Because of Winn-Dixie (2005)

20th Century Fox presents a Wayne Wang film, starring Jeff Daniels. Written by Joan Singleton. Based on a book by Kate DiCamillo. 106m. PG for thematic elements and brief mild language.

2 stars

In every film with a canine as the central protagonist, there’s a point where the audience is asked to buy into the idea that dogs can irrevocably alter the bad fortunes of humans. In “Because of Winn-Dixie,” that scene comes fairly early, as a mongrel with no known lineage comes crashing through the produce aisle of a Southern supermarket chain.

It is here that the mutt is christened “Winn-Dixie” by a lonely 10-year-old girl, Opal (Annasophia Robb), whose spontaneous decision making ensures she’ll be bringing home fleas instead of macaroni and cheese for supper that night.

Of course bringing home someone else’s dog is never all right with parents; Opal’s father (Jeff Daniels) is no exception. He’s a Baptist minister the locals of Naomi, Fla. call “Preacher,” no doubt an occupational hazard for someone who might otherwise be fond of their forename.

Yet there’s a magic to this dog, the film suggests, who not only provides needed companionship to a nomadic youngster but also has the uncanny ability to create a support system for his girl friend. Because of Winn-Dixie, Opal meets bookish Miss Franny (Eva Marie Saint), the blind gardener Gloria (Cicely Tyson) and the withdrawn minder of a local pet shop, Otis (musician Dave Matthews, in his silver screen debut). All three are inherently searching for their own life connections, even if they don’t come right out and say it. In essence, Winn-Dixie is the mechanism through which Opal finds happiness and contentment in foreign surroundings.

It’s hard to fault a movie with such a straightforward, sanitary message. Yet the film lags terribly, its crystal-clean message deprived of few seedier suggestions or tangents. At a mid-day screening Saturday, I witnessed many children squirming in their seats and running up the aisles for concessions, a definitive indicator of the film’s main flaw.

Additionally, the cast acts like it has no stake in the ensemble element, each seemingly to come and go as disparate parts. Some are underutilized: Miss Franny dropped out for such a long period of time I assumed she’d suffered something ghastly, like a stroke.

Others are more creative with their time. One of the few bright spots of a movie - which followed the straight path between its setup and conclusion with nary a deviation - is the performance of Matthews. Entering the film, I had reservations about whether his fame as a musician would be too distracting to convince audiences he was inhabiting a character.

But the similarities between persona and character is probably what attracted Matthews to the role immediately. As an unofficial anthropologist of his band - I dedicated my teen-age existence to them, seemingly - I gathered the musician was immensely private, family-minded, but also a bit of a clown. His sense of humor skews toward the random, something that fits a drifter who observes many things without trying to be noticed himself.

There’s no doubt Matthews sees the role as an opportunity to impress his young twin daughters while cross-promoting his new album this spring. But I’ll forgive him for his motivations because he breathed life into a otherwise uncomplicated story.
As for director Wayne Wang, this is just another curious entry into a vastly scattered oeuvre. He’s excelled at human drama before, skillfully adapting Amy Tan’s brilliant novel, “The Joy Luck Club,” to the screen. But he’s also tackled decidedly more racy content and is just three years removed from the highly erotic “The Center of the World.” It’s amazing that someone so diversified would be in the running to take the reins of this project, but Wang allows it the grace it deserves. It isn’t as technically proficient as some of his other films, nor as flashy, yet it reflects competency.

As we patiently await for a cadre of decent films post-Oscar, families could do a lot worse than “Because of Winn-Dixie,” which delivers its message free of the scatological humor that most child-friendly stoop to these days.

Stroking the male fantasy

Hitch (2005)
Columbia Pictures presents an Andy Tennant film, starring Will Smith and Kevin James. Written by Kevin Bisch. 115m. PG-13.

2.5 stars

As the oversized, awkward bus driver with repugnant hygiene problems, Chris Farley wasn’t convincing anyone that he and model/actress Bridgette Wilson “got it on” in “Billy Madison.”

Audiences found humor in the scenario because it was asking us to believe a preposterous situation in which models would actually date people that may still live with their mothers.

