Suspended Animation

Even when Amy Adams is literally playing a cartoon—as she does in Enchanted—she has a way of coming across as the most genuine person onscreen. Her Oscar-nominated performance as a very pregnant, very impressionable young Southern woman dazzled by her sophisticated new sister-in-law in Junebug was a small marvel. Perfectly pitched, untainted by irony, she made her character’s total innocence seem like a state of grace and a source of strength—Amy Adams’ characters may be naïve, but their naïveté is made of steel!

Adams carries over a lot of her Junebug performance into Enchanted. It’s a silly, fluffball movie, but Adams is so perfectly adorable in it that she elevates a merely serviceable script into one of the year’s few truly enjoyable mainstream comedies. (It’s a transformation similar to the one Reese Witherspoon performed on Legally Blonde, and it should give the same boost to Adams’ career.)

Adams begins the film in animated form as Giselle, one of those simpering Disney storybook heroines who spend their days conversation with forest animals, singing ballads, and waiting for the day when she exchanges “love’s true kiss” with a handsome prince. But when Prince Edward falls in love with her, the evil Queen Narissa—who will lose her throne if Edward marries—shoves Giselle through a magical portal into another dimension... namely, modern-day New York City, where the only creatures Giselle, now occupying flesh and blood form, has to communicate with are rats, pigeons, and cockroaches.

Most of the humour in the film derives from Adams’ wide-eyed, utterly guileless reactions to real-world phenomena like traffic, showers, and divorce. (She’s taken in by an attorney named Robert, played by Patrick Dempsey, who starts to suspect there may be something to Giselle’s wild story when she starts singing and sets off a gigantic production number that eventually engulfs all of Central Park.) The gags, except for a funny sequence where Giselle cleans Robert’s apartment, aren’t terribly inspired, but Adams’ cartoonish mannerisms definitely is—I love the way she even delicately crooks her fingers the way a cartoon princess does.

Nothing else in Enchanted is anywhere near Adams’ level. Timothy Spall’s subplot as Narissa’s bumbling henchman devotes too much time to him wearing wacky disguises and not enough to his pathetic desire to win the queen’s affections. A scene where Giselle is shown reading a book about female heroes like Marie Curie and Rosa Parks never leads to anything interesting. The climactic battle with a dragon is loud, confusing, and poorly staged.

And it’s disappointing to see the way Bill Kelly’s script takes such a fun premise with a lot of satirical potential and uses it to deliver such a pat, familiar message. Compare Enchanted to Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, which has a similar plot: Enchanted says there’s no reason fairytales can’t come true even in real life; the message of Allen’s film is that the real world will let you down, but that’s where you have to live.

I certainly didn’t want Enchanted to have some kind of perverse downer ending like Purple Rose, but I hoped it would be a little more sly in its depiction of fantasy bumping up against reality. There’s no equivalent to the moment in Purple Rose where Jeff Daniels says, “You make love without fading out? I can’t wait to see this!”

Then again, Purple Rose didn’t have Amy Adams, who is so delightful she pretty much absolves Enchanted of its flaws. Like Giselle, she’s so perfect that you almost can’t believe she’s real.

Heist Capades

Forget fireworks; forget dancing girls, forget gladiatorial combat: of all forms of entertainment on God’s green earth, is there anything more absorbing, more fascinating in its particulars, more captivating in its moment-to-moment succession of terrible events, more completely un-look-away-able than the sight of a simple heist going horribly, horribly wrong?

No, say I, and few movie heists have gone more horribly, horribly wrong than the one in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. The scheme is hatched by Andy Hanson (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose high-paying job as a real estate accountant isn’t quite keeping pace with the demands of his drug habit. His brother Hank (Ethan Hawke)—a broke divorcé months behind on his child support payments and the more obvious “loser” of the two—also needs cash. And so, Andy proposes that they rob their parents’ jewelry store: there’s minimal security, Andy says, they’ve both worked there, so they know where everything is, and the insurance will pay for the loss—15 minutes and it’ll all be over, and no one will get hurt.

In an ordinary movie, if you didn’t know going in that the plan would fall apart, that line alone would be a tipoff. Someone always gets hurt. Except this isn’t quite an ordinary movie: Kelly Masterson’s script jumps around in time, beginning with the heist, then constantly doubling back on itself, showing the buildup and the aftermath from various characters’ perspectives. When we see Andy tell Hank his plan, we’ve already seen it go wrong, which means we can ignore the obviously foreshadowing and concentrate on the characters—especially the psychological tricks Hank employs to bully his younger brother into doing something he doesn’t want to do.

