The Nice Guys, Irrational Man, Embrace of the Serpent

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in The Nice Guys

Shane Black's The Nice Guys is, like his previous Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a buddy film disguised as a comic mystery. Black's big break in Hollywood was his script for Lethal Weapon, along with Top Gun the ultimate 80s bromance, in which narrative drive was sacrificed to the bonding rituals of Messrs. Gibson and Glover. 

Not much has changed in thirty years. Here, the leads are Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling and there is no wife or girlfriend to distract us from the burgeoning relationship between the two. They meet cute on opposite sides of a case and when the older dick breaks the ice by breaking the Goose's hymen, er arm, then they can bond while solving the shaggy dog mystery that Black has concocted.

The jokes are stale, the plot nonexistent and the gunplay rote. Still, the leads are charming and Angourie Rice, as Gosling's daughter, is a find. Black has a flair for funky ephemera and has an obvious affection for his LA locales. As a visual stylist, Black is fairly slack, but I'll take him over Richard Donner any day. The Nice Guys is cinematically underwhelming, yet it is a pleasant enough diversion.

Incrementally better is Woody Allan's Irrational Man. Middling Woody, the film is competently shot and acted with lots of walking and talking shots of the leading man and his ladies as has been Allen's wont since Sleeper. Joaquin Phoenix, one of our best leading men, is an uneasy fit as a troubled (he has a paunch and drinks from a flask while driving his Volvo) Philosophy professor. I'm not sure Phoenix would ever be right for the relatively Apollonian oeuvre of Allen. He is best amidst the Dionysian unease of a Paul Thomas Anderson. Allen is unable to unleash the sexual charisma that Anderson did in Inherent Vice despite the stalwart assistance of Parker Posey and Emma Stone.  

Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix in Irrational Man

This is fatal to the climax of the film. Phoenix has carried out the "perfect crime", poisoning a, perhaps, corrupt judge who he has no personal connection to. Stone, his student and lover, is onto him and has threatened to expose him if he does not turn himself in. Phoenix tries to throw her down an elevator shaft, but trips on a flashlight (symbol!) that is a memento of one of their trysts and falls to his deserved demise. Because Allen has not let Phoenix's performance breathe, his character lacks the charm to make him seem a tempting devil rather than an intellectual creep. There is no surprise for the audience in his perfidy, just confusion that Stone's character did not earlier discern his villainy.

Phoenix is adept at spouting philosophical jargon, but, as soon as he says he is working on a book on Heidegger, the mindful reader knows something is wrong with his moral compass. Some critics have branded the philosophical nature of the film as facile, but I am inclined to give the Woodman a break on this because it is obvious that he is fascinated by the presence of evil in everyday life: the portraits of bourgeois men getting away with murder in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point are among his most resonant. 

Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent is an interesting look at the clash between modern and so called primitive perspectives as a shaman encounters two different German scholars forty years apart in the Amazonian forest. Guerra shoots in black and white which heightens the harshness and danger of the rain forest instead of its lush beauty.

Nilbio Torres in Embrace of the Serpent

The message of the film is rather predictable, that we have as much to learn from indigenous people as they do from us, but the skill of the direction and performers raises what could have been a hackneyed art flick into a generally compelling film. Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolivar are both superb as the young and old iterations of the shaman, Karamakate. The three dimensionality of their portrayals helps Embrace of the Serpent skirt a romanticization of the 'noble savage" that has plagued the Western canon since, at least, The Last of the Mohicans.

Guerra is adept at portraying the myriad hazards of the rain forest and Karamakate's adroit calm. The requisite trippy sequence is botched, as they almost always are. How a film artist can portray a subjective ecstatic experience in a narrative is always a conundrum though I did like how Jane Campion portrayed Kate Winslet's epiphany in Holy Smoke. (7/29/16)