New movie review: The Martian

Matt Damon plays an astronaut stranded on Mars in director Ridley Scott's The Martian.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a talented person work. It really does not matter the craft. Watching a skilled carpenter build a table can be as pleasing as watching a concert pianist perform or a top chef prepare a delicious meal. It should not be terribly revolutionary to suggest competence is appealing. It is one of the reasons the spy genre is so durable. Spies are ceaselessly competent. They accomplish with ease tasks that would confound us mere mortals, and that is why they are so damned fun to watch.

There are no spies in The Martian, but there is competence to spare, and as a result, the film is a joyous exercise in smart, big-budget moviemaking. From director Ridley Scott and writer Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir, The Martian is the story of astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), who is marooned on Mars after a storm forces a speedy evacuation by the crew of the Ares III mission. Thinking Watney has died in the storm, the rest of the crew takes off and heads back to Earth.

When their error is discovered by mission control, an all-out rescue effort begins, and the film cuts back and forth between the frantic attempts by NASA to reach the stranded astronaut and Watney’s pragmatic, life-extending measures. The film settles into a rhythm early. Problems arise, and intelligent people solve them. Another problem demands another solution, and so on until either Watney is saved or a problem comes up that cannot be solved.

Mercifully, there is no villain in the film – no aliens, no shadowy government agencies, no one working at cross-purposes to the characters. The enemies are time and space. Watney has limited resources and infinite space. He must survive on his own long enough to allow the rescue mission to reach him. A botanist, he devises a way to farm potatoes on the once-barren planet. This will buy him some time. It is up to mission control back home to solve the space problem, which is that they have a lot of space to cover to get to Watney.

Kristen Wiig and Chiwetel Ejiofor in The Martian.

Populated by an appealingly eclectic and talented cast, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Jeff Daniels, Donald Glover, and Kristen Wiig, the ground team at NASA gets to work. Under incredible pressure and with no margin for error, they propose to send an unmanned probe to Mars with supplies to keep Watney alive until the next planned manned mission arrives. When this fails, it falls to the crew of the Ares III, still on their way back to Earth, to decide if they will risk their lives to attempt a rescue of the man they left behind.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who made his name writing intricate, puzzle-box-type stories such as Cabin in the Woods and the television show Lost, Goddard’s screenplay is straightforward and workmanlike. More Apollo 13 than 2001: A Space Odyssey, the script is less interested in the meaning of life than in the extension of it. For The Martian, the former approach works, and Goddard and Scott smartly give all the action set pieces and narrative developments room to breathe rather than overstuffing the spaces between with needless philosophizing.

Movies like this work best when allowed to bask in silence, and on Mars, silence is the one thing not in short supply. While the top-flight cast also includes Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, and Kate Mara, among others, the film lives and dies with the lonely, life-and-death struggle of Watney and with Damon’s portrayal of the stranded astronaut. Long stretches of the film are inhabited by just Watney and the video diary he keeps, partially for the record and partially for his sanity. In these moments of quiet solitude, the audience is allowed to feel his grief and isolation but also his hope.

Recent comments in the press aside, Damon has a charming, everyman-like quality about him that makes you want to root for him. The character is witty and affable – two traits Damon has excelled at displaying in nearly all his roles – but the dire nature of his situation is never once out of mind. Damon’s well calibrated performance is a perfect balance of light and dark, playful and practical, which is the same tightrope the film itself walks so well.

Scott has fallen out of critical favor as a director in recent years, releasing a string of indifferently received films (A Good Year; American Gangster; Body of Lies; Robin Hood) followed by three highly divisive ones (Prometheus; The Counselor; Exodus: Gods and Kings). There was nothing necessarily wrong with these works – I happen to love Prometheus – but something was missing from most of them. With The Martian, Scott proves he is the same talented director who long ago brought us Alien and Blade Runner, as well as the relatively more recent Gladiator.

Here, Scott provides the same sense of awe-inspiring wonder that has marked his best work, but it is buoyed by an inspiring story of genuine human accomplishment. The Martian vistas are the kind of breathtaking visual achievement Scott can conjure on a whim, and this movie is full of beautiful images, but its greatest success is its people.