It’s no longer unusual for a crime movie to juggle the chronology of events—hell, it’s almost expected of you these days, unless you want to look like some kind of linear-thinking square—but Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead isn’t really interested in playing postmodern, post-Tarantino head games, withholding information from the audience in order to lay the groundwork for some kind of startling third-act plot twist. If anything, the film’s structure makes everything clearer; by the time Hand and Andy’s father Charles (Albert Finney) enters the picture, for instance, about 45 minutes into the film, we fully appreciate the awfulness of what his sons have tried to do, the further awfulness of what they’ve actually done, and the emotional toll it will take on Charles if he ever finds out.

I can’t think of many films that have better captured the hopeless, almost unbearable stomach-tightening tension you feel when you know it’s only a matter of time before the bad thing you’ve done is found out, and all your attempts to delay that discovery only dig you in deeper. Wait a minute—I can, actually: Owning Mahowny, which also starred Philip Seymour Hoffman as a man dragged under by his addiction. Hoffman is fabulous in these kinds of roles: his Andy is a monster, a big, blobby baby whose selfishness is matched only by his amorality... and yet he gives you a sense of the self-hatred, the misplaced faith in his own intelligence, and the resentment of his father that fuel his doomed plan. Hoffman delivers a wonderful monologue while lolling in the luxury apartment he visits to shoot up: “I don’t add up,” he whines. “I’m not the sum of my parts.” Hoffman’s performance as this shallow man more than adds up.

The rest of the cast is also solid: Ethan Hawke has maybe a few too many tics, but he captures Hank’s spinelessness; Albert Finney combines his bulldog physicality with the slack-jawed expression of an old man that suggests Charles’ disbelieving rage at what’s happened to him; and the stage actors Brian F. O’Byrne and Michael Shannon contribute lived-in performances as a couple of thugs on the periphery of Andy’s scheme.

The movie was directed by Sidney Lumet, the 83-year-old granddaddy of the New York film scene. He’s directed plenty of crime pictures in the past, but those ones were either character studies (Dog Day Afternoon), epic portraits of “the system” (Q&A, Prince of the City), or both (Serpico, last year’s underrated Find Me Guilty). This one is more about the inevitable mechanics of the plot—it’s a long row of dominoes knocking each other over. Hoffman begins the movie fucking his wife in Brazil; little does he suspect he’ll end up alone in Hell. Watching him get there? Now that’s entertainment!

Rush Concert

August Rush is a film about music—the beauty of it, the mystery of it, its unique power to connect human beings across large distances. Its main character is Evan, a young boy (Freddie Highmore from Finding Neverland) with amazing, instinctive musical talents—he learns to play the guitar in a couple of hours, and figures out the piano as well as the whole system of musical notation in the space of an idle afternoon. His parents, neither of whom are aware he even exists, are musicians too: his mom Lyla (Keri Russell) is a classical cellist, while his dad Louis (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) sings and plays guitar with a rock band. When Evan runs away from the orphanage where he was raised and escapes to New York, he’s cared for by a succession of fellow music-lovers: a Fagin-like street performer named Wizard (Robin Williams) with a team of child musicians in his “employ”; the director of a gospel choir at a neighbourhood church; even the faculty of Juilliard, where Evan eventually becomes a student.

The problem with August Rush—much more than its unapologetically sentimental, melodramatic plot—is that the music in it isn’t very good. Director Kirsten Sheridan tries to do some interesting things with the score: before Lyla and Louis even meet, for instance, she tries to suggest that they’re right for each other by cross-cutting between the two of them giving two very different concerts, Lyla’s cello harmonizing unexpectedly well with Louis’ rock music. It could have been a thrilling sequence, if the song Louis is singing weren’t such an undistinguished piece of sludgy Irish pub rock. Add Lyla’s cello, and you don’t get magic: you get something that sounds like filler from a Corrs album.

The score lets Sheridan down again in the final scene, where little August conducts the New York Philharmonic as they play his own composition to a huge crowd in Central Park. You can see what Sheridan wants the music to express—a recapitulation of all of August’s adventures in New York, complete with traffic sounds, subways, street guitar, gospel choir. But what composer Mark Mancina (best-known for scoring Disney’s Tarzan) gives us sounds like a generic swelling of Hollywood strings that doesn’t sound like anything August would have come up with.

