Meek's Cutoff ***½

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Cast: Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson

Zoe Kazan, Neal Huff, Will Patton, Tommy Nelson, Rod Rondeaux

The advent of Cinemascope brought with it bigger visions of where cinema could take audiences, with it came sprawling musical numbers, larger-than-life Hitchcockian nightmares and the magnificence of the Wild West in all its glory.

For what epitomizes widescreen more than the imposing image of the rocky towers of Monument Valley in The Searchers? With this new expanding screen, filmmakers were finally able to encompass the oppressing feeling of liberty that nature added to stories about cowboys, natives and pioneers.

The idea of the United States of America that was exported to worldwide audiences in these films was one of ample opportunity as long as you could withstand its obstacles (whether they were social, emotional, racial etc.)

Soon enough, the Western was subverted across the Atlantic where filmmakers like Sergio Leone grabbed on to the darkest aspects of this cultural and geographical expansion and explored the way the rest of the world perceived America.

Therefore, the first thing we must ask ourselves about Kelly Reichardt's revisionist entry in the genre is: why did she shoot it in 1.37:1 format?

Meek's Cutoff is presented to us, not in the epic landscape format favored by John Ford, but in the boxy Academy format, which instantly takes us to a time when films like Stagecoach were being made.

Perhaps Reichardt's intention was to take us back in time by using earlier cinematic language to contextualize her story about settlers in the 1800s. After all, it's fairly common for memories to be influenced by images we've seen in the movies. This is why some people imagine the past in black & white.

However effective this may be, if this was her purpose, she's not only subjugating the idea that genres should constantly evolve, she's also disregarding audience members who might not detect this with ease, or at all.

Those for whom film format is indistinguishable, will then wonder why the natural landscapes onscreen feel almost claustrophobic despite their grandeur. It is here, where the movie starts working on a psychological level. It is here, where Reichardt's genius surfaces: she is working on different layers, all of which work depending on the eye that beholds them.

Meek's Cutoff is one of those movies that requires extra attention, not because of the complexity of its plot, but precisely because of its languidness.

The entire film is presented to us in the first ten minutes. The setting is the Oregon Trail, the year is 1845. Three families traveling in wagons and carts are being led by explorer Stephen Meek (Greenwood) towards their final destination.

As the film begins we see the settlers go on about their daily lives-on a journey that is-as they wash clothes, cook and then prepare for further travel.

Despite Reichardt's, and cinematographer Chris Blauvelt's, best efforts to highlight-or perhaps contrast-the beauty of these daily rituals, we soon get the feeling that something's not right.

The husbands (Huff, Dano and Patton) and wives (Williams, Kazan and Henderson) discuss matters separately and soon we understand that they seem to be lost.

Meek reassures them that everything is fine but tensions begin to grow as they start running out of water and supplies. Their voyage becomes even more complicated when they capture an Indian.

The group becomes divided as some claim he should be killed before his tribe members find them, while others think he could help them find water.

Here Reichardt explores the dynamics of gender in society as we witness how the wives speak in whispers, fully aware that they have no actual "voice" in the decision making. This becomes especially potent when we realize that the women have ideas that might actually work, as opposed to the men's obvious inefficiency and apparent fear of Meek.

The director isn't one to hide her feminism under nonsensical disguises but unlike filmmakers that stigmatize non-mainstream ideologies, she is able to recreate the need for said currents of thought to appear.

In Meek's Cutoff she channels this with Emily Theterow (Williams), who to the shame of the others decides that the Indian should be treated with respect. Of course, the film's politics aren't Disneyfied and we understand at all times, that Emily's treatment of the Indian depends on what she can get out of him.

What's more, in her defense of this stranger, she challenges Meek and the entire patriarchal structure that has defined their journey seems on the verge of collapse. The film studies the purpose of following traditional structures under anomalous circumstances.

We are left wondering then, if a shift in power during the journey would result in long lasting change, or would thing return to normal once their destination was reached?

The film then is by all means a political work, not only because it challenges our notions about the status quo but because in doing so Reichardt, perhaps unintentionally, recreates time appropriate situations, because Meek's traditionalism and stubbornness can easily be perceived as a parable of the Bush administration , but his calm charm and "coolness" in the face of adversity easily take us to the Obama who only recently seems to have achieved an actual purpose in his presidency (it's a freaky coincidence that like Meek, his sudden decisiveness relied on the seemingly accidental encounter with a feared enemy).