But who’s laughing now? Audiences, apparently, over the double-standard world created for “Hitch” that reeks of a male’s touch. Screenwriter Kevin Bisch is leading the charge, assuaging fragile male egos by assuring us that we, the normal schlub, are innately desirable to those with immense beauty, power and wealth.

The reason why Lyle Lovetts don’t always date Julia Roberts, Bisch would claim, is because females all too often reject men early based on their looks. But, he says in the same breath, if we desire women based on the same shallow reasons, that’s perfectly acceptable.

This mentality lays napalm on a sometime uproarious rom-com, featuring Will Smith as a quasi-underground “date doctor” named Alex Hitchens. He’s sought out by the most hopeless of men, including Albert (Kevin James), who wants to date super-heiress Allegra Cole (Amber Valletta). It’s no matter that Allegra is way out of Albert’s league, Hitch reasons; the loveable oaf will be able to charm her by following the good doctor’s tried and true methods.

And since a Will Smith vehicle can’t ignore its leading man, Eva Mendes stands in as potential love interest Sara, a gossip columnist who feigns work commitments to avoid relationships.

Anybody with real life experience will tell you that fail-safe methods on one romantic interest invariably won’t work for another, but the only one who seems to be having problems appropriating Hitch’s methods is the doctor himself. Sara is stubborn, an idiosyncrasy that will lead to a “paint-by-numbers” finale including scenes that could have played out in any hack’s script still being shopped.

Even though I found several unconscionable flaws with the script, the movie kept grabbing me with its underdog characters. I rooted for Albert to land Allegra because his intentions were honorable and because soliciting the date seemed like his one opportunity to show his true potential. It’s the same reason I root every time for Lloyd Dobbler to ask out Diane Court in “Say Anything”; as the keymaster himself would say, “I’m just looking for a ‘dare to be great’ situation.”

I also root for Hitch, because he tries too hard to be romantic and can laugh at himself when the results are disastrous. The pair - Albert and Alex - are an unlikely alliance, but an admirable support system for each other.

Since the movie was landing good joke after good joke, it demonstrated a potential that doesn’t really pay off by the credits. And that was more frustrating than if the first half of the film had considerably lowered expectations and walked its audience toward the canned finale.

I think “Hitch” producers recognized the inherent flaws in the story and used the Valentine’s Day holiday to sell this film to audiences thirsty for cheap, romantic entertainment. I don’t think this film would have sat as well with audiences last October, its first scheduled release month. Audiences, I’d suggest, are more forgiving of these plots in February because we are brainwashed all month with beliefs that aren’t necessarily true. There’s no shame in being alone on Valentine’s Day and no, it’s not always a reflection of your self-worth. We’re not all destined to find true love. And beauty on the outside, no matter what a screenwriter tells you, does not necessarily mean there’s beauty on the inside.

I don’t fault the movie for choosing its marketing strategy wisely, but I’d kindly suggest that this movie won’t be as charming without some holiday help. The doctor is in, so it’s best to see him now.

Life, interrupted

Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Warner Brothers presents a Clint Eastwood film, starring Morgan Freeman and Hillary Swank. Written by Paul Haggis. Based on short stories by F.X. Toole. 137m. PG-13 for violence, some disturbing images, thematic material and language.

4.5 stars

Author’s note: This review is considerably spoiler-heavy. It is not to be even glanced at by anyone who does not want major plot elements revealed to them. You have been warned.

To hear Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman) tell it, boxing is its own ballet: It’s finding choreography in a dance with an unknown partner. Successful boxers feign one direction so they can unload in another. They also anticipate these strategies from their partner.

“Million Dollar Baby” is about boxing, and like boxing. It’s a boxing movie, until suddenly unfolds into a morality play. Now, thanks to zealots-turned-critics, it’s become front and center in a continuing debate about assisted suicide, euthanasia and pro-life.

One of my few enjoyments anymore is seeing a film of which I know nothing about. Although “Million Dollar Baby” has been wrapped up in this maelstrom, I had managed to avoid the lively debate. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m engaged in another disagreement about whether or not I should reveal major plot twists to my potential readership.