Freddie Highmore is a good, unaffected little actor, and he successfully mimes his guitar-playing scenes, but his character is so sweet, so pure-hearted, so unshakable in his beliefs (which turn out to be so precisely justified), that it’s hard to respond to him as anything other than a fictional construct. (And didn’t this kid have any exposure to music in that orphanage? When he arrives in New York, he behaves as if it’s the first time he’s even seen a musical instrument.)

Actually, the acting is fine all around—even Robin Williams is pretty good, at least until the final third of the film, when his character turns into a cheap plot device. And I respect the way Sheridan doesn’t shy away from big emotions—she co-wrote In America, a more successful tearjerker about families getting buffeted about by New York City. August Rush has all the right elements, but they don’t come together. Is it in the wrong key? Are the chords too dissonant? If I were a musical prodigy like August, I might be able to choose the right metaphor: all I know is, it just doesn’t sing.

The Toys Are a Thorn in My Side

There’s an image at the end of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium that pretty much sums up my reaction to the film. Jason Bateman plays an accountant named Henry Weston who’s been hired to straighten out the books of the magical toy store that gives the film its title. Henry starts out as a typical accountant: buttoned-down, pragmatic, humourlessly tsk-tsking at the chaotic, impractical way Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman) and his assistant Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman, still growing out her V for Vendetta headshave) run the business. But of course, by the end of the film, the pixiedust charms of the place have completely converted him—and he even helps restore it to its former glory when the magic temporarily deserts it.

Here’s the image I can’t get out of my mind: Jason Bateman standing against a wall of shelves as the various sock monkeys and other stuffed animals reach out and hug him. Except Bateman has to stand very still and in a very specific place so that all the toys that have been rigged up with special animatronic arms can reach him. And he has to contort his spine a little bit too, which is maybe why he has such an awkward smile on his face the whole time. Or maybe it’s just the face of a smart actor trying his best to sell a “magical” scene that he just doesn’t believe in.

Throughout almost the entirety of Mr. Magorium, I felt as awkward as Jason Bateman looks. This film wants very badly to sweep you up into a storybook world of whimsy and delight, but there’s an anxiousness to this film that recalls the desperate attempts of a birthday-party clown to keep the crowd entertained. This is the directorial debut of Zach Helm—who also wrote Stranger Than Fiction, that offbeat Will Ferrell movie from last year—and he fills this film with noisy stuff that kids supposedly like (fire engines! bouncing balls! gumdrops! dinosaurs! grown men talking in funny voices!) but none of the genuinely playful, childlike inspiration that someone like Michel Gondry or Jean-Pierre Jeunet might have brought to the project.

It doesn’t help matters, either, that the people who run the store are so annoying. Hoffman is the worst offender: with his babytalk lisp, wacky eyebrows, and wardrobe of zany suits, it’s like he stepped out of the worst Ray Bradbury story ever written. The movie’s emotional turning point comes when the 243-year-old Mr. Magorium announces his plans to die. Helm seems to think that Magorium’s death will affect audiences the way Ruth Gordon’s suicide did in Harold and Maude—he even plays a Cat Stevens song on the soundtrack—but truthfully, the prospect of Hoffman leaving the film early comes as a relief. Gene Wilder’s performance in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory remains the gold standard for this kind of character: besides being genuinely funny and unpredictable, Wilder tapped into a strange melancholy loneliness in that movie. You got the sense, watching him wander beside his chocolate river, that maybe living in “a world of pure imagination” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium could have used a little more Wilder in it. Or maybe just a better awareness of its own creepiness: I mean, if a sock monkey wanted to hug you, wouldn’t your first instinct be to recoil?

Roger Deakins Talks About "The Boys"

Roger Deakins refers to The Coen Brothers, charmingly, as “the boys.” When you’ve worked with the Coens for as long as he has, though, you’re permitted to be a little familiar. With his white hair and his warm British accent, it’s fun to picture Deakins as a sobering, grandfatherly influence on the smartalecky filmmaking duo, smoking a pipe in the den while Joel and Ethan play make-believe in the attic upstairs.

Deakins’ credits include Dead Man Walking, A Beautiful Mind, and The Shawshank Redemption. This year alone, he also shot The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and In the Valley of Elah. But it’s his work with the Coens that Deakins is most associated with. He’s been the cinematographer on every single Coen Brothers film since 1991’s Barton Fink: it was his lens that captured the bleak, horizonless winter in the opening of Fargo, the eerie, torchlit Klan rally in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the black-and-white southern Californian no-man’s land of The Man Who Wasn’t There, the bowling alleys and supermarket aisles of The Big Lebowski. In the world of the Coen Brothers, he’s the rug that really ties the room together.

