyone from taking Olive off the stage prematurely by wrestling guards and by acting as backup thrusters to Olive’s booty shaking. It’s hilarious, to be sure, but it’s also an unbelievably warm showing of unconditional love and support of this little girl and the preservation of her innocence in a room full of people seeking to age her before her time. And with that one moment, suddenly this trip of abject failure has become one of irrefutable triumph.

So Little Miss Sunshine does find a way to speak to the masses after all. Maybe the movie is telling us to find the joy in life, or to not take things too seriously. Maybe it just wants us to keep an open mind. Maybe it wants us to know that sometimes every single thing goes wrong but that one single thing going right can turn it all around. Whatever it is, it manages to tell an incredibly inclusive story, applicable to the lives of a great many people.