Filed under

Philip Seymour Hoffman

See all posts on posterous with this tag »

@MovieJay's Review of Ides of March

The Ides of March, George Clooney's fourth outing as a director, brings the Beau Willimon 2008 play "Farragut North" to the big screen with sharp performances and taut, classic Hollywood storytelling. Too bad the subject matter, stuff that would have been more relevant in the Clinton-era scandal-plagued late 90's, doesn't have the same sheen as every other facet of the film, but it's a small inconvenience in a movie that provides real thrills and real honesty for it's entire 98-minute running time.

The set-up: A week out from the highly contested Democratic primary of Ohio, Governor Mike Morris (Clooney) is the more liberal candidate running neck-in-neck with the more centrist candidate Senator Pullman, played by Michael Mantell. In a small but pivotal role, Jeffrey Wright plays Senator Thompson, a contender who is no longer in play to win the nomination but carries with him enough delegates to play kingmaker to either of the front-runners.

The Morris team's campaign manager is Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), while the other side is headed by Paul Giamatti as Tom Duffy. Those characters alone could make an effective political drama, however the movie centers around Stephen Meyers, Morris' campaign's press secretary in a sharply-observed performance by Ryan Gosling that transforms this behind-the-scenes drama into a potboiler driven by tension generated from its characters and the way their chess-like po litical wars are played out.

Gosling plays Meyers as an idealist among cold-hearted realists who are all weary of the game of hardball politics they have been playing for far too long. He's 30 years old, focused, concentrated, and almost always appears to be in-thought. It is through his interaction with a reporter, played with brash intelligence by Marisa Tomei, that he  has played an active role in more election cycles than most political activists a decade older which might explain the maturity.

Political campaigns are a grind, and the fallout from the stress of campaigns such as a presidential one like this is that staffers get close and sometimes sexual intimacy is understandable, even if it's wrong. Enter Molly, played by the luminous Evan Rachel Wood, a young intern on the campaign, who gets herself noticed by Meyers in a scene that is deftly acted and teeming with furtive-eroticism in just the right moments as we say the intern flirt with and then picks up Meyers. They have important, time-consuming jobs, and the urgency of the sexual tension between them is palpable later on over drinks on a visit to the hotel where Molly is staying.Eventually this coupling leads to complications that rock the Morris campaign, but I will let you dear reader, discover those for yourself.

In a parallel narrative, Stephen is having to stave off Tomei's reporter on a leak she's picked up from an anonymous source that says he took an interview with the opposing side's campaign, in a move that could indicate that the Morris campaign is losing. He did meet with Tom Duffy from the opposing side, but who told? Or is she making it up? Later, in the film's best sequence, the "loyalty" scene, Stephen is taught the hardest of political lessons as he gets torn to shreds by Zara. Philip Seymour Hoffman is so good in this scene, it's a toss-up between this role and his baseball manager of the A's in last month's Moneyball that'll see him earn yet another well-deserved Oscar nomination. Paul Giamatti could be in line for another nomination as well, in a performance that mirrors Hoffman's in it's cold, hard precision.

What we know for sure is that nowadays it's impossible for a presidential candidate to campaign that long and that hard and not come out of it with some form of exhaustion, but the greater point of the film is how it sees the compromises that are made by candidates and their campaigns and that it's equally impossible for them to stay true to all of their values.

There are stronger films in this genre with similar subject matter, such as Mike Nichols' wonderful Primary Colors built from events during the Clinton campaign for President, as well as The Contender just a few short years later focusing on Joan Allen's past as she is nominated mid-term to the VeeP slot. Those were great films, that snapped, crackled and popped with the urgency of the topics of their day. Perhaps Ides of March would be more in league with those had it been made a decade ago, but it's still a worthwhile exercise in league with the very good The Candidate, that early 70's film with Robert Redford as a last-minute entry into the senatorial race in California, who upon his surprising come-from-behind victory can be heard to say, "What do we do now?"

George Clooney's direction is flawless as usual. Along with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night & Good Luck, and the football comedy Leatherheads, he appears to have the same gift for efficient, economical storytelling that Clint Eastwood has mastered in the last act of his career. Both of them actors' directors and in Ides of March the actors here turn this from a conventional film into an observant, tense and always honest one. Good movie.

*** out of 4

Posted

Melanie's Review of Moneyball


I can’t say enough about this film.

Moneyball is what movies are supposed to be. It is an exceptionally written, directed and acted piece of mastery.

The movie is based on the true story of how Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, changed the way baseball recruits its players. Since half the North American population already knows something about what he did, I needn’t struggle to evade revealing too much.

The synopsis for this film alone would have put me to sleep normally but positive buzz lead me to viewing what I now consider to be the front-runner in the “best film” category at this year’s Oscars. I would actually put money on it. I also think Brad Pitt might actually get his third Oscar nomination for playing Billy Beane the failed ball player, turned scout, turned general manager.

I believe Brad to be my generations Robert Redford and he proved it with his performance in this movie.  It was so subtle, so nuanced, and never over-done. I must admit that sometimes I forget how talented he is.

I must also admit that I was pretty shocked to hear that Jonah Hill was co-starring in this film. Having starred in the raunchy comedies Superbad, Get Him to the Greek, and The Sitter, I figured that he’d remain a ‘one-trick pony’ and that eventually people would get sick of him and move on. Moneyball seemed to be so far outside of his scope of ability, but I gotta say… this is also very much his movie as it is Pitt's. This is the movie that will change the course of his career. Jonah Hill can actually act. His portrayal of Peter Brand, the completely green, recent economics grad from Yale who invented the new system of creating a baseball team, was so spot-on.