With the Coens’ latest film, No Country for Old Men, Deakins finds the beauty and the terror in every single Texas location, whether it’s a murder site in the middle of vast, dry, empty plain or a cheap, claustrophobic motel room. His photography is already being hailed as the work of a master, but as Deakins revealed when he talked with me about the film, he can barely stand to look at it. Certain scenes, anyway.

Q: You’ve been collaborating with the Coens for about 17 years now, and part of me wonders, how much of what we think of as the signature “Coen Brothers style” is actually your contribution? Are you simply putting their vision into action, or is the relationship more complex?

Roger Deakins: It’s hard to tell, really. It’s hard to tell on any film where one person’s contribution ends and the other person’s role takes over. That said, the Coens have a very particular way of looking at the world and their scripts are very visual. I can think of only a few instances where we actually discussed lighting—in The Man Who Wasn’t There, for instance, they said they envisioned the jail cell as having this theatrical, hard light. We talk a lot about shots and setups and they storyboard everything, and I’m involved in that process.

Q: Their films always give the impression of having been worked out with absolute meticulousness—every shot, every edit in place. Is that an accurate impression, or is there more improvisation on the set than it might appear?

RD: Oh, there’s definitely room for that. We definitely work everything out, there’s almost always a long prep period. But on the set, things happen. In No Country, for instance, there’s that reflection of Tommy Lee Jones in the TV set—

Q: I was going to ask about that! It seemed like the kind of image that would be impossible to imagine beforehand.

RD: Yeah, it was storyboarded as a shot where he’s looking at the television, but there was nothing about the reflection. You always get happy accidents—the lightning in the distance where Moss is running away from the crime scene, for instance.

Q: Do you get a thrill looking through the lens when you see something like that happen?

RD: Sure, but quite honestly, the biggest thrill I get is when I’m watching a performance and I know it’s something magical. Watching Tommy in Ellis’ cabin in the scene near the end of the film, you just get shivers up your spine. It just feels so real and so melancholy. It’s the thrill of filmmaking—being the first person to see these things.

Q: Did the Texas location present any unusual problems during the shooting of No Country for Old Men? I’m thinking of those huge shadows that you see moving across the plain in the opening scenes, for instance, which must have made it hard to have the shots match.

RD: Well, that’s the challenge with any film: making a seamless whole out of a jigsaw of locations. Someone will walk up to the exterior of a motel room at night, and then you cut to the interior a week later on a stage. The sequence when Moss is chased to the river and falls down the embankment with the dog following him—that’s all a mixture of two or three different locations at different times. I watch it and sort of cringe.

Q: Well then, what are the moments in No Country that you look at with pride, or sort of show you at your best?

RD: I don’t know, really. I’m pleased by the variety of moods and locations in the film. But I think that if it works as a whole, that’s what’s most important to me. I don’t try to be showy. I just try to reflect what’s on the page and make the thing flow as a seamless whole.

Q: Who are the cinematographers you look to for inspiration, or the films you wish you’d shot?

RD: Everything Connie Hall [the cinematographer of American Beauty and In Cold Blood] did. But it’s foolish to look at something and think, “I wish I’d done that.” I couldn’t have done that, so I’m glad they did, you know what I mean?

Q: Is there anything you think the average moviegoer should know about the role of the cinematographer that they probably don’t? Or is it better to remains more of an invisible collaborator?

RD: I prefer the invisible collaborator! [Laughs.] Sounds good to me!

Pour Some Chigurh on Me

...And here's my review of the movie itself!

* * *

He’s powerfully built, but it’s not really his muscles that makes Anton Chigurh so intimidating. Not so much the villain of No Country for Old Men as the black planet at its centre, drawing every other character inexorably closer into his malevolent orbit, Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a nightmare version of Randall “Tex” Cobb’s motorcycle-riding bounty hunter from Raising Arizona. Clad in dark denim, a long, almost comical curtain of black hair draped across his forehead, his nose broad, his smile feminine, Chigurh is a dark angel traveling across Texas, seemingly untouchable by the police, murdering not only the people he’s hired to kill, but anyone who shows the slightest curiosity about him, or who seems likely to remember his face. His weapon of choice: a pneumatic air gun designed for use in slaughterhouses.

