New movie review: Youth

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel star in writer-director Paolo Sorrentino's Youth.

Two years ago, filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino wrote and directed the Academy Award-winning The Great Beauty. Every element of that film, right down to its plot, owed a debt to Italian master Federico Fellini. In both style and substance, it was a direct riff on the classic La Dolce Vita. As such, it was a remarkably successful film, tapping into the bombast and irreverent energy of that earlier work. Though it may not exactly have been an original idea, Sorrentino at least showed he had a point of view and certainly demonstrated a directorial flair.

Now, Sorrentino is back with Youth, which borrows from the same playbook but lacks the passion or commitment of either The Great Beauty or the films that so influenced him. Youth is stuffed to the gills with ideas and imagery, but the whole ultimately adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. Every time the film gets close to pinning down some deeper truth or meaning, Sorrentino backs away, seemingly less out of fear than preoccupation. He perhaps has too many thoughts to get out and cannot focus on just one at a time.

Michael Caine plays Fred Ballinger, an internationally famous composer, now long retired, who is on holiday at an exclusive spa in the Alps. He is something of a miser, failing to find joy in much of anything, and his doctors, friends, and family have diagnosed him as apathetic. He seems to feel that diagnosis is accurate and does everything he can to embrace it. He is joined at the resort by daughter/assistant Lena (Rachel Weisz), legendary filmmaker Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), up-and-coming actor Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano), and a whole cavalcade of grotesques.

Generally speaking, it is folly to compare two filmmakers’ work directly, but in every decision he makes, Sorrentino invites the comparison to Fellini. In fact, he seems to relish it. The cast of characters – or caricatures, depending on your point of view – he assembles for Youth seems culled straight from a casting session for one of Fellini’s more whimsical flights of fancy. In addition to the central group, there is an obese former soccer star, an older married couple who never speaks, the recently named Miss Universe, a few pop stars playing themselves, and a teenage prostitute, among others.

These people mostly hang around the edges of the story, and most of them hardly say a word. They provide color to a relatively staid central plot, but that color is meant to give the illusion of depth. In practice, Sorrentino never seems interested in exploring any of their inner lives and instead settles for the mere suggestion they have inner lives before shifting the focus back to our central four.

The plot such as it is revolves around an emissary from Queen Elizabeth II who tries to persuade Fred to conduct again for a special ceremony. He refuses for personal reasons, and the rest of the film ostensibly explores what those personal reasons could be. Mick and a group of young writers are putting the finishing touches on a screenplay for the movie Mick wants to be his legacy, while Jimmy is resting before going off to shoot a Serious Film – the capital letters are mine. Lena is waiting to go on a trip with her husband, who is also Mick’s son, but he leaves her for one of those pop stars I mentioned. She is thus left adrift emotionally and geographically, so she remains at the spa.

Rachel Weisz in Youth.

For a movie featuring fantastic leading performances from Caine and Keitel, Weisz is actually the standout. Given a lot less to play by the script, Weisz takes a fairly cliché character – the adult daughter still hurt over the way her father treated the family – and gives the role a memorable spin, providing the kind of strength and motivation lacking in many of the other characters.

Caine is still a force to be reckoned with onscreen, and Sorrentino does well to play off his lead’s public persona as a debonair man about town who does not really care what others think of him. As Fred, Caine is charming and off-putting in equal measure, and from an audience standpoint, he is just a lot of fun to watch. Keitel is great as well but with a far more problematic character. Sorrentino wants us to be a lot more interested in Mick’s supposed crowning achievement than he gives us any reason to be.

At its core, the film is about artists concerned with their legacies while confronting more immediate matters such as aging and ill health. Sorrentino draws explicit parallels between the younger Jimmy, who is best known for playing a robot in a dumb science-fiction movie and wishes people knew his more serious films, and the older Fred, whose best known compositions are his “Simple Songs,” though he has written more complex and impressive works.

In theory, such contradictions and concerns could be fertile ground for exploration, introspection, and character development, but again, Sorrentino does not seem interested in exploring. It is more like a survey of all the ways these characters might feel about their lives and legacies. The film never seems to have a specific view on any of the ideas it presents but rather meanders from story to story, haphazardly tripping over stray profound thoughts along the way.

It must be acknowledged, however, that in all this wandering, Sorrentino manages to find some beautiful imagery and stunning compositions. It is almost remarkable for a movie that wants so badly to be about the importance of substance over style just how flashy the filmmaking is and how empty its ideas are. The alpine vistas are obviously gorgeous, but even the interiors are given energy and interest by Sorrentino’s camera placements and shot choices. If only the story had generated as much intrigue, Youth really could have been something.

See it? No.

New movie review: Interstellar

Matthew McConaughey explores the nothing in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.

