Three Movies You Need to See

Since my colleague Gerhardt Popwell has cornered the market on reviewing comic book movies and action flicks, I thought I’d try my hand at something a little more. . . let’s say cerebral. I’ve reviewed three neglected gems from the last 10 years of U.S. and British cinema. There’s not a single car chase or caped crusader to be found in the following films, but there are enough narrative twists and turns to keep any discerning viewer on the edge of his (or her) seat.

Margaret (2011) – Despite a big-name cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, Anna Paquin and Matthew Broderick, plus the involvement of Hollywood power players Scott Rudin and Martin Scorsese, Margaret remains stubbornly obscure. Any reputation it does have concerns its troubled off-screen history of litigation, which involved among other things an overlong director’s cut that prompted Scorsese to swoop in and cut a shorter version with his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker. (The film was released in 2011, but it was actually made in 2005.)

Paquin plays the film’s title character, a smart, entitled Manhattanite who’s by turns annoying and sympathetic in the ways most teenagers are. Through a freak accident she finds herself, along with a bus driver played by Ruffalo, witness to the sudden death of a stranger. Margaret thinks she bears some responsibility for what happened, and the bulk of the film concerns her attempts to make amends, insinuating herself into the lives of the dead woman’s family and harassing the driver in a dangerous attempt to force him to confront his role in the deadly accident. But how much of her increasingly feckless efforts are coming from legitimate guilt, or is she just another self-obsessed teenager hijacking someone else’s tragedy to focus more attention on herself?

Margaret implies all these questions, but it is director Kenneth Lonergan’s special gift not to provide any clear answers. That makes the film a challenge for audiences used to black-and-white characters and filmmakers who queue them how to feel about every line of dialogue with heavy-handed tropes like swelling background music. Lonergen not only lets the audience judge Margaret’s behavior, he makes it extra hard on them by showing her warts and all. Filled with wonderful scenes and subplots involving Matt Damon as one of Margaret’s high school teachers and Jean Reno as her mother’s boyfriend, this film works much like a good novel, leaving its finely chiseled portraits of humanity etched in the mind long after the screen goes dark.

Lonergan is best known for 2016’s Manchester By the Sea, which won a best actor Oscar for Casey Affleck and scored best picture and best director nominations as well. Manchester is a decent film, but it doesn’t really offer enough of a reward for audiences to sit through its taciturn gloominess. In contrast, Margaret is full of life, with Paquin’s manic teenage energy careening off the adults in her life and causing all manner of consequences. This is a tough movie to find, but it’s awfully damned good — way too good to be so widely unseen.

Locke (2013) – It’s no secret that Tom Hardy is one of our greatest actors. He’s earned his reputation playing classic tough guys and scenery-chewing villains in films like The Dark Knight Rises, Dunkirk and The Revenant. In Locke, however, he fully immerses himself in a more down-to-earth character, a beleaguered husband and father who excels at his high-stress job but harbors a skeleton in his closet that’s about to send his entire world crashing down. If I almost forgot to mention that Locke is a gimmick movie — the entire film takes place inside a moving car as the driver, Locke (the only character who appears on screen) handles personal and professional crises via a series of phone conversations while speeding along an English highway —  it’s because the film so instantly and thoroughly transcends said gimmick. Director Steven Knight shows a deft touch with the material, sprinkling in just enough shots of fuzzy nighttime traffic lights to forestall any visual claustrophobia audiences might feel trapped in that car with Locke. And a few other actors offer voice support, including Locke’s wife, boss, teenage son, and mistress, though we never see any of their faces.

But it’s Hardy who really earns his keep. He’s in the driver’s seat every second of this movie, but no matter how bad things get for Locke — and they get bad — we never want him to stop driving, or talking. He’s such great company, even as his life is unraveling before our eyes in a fast-developing crisis that threatens to eviscerate his family, his job and his good name. Hardy has the good sense to eschew the kind of Pacino-like histrionics that in the past have left him open to ridicule. His Locke is a tightly focused Type-A personality, prone to blunt talk with the men who work for him but able to shift easily into genial dad mode with his teenage son. Using only his eyes and his voice, Hardy is able to uncover deep pools of pathos as this proud, tough man wrestles with a decision that could render his entire life meaningless in one night. It’s a brilliant performance, a tour-de-force of slow-burn intensity without a single “showy” moment. Think of Locke as sort of an inverted road movie: Hardy never slows down, and we never stop barreling deeper into the bowels of his psyche.

Side Effects (2013) – My final rave may carry extra weight because when this film came out in 2013 I was anything but a Steven Soderbergh fan. I thought he’d mostly wasted the talent he showed with his 1989 debut Sex, Lies and Videotape. When he wasn’t pumping out wan, disposable genre fare like the Oceans movies, he was saddling us with plodding, over-earnest think pieces like Traffic and Solaris or unwatchable film school tripe like Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience. But Side Effects felt different from the start, less concerned with perfecting an air of skewed cinematic detachment than with exploring the inner life of its story. Jude Law and Rooney Mara star as a New York City psychiatrist and his new patient, a beautiful young wife who has every reason to be happy but is mired in crippling depression. He prescribes a new pill that’s just hit the market and, as the film’s title suggests, complications ensue. To say more would spoil much of the plot, but the neatest thing about Side Effects is the way it starts off as one kind of film before turning into something else entirely. For about 40 or 50 minutes, it seems like Soderbergh has made a sober meditation on the moral implications of the anti-depressant boom. Mara’s plight raises some pretty hefty questions about our potential to do previously unthought-of deeds — both good and evil — under the influence of these wonder drugs that proliferated in the 1980s and ’90s.

Then comes a plot twist, however, and before you can say “Danny Ocean,” Side Effects has turned into a first-rate crime thriller in the manner of Gone Girl. Normally I’d consider such a thematic shift to be a cop-out — the inevitable result of writers biting off more than they can chew and forced to contrive some third-act hi-jinks to wrap things up. I’m not sure I can explain why I found it so thrilling this time, but this movie just works. It helps that Side Effects has a cracking good plot that truly is clever and unexpected. And the metaphysical questions the film flirts with don’t exactly go away, even if the film’s story does erase their dramatic impact. You just wind up getting two good movies instead of one. As in Margaret, the cast here is outstanding. Neither Mara nor Law has ever been better: Their palpable sexual chemistry in the early scenes are what draw us into the film. Channing Tatum proves here that he can be a pretty good actor too, a lesson he would put on wider display in Soderbergh’s 2017 flick, Logan Lucky. The only false note, and my only criticism of Side Effects is the casting of Catherine Zeta-Jones in a key part. Her limitations as an actress are made strikingly apparent amid such superior talents who are all at the top their game. It’s a small quibble, though, in an otherwise absorbing drama that shows how effective Soderbergh can be when he gets out of his own way.