The Hunger Games

3/5

The Suzanne Collins’ novel, on which this passable if unspectacular action-adventure-coming-of-age-romance is based, was like a re-interpretation of Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man as fascist allegory and teen-romance-novel amalgam.  The protagonist is a piss-and-vinegar huntress named Katniss who gets selected as a Tribute to fight to the death with 24 other teenagers in a publicly broadcast bout, put on by the totalitarian leaders of a dystopian future.    

The author was supposedly inspired to write The Hunger Games by channel surfing between violent news stories and numbing Reality TV.  But Collins is hardly the incisive satirist necessary to puncture the dark heart of America’s desensitized lust for violence and slave-like reliance on media and technology.  Her books, while thankfully effective at snapping some of the Twilight crowd out their Edward Cullen love-trances, were excitingly well-paced without being particular vivid or intelligent.     

Collins lack of expressive imagery left more than enough room for this hotly anticipated movie adaptation to shade in many of the imaginative blank spots.  If only director Gary Ross had been able to reinvent some of the kaleidoscopic visual splendor of his last film, Pleasantville, he might have made some something iconic and resplendent.  Unfortunately, this time Ross only paints with easy allusions: the heroine’s impoverished mining District (there are 12 in Collins’ universe) is heavy on Dust Bowl and Ozarks hillbilly images, but light on artistry and humanity.   

At one point, all the kids in The Reaping, a lottery to decide which unlucky lad and lass must represent their District in the titular games, are herded into a high-walled concentration camp of monochrome grey, strewn with barbed wire fences and peopled by dispassionate armed guards, manufacturing a grade-school Holocaust evocation.  From there, the gutsy, older-than-her-years sixteen-year-old pragmatist—played by the rock solid and reactive Jennifer Lawrence—is dragged off to the Capital. The film’s landscape transforms into a Vegas by way of Oz by way of Cirque Du Soleil metropolis, where Katniss and her fellow gladiator, a nervous baker’s son named Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), get introduced to Woody Harrelson’s drunken mentor and Elizabeth Banks’ District rep, a haute couture pixie clown. 

The games themselves make up most of the film’s 2 and ½ hour runtime.  In a woodsy coliseum that looks a little too commonplace—like the forest behind Ross’s house, maybe—the kids fight off starvation, thirst, exposure, hallucinogenic hornets nests, and, most dangerously, each other (they wield knives, spears, bows or any number of serrated weaponry) in an effort to be the last one standing.  All the while, Caesar, a celebrity talk show host played by Stanley Tucci with a spray-on tan and a hive of blue hair, commentates on the barbaric proceedings with more detachment than an ESPN commentator.            

The juxtaposition of the everyday with the fantastic and the horrific is ripe for potential revelations.  When it’s all said and done, though, the premise is conceptually rich while the movie itself is not.  It would take a director like Paul Verhoeven, whose acidic lampoonery of the media and whose use of revealingly fetishistic ultra-violence were on full display in RoboCop and Starship Troopers, to actualize in full Collins’ half-baked themes on Reality TV as a vehicle for voyeurs to indulge their most perverse inclinations, in this case, assuaging a bloodlust through the brutality of on-screen violent spectacle.  

Ross, though, is anything but a provocative filmmaker.  He’s a sentimentalist who, too often in The Hunger Games, succumbs to his worst impulse, relating the story’s sadder moments with melodramatic musical cues and hokey photography of light pouring through treetops.  With too many plot points to check off, he can’t explore his characters on any rewardingly thorough level.  Collins’ unorthodox setup requires a superfluous amount of expositional dialogue, sacrificing the more character-driven variety that would give the likes of the guarded Katniss and the romantic Peeta greater emotional depth.      

Like the novel, the movie is brisk and, impressively, it covers a lot of ground.  I can’t say I enjoyed Ross’ frenetic photography during the fight scenes.  (When you can tell a director’s going for Paul Greengrass’ chaotic stylistics and all you’re seeing is shaky frames, there’s a problem.)  And despite it all, the novel’s massive fandom will enjoy watching The Hunger Games come to the screen in this serviceable adaptation that sticks rather faithfully to Collins’ prose and sets up nicely for the next installment.  If given the choice between Twilight’s risible monster-mash-love-triangle and The Hunger Games strong-willed saga of survival, I’ll take the latter every time.  While both turn their children into murderous monsters, only The Games, in its Shirley-Jackson-goes-Sweet-Valley-High kind of way, recognizes that, just by tuning in, we’re complicit in the carnage.

