Have severed head, will travel

MARLINA THE MURDERER IN FOUR ACTS

Starring Marsha Timothy. In Indonesian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

An Indonesian revenge fantasy gets a spaghetti-western treatment—the laksa look, you might say— in Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts. A third feature for writer-director Mouly Surya, only 37, the movie is a marvel of highly controlled visual elements, all set in glorious super-widescreen compositions and guaranteeing that its essentially grim subject never overwhelms her sense of style and, viewers may have to admit, fun.

The Marlina in question (Marsha Timothy) is a young widow living in a remote and unusually scrubby part of Indonesia, better known for dense rainforests and even thicker cities. We know she’s a widow because, hey, isn’t that the mummified body of her much older husband propped up in the corner of her cabin? From his articular body language, you get the sense that he was always a bit indifferent. A lot more detachment happens after some random dudes show up, determined to rob her and much, much worse.

The movie’s real subject is patriarchy, and how the lowliest men still expect to get whatever they want from even the strongest women. It might seem a polemic passing as a folktale; the outstandingly twangy score is like Morricone fused with Southeast Asian themes. But Surya, who reportedly got the story idea from cowriter Garin Nugroho (veteran director of Bird-man Tale and many other titles), is careful in her characterizations. The men Marlina encounters at home and on the road are brutal, but they clearly don’t know they’re doing anything wrong by asserting their dominion.

Although generally stoical when not wielding a machete, Marlina has a strong feel for justice, and sisterhood. (She has a friend whose pregnancy offers no protection from bandits.) But when she takes the ringleader’s head on a long bus trip to the nearest town with a police station, the on-duty officer is utterly dismissive. “We can’t act without evidence,” he complains. “And the rape kits don’t arrive until next month, at least.”

As you can tell, rage mixes fairly freely with genre sensibility in these Four Acts. There’s even a ghost story mixed in, with her attacker’s headless body showing up occasionally to play plangent melodies on a small stringed instrument. It’s not clear what that means, except that regardless of what social norms and rules happen to govern men and women, we’re pretty much stuck with each other. > KEN EISNER

LEAVE NO TRACE Starring Ben Foster. Rated G

A haunted veteran and his barely teen daughter live a clandestine existence deep inside Portland’s vast Forest Park, foraging for greens and mushrooms, huddling to keep dry beneath a tattered tarp, and running drills in the event that somebody might notice them. So begins this affecting and sensitive drama, in which the probably Ptsd–suffering Will (Hell or High Water’s Ben Foster), framed inside Pacific Northwest rainforest that might as well be Southeast Asian jungle canopy, comes to symbolize multiple generations of American “fighting” men alienated from the war state they served.

Director Debra Granik isn’t prone to such blunt messaging, mind you, adapting Peter Rock’s book My Abandonment with an almost Zenlike grace in cahoots with frequent writing and producing partner Anne Rosellini. This portrait of America’s invisible underclass is as reserved and practical as the off-the-grid impulse it depicts, with a mossy feel for location that invites comparison to the films of Kelly Reichardt. Yet, beneath the slight narrative, deliberate pace, and long stretches of quiet, Granik and her outstanding cast are busy flushing Leave No Trace with sadness and compassion.

The film avoids explaining what makes Will tick, or why he’s chosen, as a single parent, to disappear into the margins. Home-schooled (forestschooled?) daughter Tom (flawless Thomasin Mckenzie) tests above average when the duo is busted for vagrancy and ends up in the case files of social services. Tom’s deeper smarts are developed, we suppose, from years of providing a damaged but loving father with an equivalent amount of caregiving. (And helping him with those night terrors.)

It’s that forced induction into slightly more conventional society that naturally gives the film its thrust, as its characters journey from a Samaritan-run tree farm to, ultimately, another deep-woods community with a collective allergy to modern life, seductively depicted complete with acoustic campfire asides from folk veterans Michael Hurley and Marisa Anderson. Along the way, Tom finds herself drawn to iphones and a rabbit-rearing farm boy (Isaiah Stone, who debuted in Granik’s Winter’s Bone). But Will’s withdrawal is a one-way deal, and the film gambles (and wins) on an eloquent final image that transports Leave No Trace into the realm of modern fable. > ADRIAN MACK

DESIGN CANADA A documentary by Greg Durrell. Rating unavailable

Design Canada makes a case that graphic imagery has helped one of the world’s largest nations find a recognizable identity. Like hockey and radio, visual iconography has been there to reassure citizens from two major language groups and increasingly multitudinous backgrounds that they somehow belong together.

The modern Canadian flag is key to this, obviously, and the story of how it happened is literally representative of the nation. As occasional tour guide George Stroumboulopoulos points out, it took almost a hundred years after Confederation for the country to even realize it needed its own, Union Jack–less emblem. Under pressure from Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, and over fierce opposition from former PM John Diefenbaker, a multiparty committee looked at various designs, most using some form of maple leaf. Pearson’s own preference was for a hideous pennant with three conjoined leaves, but this gave way, in 1964, to the more familiar single maple with two red fields.

The first version’s rococo leaf was soon stylized to the now-familiar “11-pointer”, as one elderly participant calls it. The CBC logo, with its multiple orbs, was likewise simplified in 1992, mainly so it could be better read in the corner of TV sets—to the continuing consternation of Burton Kramer, who came up with the original in ’74. Other on-screen old-timers include Fritz Gottschalk, the Zurich-born designer who led a sedate charge toward clean lines, open space, and Helvetica-based typography, as seen in signage for the Olympics and more official functions.

