culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Full Metal Jacket, Nightcrawler, and John Wick
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Full Metal Jacket.
At rep cinemas this week: Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war satire, Jake Gyllenhaal’s turn as a monstrous freelance journalist, and Keanu Reeves’ triumphant outing as a turtlenecked assassin.
Full Metal Jacket
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Stanley Kubrick made films in movements. Films such as the symphonically shaped 2001: A Space Odyssey, which spans human history, or Eyes Wide Shut, structured as a couple’s dreamy dance around a pair of truly awful parties, build through discrete phases. His works don’t develop in the traditional linear sense—one watches them with the kind of faith in the artist’s grand conception that’s usually reserved for classical music.
Full Metal Jacket’s best-realized movement is its first, a 45-minute boot-camp training montage. Working from Gustav Hasford’s 1979 anti-Vietnam novel The Short-Timers, Kubrick follows the pragmatic Joker (Matthew Modine) and simple Leonard (Vincent D’Onofrio) through basic training as they’re hectored and moulded by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey). Joker turns out to be the narrator, but so strong is the opening that Leonard—whom Hartman snidely rechristens “Gomer Pyle”—becomes the key to the movie. The meticulous way he’s broken down from a gentle idiot into a quivering sack of flesh and then rebuilt into a model soldier (that is to say, a mad one) serves as a microcosm of the film’s criticism of the war system as a meat grinder that takes in humans and pushes out waste.
Kubrick developed a reputation for being a frosty scold, the sort of guy who called Stephen King late at night during the making of The Shining to ask whether he believed in God. It’s easy, then, to forget how funny his films can be. Full Metal Jacket is a bracing satire of how the military disciplines unruly bodies and weird brains in antiseptic rooms lit by fluorescent lights. Amusing as Hartman’s regimen is, it’s gallows humour, the comedy derived from the fact that military cleanliness is always one little push away from the grotesque and the insane.
Friday’s screening is introduced by critic Adam Nayman.
Nightcrawler
Directed by Dan Gilroy
Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East)
Jake Gyllenhaal is an unblinking, bug-eyed creep in Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut Nightcrawler, the sort of film that will be praised for a supposedly fresh script despite old zingers such as, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Gyllenhaal plays Lou, a freelance Los Angeles crime reporter who turns the vampire shift into his playground, sauntering into crime scenes unfazed, speeding through the city (bathed in nocturnal light by master cinematographer Robert Elswit) to outrun police, and uploading his footage to ratings-mad cable news producer Nina (Rene Russo).
If we found the film’s satire of our prurient, click-bating, gore-saturated news coverage a bit tame and out-of-date—nothing Lou gathers has the bite of the photojournalism on the scene of the Boston Marathon bombing, for example—we still appreciated its noir pulpiness and corrosive insights into a world where freelancing is the norm and nobody is especially accountable to anyone but him or herself. And Gyllenhaal outdoes himself as a sociopath with real entrepreneurial spirit: a rare creature, but one we’re sure exists.
John Wick
Directed by Chad Stahelski
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Unappreciated and often outright derided for much of his career, Keanu Reeves has seen a resurgence of late, even finding himself the subject of a career retrospective—fittingly entitled “Whoa: The Films of Keanu Reeves”—at TIFF Bell Lightbox. Nothing represents this second wind better than John Wick, Chad Stahelski’s confident and ingeniously designed feature debut, an ultra-violent but overall minimalist affair featuring Reeves as the titular contract killer, brought out of retirement when well-connected thugs (led by Game of Thrones’s perpetually sallow Alfie Allen) steal his car and kill his dog.
A sensitive, if not especially articulate, screen presence—just see the “Sad Keanu” meme, which finds the actor going about his day in various hangdog poses—Reeves is a fine anchor for a film about a quiet modern samurai dragged back into his shameful past when his new life is threatened. This is all fairly conventional stuff, and the devil-may-care attitude toward violence is perhaps worryingly retrograde, but Reeves’ stoic performance sells it. Meanwhile, Stahelski, a well-heeled fight choreographer who clearly knows the ropes, finds a balletic sort of grace and even the occasional glint of humour in his many action set pieces, which riff endlessly on the grim visual punchline of our hero dispatching his enemies with a gunshot or two to the face. It isn’t Shakespeare, which Reeves famously muddled his way through in the early ‘90s, but thank heavens for that.