Chigurh’s quarry is Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder lucky enough to discover $2 million left behind at a drug deal gone wrong, and foolish enough to think he can get away with taking it. Moss has the resourcefulness to elude Chigurh for a while—in one masterfully staged, sickeningly suspenseful sequence after another—but Chigurh is as dogged as The Grim Reaper. Sooner or later, he comes for us all, and all good-hearted men like Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) can do is stand by and watch in stoic dismay. “If this isn’t a mess,” he says, “it’ll do until one comes along.”

Based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men is the Coen Brother’s first true adapted screenplay—the first really faithful one, anyway. (O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ladykillers don’t quite count.) But it harks back to elements from many of their earlier films: there’s the sun-baked Texas landscapes of Blood Simple, the purgatory-like hotel rooms of Barton Fink, and, as in Fargo, there’s a morally upright law enforcement officer faced with a violent, chaotic world they simply can’t comprehend.

And yet it doesn’t feel like a retread. Except for Stephen Root, who turns up in a small part as a smarmy business executive, none of the usual Coen actors are on hand. There are no bellowing fat men, and little of their arch dialogue. Maybe it’s the McCarthy influence, but there’s a newfound seriousness to this film—not depth, necessarily, but seriousness. There’s a lot of deadpan dark humour here, but you don’t feel the Coens snickering behind the camera, as you do in so many of their other films. If anything, they seem as appalled as we are at how horribly everything works out for everybody onscreen.

At their best, the Coens exert a rare mastery over the screen image—it often feels as though even the inanimate objects in their films are obeying them. No Country for Old Men is one of their very best films, superbly acted by Brolin, Bardem, Jones, with great supporting work handed in by the Texas sky, a satchel of money, a pit bull, an air conditioning duct, some window curtains, and a beeping transponder. If this isn’t a masterpiece, it’ll do until one comes along.

The Man(nequin) I Love

Lars and the Real Girl has a premise that sounds like it barely has enough potential to fill out a four-minute sketch, the kind they bury in the last 10 minutes of Saturday Night Live. It’s the story of Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling), a man living in a snowbound small town in what looks like North Dakota or Minnesota—although he’s so painfully shy that he’d probably bundle up in sweater and down-filled jackets even if he lived in southern California. One day, he orders a “RealDoll”—an expensive, anatomically correct female sex mannequin—over the Internet... and then introduces the dead-eyed “Bianca” to his brother Gus and his wife Karin as his new girlfriend.

Lars is obviously nuts—he even hears Bianca talking to him—but Karin decides to follow the advice of the local psychiatrist and indulge his harmless delusion. Before long, the entire town is joining in, and Bianca starts to take on a “life” of her own. (She even gets elected to the school board.) Picture a cross between Harvey and one of those insane-ventriloquist movies like Dead of Night or Magic—and then picture the whole improbable combination actually kind of working—and you’d have Lars and the Real Girl.

I think I admire Lars and the Real Girl more as a technical feat of screenwriting and directing—for its ability to hit the right blend of whimsy and realism and for the way it sustains its unlikely premise—than for anything it has to say about love or loneliness. The film succeeds more because of what it artfully leaves out than what it shows us: screenwriter Nancy Oliver (who also wrote several episodes of Six Feet Under) and director Craig Gillespie (whose only other film, weirdly enough, is Mr. Woodcock) never show Lars dressing Bianca, or posing her, or putting her in any kind of undignified situation.

There are no villains in the film either—no one to speak up and make the common-sense observation that Lars’ fixation on Bianca is actually pretty creepy. (No one except Gus, that is, but he agrees to put up with the situation for Karin’s sake.) And the film carefully dodges the issue of what Bianca was built for as well—Lars, we’re told, is saving himself for when they get married. Actually, Lars is such a timid character that having sex with Bianca seems like the furthest thing from his mind. She’s a companion—Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away, only with breasts and a vagina.

Ryan Gosling goes a long way towards making this project work. But even this aspect of the film is something I feel a lot of ambivalence about. It’s an inventive, meticulously detailed portrait of a closed-off man, a symphony of nervous, tight smiles, distracted head movements, hunched body language, topped off with a head of greasy, badly combed hair and garnished with a mousy little mustache. When Lars goes to a party, his idea of dancing is to stand in the middle of the floor, scrunch his eyes closed, clench his fists, and rock tensely back and forth roughly in time to the music. Gosling is kind of amazing in this scene (it helps that the song is Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place,” surely one of the most transcendent pop songs ever written), but after a certain point, his performance starts to seem too self-contained for its own good. It’s one of those “virtuoso” one-man-band roles that so many hot actors love to tackle—Kevin Spacey and Johnny Depp have built their careers on them—where everything in the movie is set up to indulge their acting choices, so much so that they’re not even required to have chemistry with their co-stars.