Working from Goddard’s script and Weir’s story, Scott astonishes with more than just visuals. Think how rare that is to see a big, effects-driven movie, which this clearly is, and to be amazed by something more than how pretty everything is. In The Martian, we are amazed simply to watch smart people confront impossible odds with determination and hope.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Bel Powley stars in writer-director Marielle Heller's new film The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

Never have I been a teenage girl. It is a flaw of mine that cannot be corrected. That being true, I am not the target audience for The Diary of a Teenage Girl, nor am I probably in a position to gauge its reality and emotional honesty. I can say this about first-time writer-director Marielle Heller’s new film, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Phoebe Gloeckner: It is beautifully acted and lovingly crafted, and it certainly feels real.

Relative newcomer Bel Powley plays Minnie, a 15-year-old girl growing up in ’70s San Francisco and exploring her burgeoning sexuality. Her mother is mostly absent from her life, her little sister is too young to understand her experiences, and her primary father figure no longer lives nearby. For all intents and purposes, she is alone, and the film does an expert job of depicting how Minnie conflates physical closeness with emotional connection.

At one point, she strips naked and looks herself over in her bedroom mirror. In voiceover, she says she desperately wants somebody to touch her body, but she fears no one will ever want to. The combination of desire, low self-esteem, and teenage hormones makes Minnie vulnerable, and the first person to pounce on that vulnerability is Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), her mother’s boyfriend.

There is no sugarcoating in the script, which opens with the line, “Today, I had sex for the first time. Holy shit.” Minnie loses her virginity to Monroe. They will have many more sexual liaisons, which are depicted explicitly but not luridly throughout the film. It is hard to say how a male director would have handled this material, but as forthright as Heller is with her lead’s sexuality, the scenes are photographed matter-of-factly, with little prurient interest.

We are not meant to be turned on by this love affair, but we should not be repulsed either. Like Minnie, the audience is on a journey of discovery. We have the benefit of distance and the knowledge that this relationship is damaging to her. Minnie does not have this benefit and must learn, as we all do, by trial and error.

Powley, who has appeared on a number of British television series and in one previous feature film, is the heart of the movie. Everything rests on her ability to convey the feeling of being aggressively sexual but too inexperienced to understand how that sexuality will affect her life and relationships. Powley carries this off with brightness and the kind of cock-eyed certainty youth affords.

Skarsgård is good enough as Monroe to make you almost forget the creepy, predatory nature of the character and feel sorry for this doofus who does only what is most convenient for him – almost. Kristen Wiig, who plays Minnie’s mom, is also solid in the mostly dramatic role of a woman whose life has not tuned out the way she hoped and which continues to spiral out of control.

Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgard also star.

The world needs more stories like this, preferably, as in this case, told by female storytellers. Heller, who spearheaded the effort to bring The Diary of a Teenage Girl to the screen, is a clearly gifted filmmaker. She and cinematographer Brandon Trost, known mostly for his work on action films, capture the gauzy feel of the early ’70s and deftly parallel that with the haze of being a teenager in a world for which you are not quite prepared.

Immediately after watching the film, I was troubled by the almost single-minded focus on Minnie’s sexuality. She has few other defining traits. She wants to be an artist and is often shown drawing. She has some correspondence with artist Aline Kominsky, who in the timeline of the film, is yet to become Robert Crumb’s wife but who is already a talented artist in her own right. That is about it, though. She is a wannabe artist who is obsessed with sex.

I wondered if this is a reductive view of teenagers in general and teenage girls in particular. Surely, teenage girls must have more on their minds than sex, having sex, and who will have sex with them. Minnie does not seem to think about anything more than sex and has conversations that always wrap back around to sex in some way. I initially considered this a failure on the part of the film, particularly as there are so few stories in theaters about teenage girls and their real lives – anyone living in a dystopian sci-fi future or who is in love with a vampire does not count.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I reconsidered this position. I made the mistake of asking Minnie to represent all teenage girls – again, due to their lack of representation in the marketplace, this was just my first instinct – but this is an unfair burden to place upon the film. Given the semi-autobiographical nature of the source material, it would be more fitting to view this as the story of one teenage girl. Minnie is a specific person. She is no one’s archetype, and her preoccupations are her own.