If the film seems to be trying to discuss too much, it's only testament to art's capacity of molding itself to the necessities of those who consume it, for it can be said that a few years ago, the film would've been touted as a liberal pro-immigration essay and fifty years ago it would've been feared for its subversive takes on feminism and segregation.

Meek's Cutoff is transgressive political study, a convention-defying genre film and all in all, an excitingly entertaining film (you must watch it if only to witness the year's most authentic action sequence!) but overall it's an ambitiously ambiguous, but never purposeless, evaluation of American history: how they got there and where they're going.

Because when all is said and done few images of this movie year will remain as potent as that of Michelle Williams fearfully holding on to a rifle, trying to reach a compromise between physical and ideological survival.

It's Complicated ***

Director: Nancy Meyers
Cast: Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin
John Krasinski, Rita Wilson, Lake Bell, Zoe Kazan
Hunter Parrish, Caitlin Fitzgerald

Since Nancy Meyers insists on delivering films that take place exclusively in settings where women take baths while having wine and men wear navy blue sailing jackets as if they're impossible to live without, someone had to eventually come and shake her world a bit.
Not surprisingly this person is Meryl Streep, who in "It's Complicated" delivers what might be her sexiest screen performance just as she turns sixty.
She plays Jane, a divorced bakery owner who unexpectedly begins an affair with her ex-husband Jake (Baldwin) who's now married to a younger woman (Bell). They also hide from their children (played by Kazan, Parrish and Fitzgerald) who apparently are still getting over the decade old divorce.
"It's Complicated" is not complicated at all, Meyers inserts a new dilemma in the shape of Adam (Martin), Jane's sensitive architect who's into her and is obviously better than the guy who dumped her for a kid.
But Meyers fools herself into thinking that the turn of events in the film will be surprising as if she hadn't been recycling this same kind of story throughout her directing career.
What she has this time is Meryl, who makes this Martha Stewart world of passionate domesticity something completely her own.
When Jane insists she needs a bigger kitchen (when she has one that already looks like a studio apartment) we don't take it as upper class capriciousness but as the only thing this woman seems prepared to take on at the moment.
Streep gives Jane the right amounts of carelessness to make us believe she's just a drama queen, but watch as she turns this back on us by revealing a woman who only masks her insecurities through this joie de vivre.
Watching her with Baldwin is like watching her time traveling as she looks as beautiful and fresh as she did in, some parts of, "Sophie's Choice". Her animal side is evident when she takes on Jake with passion that overcomes guilt.
To see her actually choose lust over guilt just with a facial expression is the equivalent of Viagra to Jake.
In scenes with Adam she takes on another more earthy side that makes her glow. "I'm always surprised when I can count on someone" she confides in him and we know she means it.
Wherever the screenplay takes her, Streep turns it into a delicate portrayal of someone who might not be as mature as her age suggests instead of the slight beige and white nutcase some of her actions might steer her to.
"Turns out I'm a bit of a slut" she says completely surprised with this realization. In return she has kept surprising us all along as well.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee **1/2

Director: Rebecca Miller
Cast: Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin
Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Monica Bellucci
Ryan McDonald, Zoe Kazan, Mike Binder, Maria Bello
Robin Weigert, Shirley Knight