The vast emptiness of space is an ideal setting for a contemplative exploration of humanity, loneliness, and the need for love and community. At the same time, the chaotic machinations of the universe mean there are galaxies full of stars and planets around which to base an epic science-fiction action-adventure movie. It is possible Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar would have been a good film if it had told a story about any of that. Alas, it is neither a good film nor very interested in storytelling.

Bloated, empty, and incoherent, Interstellar shows up at the theater with a bag full of tricks amounting to nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Having never been a convert to the cult of Nolan, maybe I am not the target audience for this film, but it is hard to imagine who would be. This is classic big-budget gimmickry, which wants so badly to pluck our heart strings, engage our minds, and overwhelm our senses but succeeds only in being cloying, pontificating, and very loud, often all at the same time.

Emotionally manipulative to its core, the film might have had a chance at drawing tears and inspiring empathy if we knew who any of these people were. Instead, Nolan looks down on his creation as a god might and observes the little ants running around on their corn farms and the wastelands of uncolonized planets. The question becomes: Why should any of us in the audience take a different view?

Late in the film, this thesis becomes clear when two characters – one of whom we have only just met – engage in a fistfight and roll around on the ground. Nolan pulls back to reveal the scope of the icy landscape on which they stand. The intent is to frame these petty people as small when compared to the backdrop of the universe and the scale of the problem they are trying to solve – to save the human race.

It almost works, except that we are meant to care about who wins the fight. By forcing us to want the “good guy” to win, the movie undercuts its message of human pettiness and frailty and encourages the audience to join in the squabbling. This is just one among many examples of the movie trying to have its philosophical cake and eat it, too.

Humanity is dying. A vaguely discussed famine has gripped the world, and as food supplies dwindle and dust storms rage, a small governmental organization – NASA – believes it has the answer. We will leave the planet. Missions are sent to explore the universe and find habitable worlds for us, while back on Earth, the destruction continues unabated.

The movie is at odds with itself almost from the very beginning. It wants the sci-fi spectacle of so many outer-space actioners, but it also wants the human emotion of a low-key drama. It delivers only one of these – the one with explosions. Splitting the film between an environmental disaster drama on Earth and the action of space exploration, Nolan and editor Lee Smith seem at loss for how to connect the two threads. Too often, they build to incredible climaxes at one location only to cut away to the other, but rather than build tension, these cuts destroy any momentum the story may have gathered.

None of this would be as problematic if the characters existed as anything beyond broad sketches, but somehow, in a nearly three-hour movie, the script forgets to give any of the characters even rudimentary reasons for their often-baffling decisions. Quite clearly, they are movie characters making choices that benefit no one and nothing but the plot.

As Nolan films are wont to do, Interstellar draws a superb cast for even its smallest roles. Leading the way are Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain, supported by Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, David Gyasi, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, and Nolan regular Michael Caine. They all give fine performances, taking into account the material with which they have to work, but apart from one or two strong moments from McConaughey, they are lost in the morass of sentiment and barrage of spectacle to which the film has committed.

The most ready comparison is to Nolan’s own Inception, with its puzzle-box plotting, lecture-hall pedantry, and larger-than-life visuals. Without wanting to start a debate on the merits of Inception, I hope we can agree the dream worlds of the film were somewhat lacking in imagination. In his latest, Nolan doubles down on beyond-the-stars blandness and delivers some of the least intriguing intergalactic worlds this side of an Arizona desert.

With infinite resources at their disposal, the filmmakers give us one planet that appears to be all shallow water and one that appears to be all ice. I have no doubt worlds such as these exist in one form or another, but to set a movie there seems a dubious prospect at best. In Interstellar, we visit both and find little of interest on either.

If you insist on seeing this movie, I would urge you to pay the IMAX surcharge – assuming you can find true IMAX in your area – as there are two bravura space-travel scenes worth the added price of admission. Even these are comparatively staid against something such as Stanley Kubrick’s “Beyond the Infinite” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but they are the only moments where you might feel anything but bored while sitting in the theater.

This is the final and most egregious sin of Interstellar. As much as it wants us to think about our place in the universe, the way we treat our planet, and the connections we form with others, it simply fails to foster any interest in its ideas. By the third or fourth time a character advises others to “rage against the dying of the light,” it becomes clear this movie has no new ideas. The script is comprised only of shopworn pseudo-philosophies that might look good on a dorm-room poster, which is just as well, since a lot of college freshmen are going to be hanging this one on their walls.

Were one to look too closely – and I would discourage anyone from doing so – the only things to be found are dangerously destructive ideologies that espouse the supremacy of humanity and the human race’s right to seek and destroy. It is a literal scorched-earth policy writ large on the big screen and passed off as an intelligent take on our special place in existence. If this movie is correct and the universe is empty but for us, so much the better, and we have gotten what we earned. We are kings of nothing.

See it? No.