There’s also an anti-swiss movement, arriving like clockwork from Heather Cooper, whose Renaissance-tinged illustrations and playful design brought life to Canadian imagery in the 1980s—most famously in her beaver logo for Roots. Her namesake agency, Burns Cooper, is never mentioned (neither is the enigmatic bandage on her forehead), nor does the film bring up more radical movements, like those encapsulated by Toronto’s Reactor Art + Design, whose illustration-heavy work (especially that of original partner Barbara Klunder) greatly influenced the retro styles popular today.

The doc makes some attempt to sketch out the more inclusive contemporary scene, in terms of gender, ethnicity, and outlook, with Douglas Coupland and some younger voices briefly evident. Filmmaker Greg Durrell, who has himself made graphics for movies and the Olympics, doesn’t try to be definitive; at only 74 minutes, his first feature doesn’t go into overtime about anything. But it’s an appropriately well-ordered intro to a subject almost all Canadians have thought about, even if they had no idea that’s what they were doing. > KEN EISNER

BOUNDARIES Starring Christopher Plummer. Rated 14A

“I’m so fucked-up,” says Vera Farmiga’s persistently dishevelled Laura Jaconi, “I can’t even tell my therapist how fucked-up I am.” It’s one of the funniest, most selfaware moments in a tale that is otherwise clueless and lacking in laughs.

A road movie with a fixed destination and no working GPS, Boundaries appears to have assembled a great cast around an overly familiar idea and then left the script too late. That’s weird, because this is the fourth feature for writer-director Shana Feste, best-known for her goopy Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Country Strong. (Never heard of Feste’s 2014 remake of Endless Love? You’re not alone.)

Here’s the concept: middle-aged Laura has abandonment issues, thanks to endless disappointments from her shiftless father, Jack (Christopher Plummer), who’s getting kicked out of his retirement home for growing pot. Her sad past has caused Laura to fill her home with mangy stray cats and dogs. And she’s far too close to her geeky teenage son, Henry (A Monster Calls’s Scottish-born Lewis Macdougall). He’s always in trouble for drawing obscene naked portraits of teachers and his mother’s fleeting boyfriends. Are you chortling yet?

When absent Dad begs Laura for help, the best she can offer is getting him to her more tolerant sister, Jojo (The Daily Show’s Kristen Schaal), in L.A. Jack says he can’t fly, so Laura reluctantly agrees to drive him in his ancient Rolls-royce, with Henry in tow. She takes time off from a job that is never really explained to go on a mission that makes no sense; she knows, even if we don’t, that Jojo lives in a 400-square-foot rented apartment, while Laura has a huge, freestanding house in Seattle, presumably paid for by that mystery job.

She needs to make the trip as quick as possible, so of course she takes Highway 101, with a trunk filled with pot he sells along the way without her ever figuring it out. (Guess I’ve been picking the wrong rest stops for my old-rock-music montages.) The Canadian-enabled film makes adequate, if dimly lit, use of B.C. locations subbing for the American west coast going south. Granville Island stands in for Sausalito, where her deadbeat ex-husband (Bobby Cannavale) lives on a houseboat. It’s hard to say what’s more poorly written, their disjointed family reunion (“What’s your

Boundaries

problem, kid?”) or the pointless visit with Peter Fonda, as a rich guy who buys the rest of Jack’s stash.

Christopher Lloyd fares better as a fellow old-timer off the grid. But none of these encounters are used to deepen Jack’s back story or change Laura’s perceptions of him. Instead, it’s left entirely to the actors to oversell their thin material, and the effort is all too visible. Maybe they should have had Plummer play all the parts. > KEN EISNER

UNCLE DREW Starring Kyrie Irving. Rated PG

Australian-born Kyrie Irving spent much of this decade as a point guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers (now he’s with the Boston Celtics), and was an Olympic gold medallist two years ago. In 2012, he took time out to don a white wig and aging makeup for an amusing series of Pepsi Max spots in which he played a Harlem old-timer hustling “young bloods” on the basketball court.

NBA greats like Bill Russell popped up in the ads, Irving proved to be a talented improviser, and you can see why the marketing folks at not-coke thought they had something worth expanding. Even so, to call this feature-length spinoff familiar is an understatement. Indeed, Uncle Drew writer Jay Longino told Variety that the film’s initial pitch was based on The Blues Brothers and other let’s-get-the-old-gang-together flicks.

Its director, Charles Stone III, also borrowed elements from his earlier efforts Drumline (cocky musical upstart learns to respect tradition) and Mr. 3000 (cocky oldtimer is forced to regain his crown) to make a surprisingly sluggish movie that spends more than an hour of its 90 minutes doing Barbershop-ish setups for a payoff that feels rushed and incidental to an oddly underpopulated comedy more sentimental than energetic.

There are some mild laughs, mostly coming from Lil Rel Howery—the resourceful TSA buddy in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, referenced here—as Dax, a would-be sports impresario and Foot Locker employee haunted by his own B-ball failure at the hands of a local “Macklemore-looking dude” (Nick Kroll) who stole his ball and more. (Remarkably, the film’s Pepsi placements are few, but Kroll makes a funny shout-out to “Aleve, the number one pain reliever in the game!”.)

When Dax loses a new team to his rival, a chance encounter with Irving’s Uncle Drew (now in makeup that’s less convincing than what was in the ads) has him rounding up the cranky baller’s teammates from back in the day, just in time to enter a big contest Dax has spent his life savings on. These include Shaquille O’neal, Nate Robinson, Reggie Miller, and Chris Webber as gents who are not only old but blind, wheelchairbound, mute, and filled with anger.

One, happily, has a beautiful granddaughter (Erica Ash) for Dax to bond with, but nothing really comes of that de rigueur plot point. Tiffany Haddish appears briefly as his trashy, gold-digging girlfriend. When she sees the finished film, she may regret not having worn a disguise. > KEN EISNER