How do you engage an audience and make them become interested in a character? First you have them believe said character has qualities we want to discover.
Pippa Lee (Wright Penn) is "a mystery, an enigma..." says one of her friends (Binder) minutes into the film.
So check, we have something to unravel.
Then you go and try to solve said mystery by putting together pieces of a puzzle. Therefore we go back in time as Pippa narrates her life to make us understand where she is now.
And since we don't really know what it is exactly we're trying to discover we let the characters engage us.
We learn how Pippa (played by Lively as a younger version) ran away from home, escaping her lunatic mom (Bello) and passive dad (Tim Guinee). She ends up living with her lesbian aunt (Weigert) and her girlfriend (Moore) only to end up becoming addicted to pills and falling in love with-and marrying-a publishing editor (Arkin) who's thirty years her senior.
And this is where we first meet her, she's just moved in with her husband to a retirement community trying to find something new to do, while learning that she might be going insane.
Written and directed by Miller (who also wrote the book the film is based on) "The Lives of Pippa Lee" is obviously its creator's lovechild and as such Miller has trouble knowing what to tell, what to conceal and she doesn't want to give us a bad impression about the people she so devotedly wrote, re-wrote and directed.
Therefore the characters are actually very interesting, even if sometimes they're stuck with ridiculous dialogues and selfconscious quips, but there is absolutely no real plot to follow.
She just keeps inserting new elements (even if they're old because they're Dickensian flashbacks) to make her heroine more appealing.
One of those elements includes new neighbor Chris (Reeves) who more than not turns out to be an excuse for Miller to pull all her deus ex machina moves.
But even with all her tricks and stylistic juxtapositions Miller can never really justify what she's doing and the "many" lives of Pippa Lee are reduced to her being single and then married.
Working with Wright Penn as top accomplice ("to be perfectly honest I've had enough of being an enigma" she teases) they make an event out of what turns out to be a not quite fascinating life.
The actress is at her best, she's tender and loving with Arkin, she's motherhood personified with the actors who play her kids (Kazan and McDonald) and she does her best Marcia Cross when she has to share scenes with her neurotic friend (Ryder).
Underneath her undeniable sexiness and appeal Wright Penn is above all bewitching. Try to take your eyes away from her and you won't be able to.
If only the movie had something else to say (we often wonder why do we need to know about this woman's life) instead of settling for facile resolutions and awkward quirk, then we would have been in for a real treat.
Because as it is, the movie comes, goes and Pippa is still as much of a mystery to us when the movie ends. "I feel like this is just the beginning" she says in the last scene, but perhaps only Miller is willing to go on this journey with her.

I Hate Valentine's Day *

Director: Nia Vardalos
Cast: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett
Zoe Kazan, Rachel Dratch, Stephen Guarino, Amir Arison
Jay O. Sanders, Gary Wilmes, Mike Starr

There are some days when Nia Vardalos makes you think she could fuel an entire nuclear reactor based on charm alone and there are others where you see her as someone desperately overstaying her welcome by grabbing on to "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" goodwill.
In this, her directorial debut (which she also co-wrote), she belong to the latter category. She plays Genevieve, a happy-go-lucky Brooklyn florist who smiles 24/7 because of her "fall in love but avoid relationships" policy.
She has a strict set of rules by which she goes out with someone for just five dates to enjoy the process of falling (sex included) and then getting out in time to avoid the pain.
If a guy, or a Glenn Close character, did this they'd by sexual maniacs bordering on psychotic disorder, but because it's Vardalos (in her one woman show) she's a dating genius.
Her system of course is set to fail when she meets "the guy", this time it's Greg (Corbett) a laid back restaurant owner who catches her eye from the first time she spots him.
After they're done with their five date thing she realizes she wants more, he remains detached to keep her satisfied and we've got ourselves a little dramatic tension...
The original premise sounds cute, also very selfish, but mostly refreshing amidst how the romantic comedy has succumbed to repetitive plots.
Vardalos should be praised for her intention, but she forgot to study both parts of the equation. While to some her Genevieve is a goddess of love and happiness to others she has got to look like a nymphomaniac who uses these rules as ways to have sex with different people and have lady like justifications (they were dating after all).
The ones who stand on her side in this include the entire ensemble, all of whom are placed in the right spot or scene to fulfill Genevieve's life.
She's got the reliable, and reliably clichéd, gay employees (Guarino and Arison), the needy girlfriend (the wonderful, but underused, Kazan) and a bizarre group of people (including Dratch) who always are sitting at a diner waiting for Genevieve to come in and solve all their romantic problems.
It shows what kind of writer Vardalos is whenever her characters resemble animatronics from a Disney ride that spring to life only when there's an audience.
But something must've struck her as odd, because she introduces some daddy issues to make her character look more human (or at least give her writer/director/analyst credits), even though said issues also seem too facile to justify her lifestyle.
Vardalos flows through the film completely devoid of any sense of reality and in this way her view of love makes sense.
Love makes us go nuts and in this egocentric movie, she makes it clear that she loves herself.

