In Revue: The Case Against Just Going With It

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

Javier Bardem plays it all dour and serious, for once, in his latest role. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

What a sad, sad week for movies, friends. If you’re heading to the mutliplex this week, don’t. You’ll only see Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston whither and die before you, their faces collapsing into their gaping, surgically-applied grins, like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And if you’re heading to the art house (which is really a different kind of multiplex), don’t. You’ll just be duped into thinking you like the latest Iñárritu film. If you’re going to the real art house, though, there’s a nifty, Canada’s Top Ten-certified, film by Ingrid Veninger. Oh and we didn’t review it, but the 3-D Justin Bieber docu-biopic comes out this weekend. Finally, right?

Biutiful opens on the sound of star Javier Bardem (playing some Spanish underworld goon-slash-single dad) and newcomer Hanaa Bouchaib (as one of his two children) murmuring in hushed tones, the sickly-sweet sound of wet tongues passing lips fostering an air of phony intimacy. If the opening credits don’t tip you off, this foundational bit of slobbery sentimentality will: you’re watching an Alejandro González Iñárritu film.
Bardem plays Uxbal, a low-rung gangster and hustler struggling to reconcile his private and professional life as his impending death (signified by recurring scenes of him pissing blood) nips at his heels. As he did with his last feature, 2006’s stupid Babel, Iñárritu threads together a few multilingual storylines (Uxbal frequently crosses paths with an African drug pusher and a sweat shop owner who is both Chinese and a closeted homosexual) into a rubbish yarn of human desperation and depression. And just like his last film, he again confuses bloat with some sweeping epic quality. As the film’s increasingly dismal details mount over its 148-minute runtime, Biutiful’s maudlin pandering only deepens. What was presumably intended as an intricate tapestry of life on the fringe unravels into a fraught mess of doom and gloom that has come to define Iñárritu’s ham-handed approach to emotional realism. (The too-frequent twang of the schmaltzy Spanish guitar that punctuates the soundtrack doesn’t help things.)
There’s no doubt that Bardem is a fine actor, maybe one of the best currently working. But any master thespian’s chops are squandered when their director would have them strain themselves in the service of some spurious artistic vision. We can forgive David Lynch grinding Naomi Watts or Laura Dern through his nightmarish machinations, parading them around tear-streaked and snot-covered, because their performances can believably be considered to exist in service of something. Watching Bardem parade around dour and ravaged and puffy-eyed for Iñárritu just seems like a waste.
Biutiful opens Friday, February 11 at The Varsity Cinemas (55 Bloor Street West). Click here for showtimes.

Setting an awkward teenage romance in Slovakia is surefire way to purge it of any insufferable twee-ness. And while “an awkward teenage romance in Slovakia” is as handy a logline as any for summing up Modra, it disservices just how adult the film’s relationships are.
Hallie Switzer (director Ingrid Veninger’s daughter) stars as Lina, a freshly-dumped Toronto teenager who hastily invites schoolmate Leca (Alexander Gammal) to spend a week with her extended family in Modra, a remote Slovakian berg. Like all seventeen year olds, Leca’s bored and looking to score, and jumps at the opportunity. Using some stock “Oh wow, I’ve never been to Europe” line as an excuse, he packs a bag and hitches a flight to the former Soviet satellite state. Veninger, who fled Slovakia with her family as a toddler in the face of mounting anti-Communist tensions, employs her own extended family, and other on-hand non-actors, in a bid to imbue her film with that added soupçon of realism. There’s a stiltedness between Switzer (who had also never acted before this) and Gammal, which—depending on how forgiving you are—can either be chalked up to inexperience in front of the camera, or their shared bounty of experience in being teenagers, who tend to manage their emotions with a good deal of affectation.
It’s a credit to Veninger’s screenplay that Lina and Leco’s nascent romance doesn’t evolve with the kind of corniness a teenage trip to Europe would usually suggest. Instead, she gives her teenage leads space to explore their burgeoning feelings for with each other. Slovakia’s natural beauty is similarly slow-played, revealed in bits and pieces, not as a series of postcard-pretty panoramas doubling as tourist-baiting propaganda. If the film suffers from anything, it may be the sense that it’s almost too personal, an excuse for Veninger and her family to plot a family reunion while the camera runs. But while ducking away to Slovakia on a whim may not be a shared teenage experience (like smoking bad pot behind a fry truck or losing your virginity to a Perfect Circle song), the sense of displacement and discovery that Modra’s setup accommodates resounds universally.
Modra opens Friday, February 11 at The Royal (608 College Street). Click here for showtimes.

Astoundingly, the umpteenth collaboration of comic man-boy Adam Sandler and director Dennis Dugan isn’t as predictably bad as most of their other efforts (Big Daddy, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, that Zohan one). It’s worse. Much worse. It’s lifeless, entirely unfunny, and in aid of nothing.
Sandler plays a Los Angeles cosmetic surgeon and compulsive liar who sports a fake wedding band in order to attract women. When he meets one especially tight little number (supermodel Brooklyn Decker, who’s so ridiculously hot she’d have to fall for a dorky schlub like Sandler), the married guy scams backfires. She asks to meet his fictional ex, trapping Sandler in an icky swamp of deceit he can only wade deeper and deeper into. To broaden the ruse, he drags along longtime friend and office assistant (Jennifer Aniston) to play his soon-to-be-divorced wife, her two impossibly precocious kids (Griffin Gluck and Bailee Madison, no relation), and his even schlubbier brother (Nick Swardson) incognito, for no reason, as a facile German caricature. Their lies, and the good doctor’s bottomless pocketbook, takes the sextet to Hawaii, where they run into Aniston’s perkily conniving sorority sister (Nicole Kidman, who you can now be forgiven for ever confusing with a real actor) and her smirking beau (Dave Matthews, because why not?). Lies pile on top of lies but through it all—wouldn’t you know?—Sandler and Aniston (who cares what the characters’ names are) start to fall for each other. Who’d have guessed?!
Just Go With It is no good. But not like no good in the way where it’s just not especially funny or convincing or enjoyable. It’s no good. It’s poison. It’s a coma-white purgatory that has pitilessly gulped up its principals, a liminal non-space from which no humour, feeling or light can escape. Here, otherwise pleasant enough people—Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, Mario Joyner—find themselves swirling around limply with the likes of Nick Swardson, Brooklyn Decker, Kevin Nealon, and an acting Dave Matthews. As a Beckettian exercise in endurance, Just Go With It is a marvel. It’s Waiting for Godot if Godot were the crowning pee-pee joke that never arrived. As a movie, though, it’s rubbish. If you find yourself laughing or at all entertained (let alone moved) by it, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Just Go With It opens Friday, February 11, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.