Every critic encounters an unique situation. While I’ve kept mum about other films’ key turning points, I can’t help but think doing so in this case would do myself a grave injustice. I can’t adequately relate to you why this movie had such a powerful resonance if I’m reduced to qualifiers such as “a dark turn” or “something happens here which I must not reveal.”

As I’ve said before, each individual brings their personal politics and their film histories into a movie theater. It’s absurd of me to deny my true self while reviewing, telling readers I’ve above reproach if I find a film presents a view I find repugnant.
And while I’ve always considered myself pro-life across the board, I have found perhaps my true nature in the 24 hours since I saw “Million Dollar Baby.” In it is a tale woven so tightly, it made me reconsider a view I’ve often held strongly.

It tells the tale of Maggie Fitzgerald (Hillary Swank), 31 years old and without passion for much of anything, except boxing. It’s in the Hit Pit Gym, the dues of which she can barely afford on her waitress salary, that she feels like she’s alive. And like the most admirable of go-getters, Maggie has sought out legendary trainer and “cut man” Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) for her tutelage.

Their relationship is like an unlikely symbiosis. In the ring, Frankie has just lost a prized fighter to a more aggressive management team, while Maggie is a potential diamond in the rough. In reality, she unknowingly, and slowly, becomes his chance at retribution. A weekly returned letter from Frankie’s estranged daughter is proof of his need for such reconciliation.
As Maggie becomes a better fighter, she assuages some of Frankie’s more permanent fears. But his own doubtfulness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; when Maggie is paralyzed, his blame consumes him.

He’s handed a catch-22 and told to choose: Help Maggie die by assisting in her suicide or come every day to the nursing unit and watch her suffer. Their relationship, already complex, takes on decidedly more perilous overtones.

Frankie, who has never found appropriate answers in the church’s doctrine despite attending mass faithfully every day, turns to his parish priest. Instead of offering any semblance of practical advice, the priest recites long-held dogma that doesn’t address the specificity of the circumstance. Frankie is sent off with the equivalent of a rap on the knuckles; the priest tells him, “If you do this thing you will be lost, somewhere so deep you will never find yourself.”

So is Frankie’s choice one of the ultimate sacrifice, of choosing her life over his? I guess that would depend on who the audience thinks the central protagonist is. If it’s Frankie, then yes, it seems like a tale of great personal sacrifice. But if it’s Maggie, it’s a tale of great hope, of great potential and great determination. Even in death, she was determined to follow through it through to the end.

And what of the charge that some have contended that “Million Dollar Baby” is pushing a pro-choice agenda? Like all art, film is intended to engage us, to test our firmly held doctrines, to manipulate us and to incite us to become enraged, or angry, or passionate, or resolute. Just because there’s more films like “Racing Stripes” than “Million Dollar Baby” these days doesn’t dilute the potential for film.

This film made me react to it, made me insert myself into Frankie’s situation and choose, yes, I would help her die. That thought sickens me, appalls me and makes me embarrassed to even admit, but it’s the truth which I realized only Sunday is contained within me.

I’m forced to re-examine all my beliefs concerning my previously outspoken pro-life attitude. What does this realization say about my relationship with God, who we’re taught in Sunday school is the only person that should control when we die? What does it say about my empathy, my sympathy for others and my willingness to engage in criminal activity to ease an individual’s pain? Could I live with myself if I actually went through with it, destined to relive the experience in a continuum of ‘what-ifs’?

No matter what the eventual answers to these questions, “Million Dollar Baby” has done what few films in 2004 managed: It engaged me, tested me and made me a better person for having seen it.

Soaring to new, digital, heights for Scorsese

The Aviator (2004)
Miramax presents a Martin Scorsese film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett. Written by John Logan. 170m. PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual content, nudity, language and a crash sequence.

4 stars

Martin Scorsese, 62, has often been considered an old school master living in a more modern age. So imagine my surprise when, at the near end of his latest 170 minute effort, he digitally inserts a shot that begins outside the giant Hercules aircraft and ends up in an extreme close-up of the fierce resolve present in Howard Hughes’s eyes.

While a push through an digitized aircraft’s window isn’t uncommon in a big-budget action film, it is a rarity for Scorsese, who has often been lauded for his films’ realistic, and exquisite, cinematography.