Seen in this light, the problem is less with the film and more with the Hollywood system that refuses to tell relatable stories about teenage girls. I promise teenage girls go to the movies just as much as teenage boys; however, it is doubtful the two demographics are served by the same films. The solution, then, is not to quibble over the story of Minnie, who has every right to be whomever she wants to be, but instead to push for more films about girls like Minnie but whose preoccupations may be different. That would be progress.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: The Skeleton Twins

Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader play siblings in the new comedy-drama The Skeleton Twins.

There are bonds that can never be broken, and there are bonds that must be broken. As The Skeleton Twins progresses, it becomes clear which are which. It is undeniable that twins Maggie and Milo share the former, but as the movie begins, they have not spoken in 10 years. The intrigue comes less from the dawning realization of what drove this wedge between them and more from the careful mending of the wounds it left.

When we meet Milo, he is living in a cluttered apartment in Los Angeles and seems to be reeling from a breakup with his most recent boyfriend. He blasts his stereo, hops in the bathtub, and slashes his wrists. Across the country in upstate New York, Maggie stares at herself in the mirror, then looks down at a handful of pills. She, too, is going to end it, but moments before she does, she gets a call that her brother is in the hospital. She picks him up and invites him to stay with her and her new husband. He accepts the invitation, and everything else flows from there.

Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader play the titular siblings. Every scene between the two resonates with depth, warmth, and humor, and despite the movie’s dark tone, the pairing of Wiig and Hader cannot help but bring light to the proceedings. Though not portraying solely dramatic or tragic characters, the actors are afforded the opportunity to show new sides to their well-known comic personae.

In particular, Hader infuses Milo with the energy and wit so often indicative of the characters he plays in his films or on Saturday Night Live, but The Skeleton Twins allows him to show what happens to the smartass when the door closes and there is no else left in the room. His go-to tactic of making jokes even in the darkest times reveals a person who wants to make others happy despite his own happiness remaining elusive.

As Milo is released from the hospital, he is reading “Marley and Me.” Maggie arrives and accidentally spoils the ending. He plays the victim, and she feels bad, before he reveals that he already knew how it ends, that everyone knows how it ends. She says, “I see you’ve still got your sense of humor.” He responds, “They can’t take that away from me.” This is another joke, but it also is a moment of raw vulnerability. He is a struggling actor who waits tables and keeps only the company of his fish. All he may have left are his wisecracks.

Maggie is so mired in her rut that even her humor escapes her. Her job is uninspiring, and though her marriage to Lance (Luke Wilson) tethers her to reality, it also causes her no end of guilt. We never see what her days were like before Milo showed up, but Wiig’s performance makes it clear Maggie checked out of her life a long time ago.

The ways she tries to shake herself out of her depression are observational of the limited options she sees for herself and the passive role she plays in her day-to-day interactions. But the more she lies to herself, the deeper into the muck she sinks. Milo comes back into her life at her lowest moment, but it is just the nadir of a low ebb that has gone on since before we can know. She did not get here overnight. She got here over years.

Wilson’s scene-stealing turn as the husband who may be the nicest guy in the world is both hilarious and sad. A genuinely good, generally happy person who plays fantasy football and enjoys The Deadliest Catch, Lance does not belong among these people. His light-hearted optimism is the antithesis of what Milo and Maggie experience, and his persistent upbeat attitude has the effect of rubbing the siblings’ noses in a state of being they could never enjoy.

Though there is some family backstory, including a father who battled depression and lost, the script relies too much on “The Big Event” in their lives that brought Milo and Maggie to this point. Writer-director Craig Johnson and co-writer Mark Heyman seem to understand what it is like to suffer from depression and the difficult process of recovery, but they seem at a loss to explain its origins.

Depression is an impossibly multifaceted disease caused by myriad genetic and environmental factors, and it would be a lot to ask for a movie to explain. But by pinning so much of the siblings’ current state to one major event from their teenage years, the movie undermines its potential for exploration and growth, instead settling for deep characters defined by shallow circumstance.

That Hader and Wiig are great in these roles in undeniable, but one gets the feeling that given more incisive material, their performances could have been transcendent. At the same time, the filmmakers clearly set out to make an affecting comedy split evenly between pathos and humor. At that, they have succeeded, and no one can take that away from them.

See it? Yes.