Gyllenhaal a strong Oscar contender
Whenthe Tsarnaev brothers detonated two pressure cooker bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon, they took three lives and ruined hundreds more. Because the devices were detonated at street level, 16 victims lost their legs: Jeff Bauman was one of them, and Stronger tells his story.
Jeff (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an amiable flake who works in a wholesale food outlet and spends most of his free time boozing with his buddies. His tendency not to show up for things has so infuriated his girlfriend Erin (Tatiana Maslany) that she’s broken up with him. But Jeff is keen and infuriatingly lovable, and in an attempt to win her back, he decides to cheer on Erin’s upcoming run in the Boston Marathon.
What happens next is cleverly handled: initially we only see the bangs, the white noise, Jeff’s subsequent confusion. When he comes to in hospital, one of his friends tells him he’s lost both his legs — Jeff makes a joke, but accepting his new reality won’t be easy. From his hospital bed, he’d helped identify one of the bombers, and Jeff is feted as a hero in Boston. But he’s not prepared for the glare of the spotlight, nor for the pressure of a rekindled romance with Erin.
One of the most refreshing things about David Gordon Green’s film is its avoidance of stars and stripes jingoism. When Jeff’s family howl at the hospital TV after one of the Tsarnaevs is killed, it doesn’t seem terribly dignified. Jeff himself is far from perfect and Stronger charts the toll his recovery takes on those around him. Miranda Richardson is slightly miscast as his mother and Bostonians must grow tired of these boozy, raucous portrayals of them. But Maslany is excellent as Erin, and Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of Jeff is full of nuance. She may get an Oscar nomination — he surely will. Clever, mean-spirited, gleefully unpleasant, Better Watch Out is an efficiently nasty Yuletide comic horror that operates as a sort of anti Home Alone. Precocious teenager Luke (Levi Miller) has a serious crush on his babysitter Ashley (Olivia DeJonge): he’s 13, she’s 18, but Luke doesn’t care and when she comes over to watch him at Christmas, he and his friend Garrett (Ed Oxenbould) hatch a plan to seduce her. Their scheme is not a sporting one, involving horror films and alcohol, but meanwhile a stalker appears outside the house, and things are about to turn nasty.
Better Watch Out has some decent twists and writer/director Chris Peckover knows his horror films. DeJonge is good as the unfortunate Ashley, but Miller overdoes it a bit, and the film isn’t quite as funny as it thinks it is. I’ve a high tolerance for samurai films, but Blade of the Immortal did not charm me. In the Shogunate era, a growling samurai called Manji (Takuya Kimura) is about to die of his wounds after laying waste to an entire band of treacherous brigands when a passing crone saves his life. She’s a witch, and does so by passing ‘sacred worms’ into his system: they will heal every wound and make Manji immortal, which he soon discovers is a terrible curse.
His endless life has no meaning till he joins forces with a brave young woman who’s determined to avenge her father’s death. Blade of the Immortal is glossy and slickly edited, but its visual aesthetic is garish and the rising body count becomes tedious. And finally, a word about Menashe, a quiet, funny, intense film that immerses you fully in the parallel universe of Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jews. Recently widowed Menashe (Menashe Lustig) has lost custody of his 12-year-old son because the rabbi insists he marry again first. Menashe doesn’t want to and his attempts to recover his son are complicated by his all-round incompetence. It’s a touching, intimate film conducted mainly in Yiddish, and while the culture is particular, the human problems are universal.