But like his subject, the billionaire Texan Howard Hughes, Scorsese needed to think outside ordinary limitations to get a film like “The Aviator” off the ground. The glaring summation of Hughes life is akin to the fictional Charles Foster Kane: he lived a life of excess that became an obsession.

The biopic opens on the teen-age Hughes, who has just wrangled control of his deceased father’s drill bit company and has siphoned the positive cash flow into his extravagant war flick, “Hell’s Angels.” A thematic resonance is established. As the fictional David St. Hubbins would say, “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”

During the midst of the Great Depression, the self-confident twenty-something scraps the entire film to accommodate the latest technology: the talkie. But instead of outrage over his $3.8 million expenditure, people embrace Hughes as a young whippersnapper bucking the studio-laden system.

And we believe it because actor Leonardo DiCaprio is selling it so well. DiCaprio is no stranger to the role of part-huckster; his turn in “Catch Me If You Can” is evidence of that. But this project, which DiCaprio fostered for years, may very well be what he stakes his personal reputation on in the future. And the performance he gives, which transitions Hughes from the mid-1920s to the late 40s, is nothing short of totally engrossing.

Screenwriter John Logan synthesizes Hughes’ many public dalliances into two main flings: those with actresses Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale). In the blue-blooded Connecticut Yankee Hepburn, Hughes finds solace in her eccentricities. He’s grounded by her acceptances of his obsessive-compulsive tendencies, which have just begun to show outwardly by the mid-1930s. And as daunting as it would be to play a screen legend, Blanchett has Hepburn’s peccadilloes mastered to perfection, right down to her affectation while speaking. Blanchett, in an interview, said icons like Hepburn are remembered for the way they spoke as much as their looks. Yet she doesn’t resort to parody or high camp for her performance, something that a less capable actor might have tried.

By the end of the 1930s, Hughes had controlling interest in Trans World Airlines. His passion for aviation had consumed his life, even more so than the boundary-pushing movies he was notorious for overseeing. In Pan-Am head Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) lay a natural adversary, someone as interested in aviation’s contributions to capitalism as Hughes was. Their good natured relationship in public was little indicator of the muckraking behind the scenes, such as Trippe’s unofficial hiring of Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) to investigate Hughes publicly.

By the senate investigations, Hughes had begun his downward spiral into the pit of obsessive compulsive disorder. He had crashed an experimental reconnaissance plane into a Beverly Hills neighborhood and his Hercules project was being ridiculed as “The Spruce Goose,” an obnoxious waste of taxpayer money. Through Brewster, Alda nicely captures the seeds of corruption inherent in the senator’s motivations.

By the end of the film, with Hughes outwardly exhibiting signs of deep-seated paranoia and obsessive tendencies, it’s hard to imagine this film not being viewed as a sad tragedy. But perhaps some will see Hughes as someone who paid the price for being too ambitious, too greedy or too capitalistic. Maybe, as they are prone to say in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” this disease is where Howard Hughes gets his comeuppance.

The answer may lie in Hughes’ eyes. Cinematographer Robert Richardson said Scorsese instructed him to keep in mind the eyes during lighting and framing scenes, because in the eyes lie the truest emotion. In DiCaprio’s eyes, we see Hughes’ mind working faster than the available technology and a great fear of the unknown disease. I think audiences will sympathize with Hughes; although he is part showman, a more genuine quality is revealed in personal moments with Hepburn. During those times, Hughes discloses his fear about not being in control for the first time in life. For a person who bought his way out of every problem, obsessive-compulsive disorder offered no such bargain.

One final note: “Aviator” producers were quite proud of Scorsese’s decision to create three distinct color themes for the film. They explain: “From the 1920s through 1938 the look is muted, with a green-hued, historical quality; from 1938 through the 1940s, the ambiance takes on the trademark ‘classic Hollywood’ lushness of full Technicolor; and then by the end of the film, the color subtly shifts to the modern color film look familiar to filmgoers in 2004.” I must confess that I missed it almost entirely, otherwise engaged in the storytelling to notice the changing aesthetics.