Revolutionary Road ***

Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet
Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon, Zoe Kazan, David Harbour
Kathryn Hahn, Richard Easton

The suburbs have been the mythical creature of innumerable films; it's within the picket fences and tree lined roads where some of the darkest machinations behind American culture have occurred.
Seen by the cynical as the place where dreams go to die, the notion that anyone who holds esteem towards these values is a killer robot or an alien has spoken more about the people who say it, than their actual discourse has done for them.
But when we are invited to view them under a critical light in a context that includes several other variables instead of just one accusing finger, the suburbs can turn out to be much more complex than we'd imagined.
And to explore this ambiguity seemed to be the intention of Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road", an adaptation of Richard Yates' cult novel about the Wheelers, Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet), a couple who moves to the suburbs where they find their dreams crumbling before their eyes.
Frank works as an "executive" in a city based company where not even he's sure of what he does, while April stays home looking after the house and their children.
They socialize with the neighbors which include real estate agent, the gossipy Mrs.Helen Givings (an excellent Bates), her son John (Shannon) who has recently been released from a mental institution and the Campbells, Shep (Harbour who does miracles with the little scenes he's given) and Milly (Hahn).
The Wheelers find comfort in their knowledge that they're above everyone else. That the executive lunches, martini breaks and egg salad sandwiches are just a waiting room for the grand life they have ahead of them.
But when April realizes they are slowly giving in to convention, she takes action and comes up with a plan for them to move to Paris where she will work while Frank "finds himself".
Early on the film announces it will be mostly about marital problems and for this it becomes a showcase for its two lead actors who are phenomenal.
DiCaprio, ever more maturing, imbues Frank with the kind of fear only lessened by the fact that you may have seen it in people you know.
His eagerness to please and a sense of "deserving" everything promised with post-WWII America, but not getting it or at least not in the way he expected, touches on a sensitive part of you.
With April, Winslet goes for earnestness avoiding the melodrama one would come to expect from a hysterical housewife. She throws tantrums and most of the time sparks up fights she knows she shouldn't be holding, but there is something remarkably human about April that makes these things comprehensible, maybe the fact that a sense of emasculating her husband is one of the only things that make her feel alive.
Her eyes often wonder "how did we get here?" and her nuances are what give April the soul the movie never obtains. Talking to a friend she confesses how "she wanted in" not escaping and in the same scene she goes from moving and confessional to raw and sexual without us expecting it.
Eventually we wonder if April is putting on a performance all the time. Winslet taps into this element to make us doubt our very surroundings.
DiCaprio and Winslet convey this angst beautifully and turn "Revolutionary Road" into the movie that chronicles the implicitness other dysfunctional suburbia films have taken for granted.
Shannon's character then comes and questions everything about the Wheelers in a way nobody else dared to, think of him as a contemporary viewer interceding for all who have doubts about why people choose these lives.
Because if there is something true about the film is that its themes are as relevant as ever. John whose insanity might receive a milder diagnosis nowadays, has so many questions that he can't contain them and Shannon holds up remarkably well, given how other actors would've dealt with this character.
He represents a rage that most would opt to hide and in his final scene creeps under your skin and gives the film what ultimately becomes it's one undeniable truth.
Mendes crafts a work that is easy to admire, giving it a nice structure and an adequate pace, if the symbolism is nothing too new (enough with the pastels and light! Give us a film about suburbia inspired by German Expressionism!), it's talking to us in the only terms the director knows how and this is perhaps because even he's unsure of what he's trying to say.
The director puts out a troubling representation of traditional values, that nevertheless offers no option. It's like a window to hell from inside a burning house.
If he gets one thing right is the idea that the one thing humans can share is their misery, especially in the last scene where he tries to send us away with an ironic wink at a how it all will become a vicious cycle, but feels more like how Frank is described at the beginning of the film "a smartass with a big mouth" or camera in this case.
Throughout the film something that remains constant is the carelessness for the children, they are barely featured and the characters themselves' are rarely asked for opinion.
They appear purely as accesories and perhaps without trying Mendes makes the most lasting impression with them.
By not taking them into account he makes their consequent story the only one we're dying to hear.