The Lucky One

1.5/5

Film adaptations of Nicholas Sparks’ novels are like the female equivalent to the testosterone-fueled carnage of the Transformers movies and their many clones.  There’s a core group of young men that go to theaters solely to gorge on numbing special effects junk food—along the lines of Michael Bay’s deliriously pointless, noisily mechanized and blindingly fiery spectacles—and drool ferverishly at the Maxim centerfold eye-candy of Megan Fox or Rosie Huntington Whitely.  Their wives or girlfriends, on the other hand, get their kicks from the three-hankie melodrama of Sparks’ mawkishly mishandled and jejune tearjerkers that, transplanted to the screen, are little more than sappy cardboard romances spiced up with their own brand of pinup-boy eye-candy, provided by teenybopper favorites like Channing Tatum and Liam Hemsworth. 

In The Lucky One, former Disney Channel heartthrob Zach Efron tries to navigate the tricky leap into serious actor territory, but really just joins the former ranks of chiseled meathead lover-boys. As another syrupy Sparks adaptation, the movie’s look is as kitsch-painterly—with images of billowy red mists, sunsets over sparkly water bodies, and glorious rays peaking through Southern-sumptuous vegetation—as its story is bird-brained and bloodless.  But The Lucky One, at the very least, has a premise worth jumping off from, even if its subsequent plot progression is more of a descent than ascent in quality.   

Efron plays Logan, a Marine in Iraq who ventures away from his unit only momentarily to pick up a wallet-sized picture of an anonymous lovely blond lying amid the rubble of Baghdad.   A mortar lands on the exact spot he previously stood, sending dumpsters full of dirt and a number of his fellow Jarheads sky-high.  Logan is eventually discharged and sent home to Colorado, but he holds onto the picture, which he considers his good luck charm.  With no real plan and a touch of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Logan decides to walk from Colorado to Louisiana in order to find this random beauty and thank her for saving his life. 

Having once espoused his admiration for Leonardo DiCaprio’s smooth transition from fan-girl poster-child to Oscar favorite, Efron is clearly on the hunt for juicy dramatic parts that will help stake his claim as an actor of substance.  More or less, he’s found one in Logan, a haunted but gentle warrior struggling with survivor’s guilt and a crippling lack of purpose.  Beefed up and ruggedly unkempt, Efron plays him strong and silent, but where’s the heartbreak below the stony visage?  He’s more of a hunky mannequin than a human being, and Efron, relying more on his hypnotic blue peepers than on protean emotional expressions, misses a chance to give the film’s central dreamboat a candidly colorful puissance.

After a little light investigating, Logan tracks the girl to a kennel out in the Bayou.  Deciding to keep his ulterior motive a secret, supposedly because it’s too hard for him to talk about, Logan gets a job there, cleaning up after the mangy mutts.  His luminescent guardian angel, Beth, played by Taylor Schilling with a more variant spectrum of sneers and lustful glances, turns out to be the owner.  At first, she treats Logan’s “drifter” with cold reticence, but then warms to him after seeing how good he looks while lifting heavy bags of dog food in a tight shirt.  Logan’s motives are never entirely clear, but we can assume the attraction is mutual.  The necessary hurdle blocking their serendipitous path to love is Beth’s jealous ex-husband, Keith, the local sheriff, a villain so clichéd and boorish he’s practically a cartoon. 

The best character in the movie is Beth’s grandmother, Ellie, who’s played by Blythe Danner as a slightly amused box of wisdom.  Overall, though, the movie languorously moves through its highly robotic motions, groping desperately for any shred of drama or romance.  Working from a lackluster adaptation, director Scott Hicks can’t really rely on his young actors—especially Efron—to transcend the material, so there’s very little revelatory dialogue to be found, even of the sappiest variety.  Hicks, instead, tries to tell the story the characters can’t through florid and autumnal pictorials of Schilling splashing in creeks or Efron walking soldierly along Southern dirt roads, all tuned to the romantic keys of inoffensive pop love-anthems.  Mostly, The Lucky One is a series of lethargic musical montages and truncated dialogue scenes strung together by the dental floss of passionless romance and a dishonest portrait of returning veterans.  Even for cinematic junk food, this is pretty indigestible.

Footnote

4/5

Every culture has a responsibility to pass on its ancestry and heritage to each new generation. That’s the only way to ensure that traditions and histories survive the withering of passing years. In Israel, this task is doubly important for existential destruction is an ubiquitous fear; to preserve the work of scholars and historians who spend their days tracing back the years, making connections and discoveries, and encasing in time the culture of an entire people ensures that those people achieve a level of immortality—even if immortality for a single person remains impossible.