That said, Gosling has an earnest, boyish charm that’s hard to resist—especially when he takes Bianca out to the forest and sings “L-O-V-E” to her at the top of his lungs. To my surprise, the preview audience I saw Lars and the Real Girl with was completely won over by it, but I doubt whether it will turn into another Little Miss Sunshine at the box office. It’s too sweet and Capra-esque for the indie crowd, but the premise will probably be too off-putting for the multiplexers.

And who does that leave to go see it? Are there enough members of the doll-fetish community to make this thing a hit? And if they show up with their “girlfriends,” will the theatre staff honour the spirit of the movie and charge them for the extra ticket?

You're Sorkin In It

Lions for Lambs is a landmark for me: I think this is the first time I’ve found myself criticizing a big Hollywood movie for not spending enough money. Boy, this is a cheap-looking picture—a segment set on a snowy mountaintop in Afghanistan is one of the most stagebound pieces of studio filmmaking this side of the cop shows Universal Pictures cranked out in the early ’70s—and the presence of A-list stars like Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford (who also directed) only makes the artifice of the film that much more jarring. It’s a movie that seems like it’s being performed in front of stage flats—you half-wonder why Redford didn’t do away with sets altogether and film it Dogville-style on an empty soundstage.

Or an Off-Broadway theatre. Perhaps there, Lions for Lambs wouldn’t have seemed so talky and inert as it does onscreen, and its unusual structure might have seemed more innovative. Lions for Lambs takes place roughly in real time, in three different locations. In Washington, a hawkish young Republican senator named Jasper Irving (Cruise) invites veteran liberal reporter Janine Roth (Streep) into his office to leak her an exclusive story about a bold new military initiative to take the high ground in Afghanistan; in Afghanistan itself, where the mission has gone disastrously wrong, two injured American soldiers await the rescue helicopter, hoping that the enemy doesn’t get to them first; and on the campus of what the film cryptically refers to simply as “a California university,” glamourous but aging poli sci prof Stephen Malley (Redford) tries to shake one of his students out of glib apathy and into action. (As it turns out, those two soldiers in Afghanistan are Redford’s former students, who were inspired to enlist by his “don’t sit back, stand up” rhetoric.)

Wearing his weathered face and his faded denim shirt with equal pride, Redford is a welcome, charismatic presence as Dr. Malley—only his sixth onscreen performance in the last decade. He brings an amused levity to his give-and-take with Andrew Garfield as his cynical problem student that softens what could have been a much preachier role. And Tom Cruise gives his most focused performance since Magnolia—can it be a coincidence that both roles involve long, tense showdowns with smart female reporters determined to peel away the mask he presents to the public?

Screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan (who also wrote the much flashier Middle East action picture The Kingdom) is onto something with this script. Anyone who’s ever mocked George W. Bush from the safety of their living-room couch will probably feel their conscience pricked by the film’s argument that criticism that isn’t backed up with some kind of action—what one might call “Daily Show activism”—doesn’t count for much, especially now, when the global stakes are so high.

But Carnahan and Redford’s schematic presentation of this theme throws a wet blanket over the entire film. The script has a bad case of the Sorkins. Like so many scenes in The West Wing, the political debates in Lions for Lambs are too perfectly scripted to be believed—the characters are constantly setting up each other’s punchlines, one argument neatly dovetailing into the opponent’s response, everyone able to summon precisely the statistic or historical quotation at the exact rhetorical moment it’s required. It’s the difference between watching a friendly rally and watching a bloody tennis match—the characters in Lions for Lambs always seem to know ahead of time where the ball is going to land.

Lions for Lambs is the first film Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner have shepherded into theatres in their new roles heading up United Artists, the once-dormant company freshly revived as a boutique studio under the aegis of MGM. I doubt people will remember much about this cautious piece of middlebrow entertainment five years from now, but I doubt whether Cruise is all that worried about looking like a movie executive. If Lions for Lambs is anything to go by, he’s more interested, eerily enough, in looking presidential.