Also headlining in Moneyball is Philip Seymour Hoffman. I’m not sure why his name is on all of the posters, given that he’s in the movie for all of five minutes… not that I’m complaining. I love Seymour Hoffman â€" the man is a genius. However, his role of Art Howe, the head coach for the Oakland A’s, was pretty small. I would have loved to have him in the movie more. He probably did the film as a favour to the director Bennett Miller, who also directed him in Capote (which coincidentally is the only other film that Miller has directed).

In order to avoid boring all of you with a list of other bit parts in the film, I will simply state that the actors that were chosen to play all of the team’s players and employees were excellent - they all brought heart and depth to the film.

The only area in Moneyball that lacked for me was Brad’s chemistry with his on-screen daughter played by Kerris Dorsey. Although she’s a lovely girl who is a TV veteran at the ripe old age of 13 - and possesses an almost angelic singing voice - she never seemed to connect with Brad as her dad. Not sure if it was her acting, or if it was the script. Their relationship just never worked for me.

Next to the main two actors, the best part of the film to me was the beautifully crafted script. As a West Wing addict, I can spot Aaron Sorkin’s work anywhere. Sorkin has an incredible gift with words and a knack for sculpting characters that you fall in love with. The script was co-written with Steven Zaillian, who happens to be the screenplay writer to some of my favourite movies (Awakenings, Searching for Bobby Fischer, and Schindler’s List). So for me it is a match made in heaven. And it worked very well, as the audience laughed out loud at so many points during the movie that I lost track of how many times. Sorkin and Zaillian took a potentially dull topic and breathed dazzling life into it.

Moneyball is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. It is the kind of film that Hollywood should strive to make more often. Do yourself a favour… go see this film. I enjoyed it so much, that I’m planning on going to see it again as soon as I can â€" which is saying a lot since I don’t even know who Billy Beane is.

Posted

@MovieJay's Review of Moneyball

Heading into the 2002 season, Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics found themselves minus three star players from their previous season. One in which they cracked the elusive 100-win barrier but ended up losing a heartbreaking 5-game series to the Yankees in the first round of the playoffs to end their season early.

The A's had a payroll of just under $40 million, roughly three times less than that of the Yankees, in a sport where the big market teams essentially pilfer great players from the smaller market ones. Unlike the NBA or the NFL, where revenues are pooled and teams have an equal shot at being competitive, Major League Baseball still goes by the old formula of every-man-for-himself.

It is this challenge of lopsidedness and the frustration that comes from it that the movie is about. We see this very well illustrated early on through a sports-talk radio announcer as he laments how the A's are essentially a farm system for teams like the Yankees and Red Sox. It is this same tension that we see in Billy Beane, the A's General Manager and a former player himself as he is a man who simply hates, hates, hates losing.

Restless and lonely, Brad Pitt plays Beane as a man with constant dissatisfaction within himself. He wheels and deals, signs new players, works the phones with other GM's around the league, dotes on his daughter from his failed marriage, and drives around aimlessly during games while sporadically checking the radio to hear updates driven with an almost obsessive focus.

In the off-season heading into 2002, it is made clear to Beane by the A's owner that they'll have to try to compete again using imagination and creativity since the payroll simply won't budge from where it's at, which is in the basement. On a trip to Cleveland to meet with Indians management, we meet Peter Brand, an assistant in that organization who appears to be one of the key people in the room who shoots down a trade that Beane and the Indians GM are working out. This infuriates Beane and it leads to a scene between the two men in an underground parking lot where Brand explains the fallacies of the old scouting system. Beane appreciates Brand's honesty which results in him buying him from the Indians to work as his assistant-GM in Oakland.

Moneyball isn't so much a baseball movie as it is a movie about the business of baseball. What we learn about sabermetrics, a computer-generated analysis that is used to target undervalued players who are perhaps better than their overall numbers might suggest, is not as important as the fact that it is now commonly used by all professional sports teams. Indeed, the best the movie can do is give us entertaining cross-cuts and pans of a multitude of stats, figures and player names, but what is important is how the characters feel about the technology.

The great success of Moneyball, a drama that is surprisingly touching and funny, lies in the screenplay by Steve Zailian (Schindler's List, Searching For Bobby Fischer) and Aaron Sorkin (the West Wing, the Social Network). They use observation and character to thrust the action forward instead of artificial plot requirements we have become used to in sports movies that too often depend on the "big game" or the "tournament" for tension. We meet a few of the players on the A's squad, but the focus is almost entirely on the backroom dealings, although there is one sequence in the second half of the pic detailing the American League record the A's set by winning 20 games in a row that is among the best and purely entertaining sequences of it's kind in sports movies as it splices real footage together with action from the movie. There are also a couple of quiet and sad scenes involving players who are traded or sent down to the minors that are written very well and make the athletes into human commodities who we actually feel for.

Moneyball is smarter and ultimately more engaging than most other sports films because it does a wonderful job at bringing empathy to all sides. From the GM and his assistant, (played with dry understatement by Jonah Hill, in his best performance to date), to the old-time scouts who fear the new system, to the uncompromising and stalwart A's manager Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a guy who will manage his team the best way he sees fit. The empathy given to Hoffman and the scouts elevates this movie as one of the year's best because they aren't made out to be foils but are real people with real concerns and doubts about an unproven system based on computer technology.

Brad Pitt does a great job of suggesting restlessness in almost every scene as he moves forward with uncertainty about how things will turn out for the team and for himself. The movie ends perfectly with an interplay between him and Hill in some of their more private moments which are existential and melancholy and are truly refreshing to behold in a movie about sports.

Thoughtful, funny, and an excellent entertainment, Moneyball is the best movie of it's kind since Friday Night Lights.

Posted