Footnote, the excellent Israeli drama by Joseph Cedar, posits these concepts intimately and extensively with exceptional attention to the details of its characters. Shlomo Bar Aba plays the cantankerous Professor Eliezer Shkolnik, a septuagenarian Talmudic philologist at a top university in Jerusalem. As an academic, Eliezer has been passed over again and again by his peers: decades of scripture and manuscript dissection have long gone unrecognized by his field’s highly venerated elite. We learn in one of the film’s many quirky, narrated, tangential segments (straight from Amelie’s discarded reels) that 30 years of Eliezer’s backbreaking scholarship was hijacked and published by a bitter rival. Now, his only claim to fame is a footnote in the book of his mentor recognizing an iota of contribution.

What complicates things is that his son, Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), is also a professor of Talmudic history at the same university. Only Uriel is constantly being exalted for his work, receiving a multitude of prizes and honors. In the film’s opening segment, Uriel is granted membership into the highly esteemed Israel Academy, but throughout his five-minute acceptance speech, the camera never leaves Eliezer’s heartbroken face. Cedar’s astute artifice is effective at educing an ocean of unspoken animosity between father and son. Even though Uriel thanks him warmly in his words, citing his father’s vocational philosophy as a major influence on his own publications, Eliezer reads the peace offering as mere condescension.

When the prestigious Israel Prize—an annual award recognizing Israel’s brightest minds—announces its winner later on, will it be Eliezer’s year? Will he finally receive the honor he so desperately craves? Or will his son swoop in and win it from under his nose? With a number of inventive visual flourishes and just the right amount of absurdist humor, Footnote is not your average story of familial rivalry; instead, it’s a thematically rich tale of jealousy and sacrifice told with nearly parabolic Old Testament allusions, and also more modern insinuations about the importance of personal as well as ancestral legacy. Populated by deeply complex characters in a provocative narrative billowing with moral opacity, the film finds a fervid distinction between a scholar’s own professional responsibility to the truth and Man’s more complicated adherence to it. As Eliezer begins to comprise his integrity and morality for the sake of a mere prize, we can see he’s really gathering artifacts to aggrandize and preserve his own existence. Footnote becomes less about who someone is and more about how they’re remembered.

Parallels between father and son are drawn—both have offices stacked ceiling high with documents—to remind us of the tragic irony of their feud. It also creates an allegorical conflict between Man and his past—fueled by the fear he might repeat the mistakes of those who came before him. The two central performances bleed with candid emotionality. Bar Aba plays Eliezer as an anti-social grump who’s alienated his family and colleagues out of bitter spite. But behind his sullen visage is a sensitive old man, desperate to achieve the kind of immortality that the historical and religious subjects he dedicates his life to studying have done. Ashkenazi gives Uriel a dignity and propriety that his father lacks, but as the situation grows more precarious, Uriel starts to resemble his father in manner and attitude; he even severely and unjustly reprimands his own teenage son in a scene exploring the intergenerational legacy of familial dysfunction.

To understand Israeli cinema is to understand how the past and the present are always linked, like a father to his son. From their banishment from the Holy Land 2000 years ago to the Inquisition to the pogroms to the Holocaust to today, Jews collectively recognize the fragility of their small existence throughout history. Just as Israel’s geographical snugness is lampooned in a scene depicting a meeting in a cramped and crowded office, the sense of existential crisis is manifest in Eliezer. At one point, his son defends him against the head of the academic council by saying, “You’re seeking honors, just like every other mortal.” Footnote’s depiction of a cranky old man’s dishonorable crusade for honor leaves you with the sense that his actions weren’t only understandable—they were somehow necessary.

21 Jump Street

2.5/5

21 Jump Street, an action/comedy reboot of the 80’s TV cop drama that starred a young teen-beat Johnny Depp, is a funny but puerile and inconsequential bromance and wish-fulfillment fantasy starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. They play two overgrown kids with guns and badges who manage to suppress their underlying homoeroticism long enough to infiltrate a high school and stop a drug ring. The only thing this weakly transmuted adaptation has in common with its source material is the title and the squalid abandoned church headquarters that provides the eponymous address. The rest is a 21^st century makeover that sheds the original series’ risible earnestness to make room for a full layer of parodic flippancy and dick jokes.

To call 21 Jump Street loosely plotted is being kind. Way back in 2005, a Slim Shady clone named Schmidt (Hill) gets shot down by his dream prom date while the wispy haired and doltish jock Jenko (Tatum) looks on and laughs. “You’re a dork and she’s hot,” he teases at the outcome. Years later, the two are paired up in police academy and become partners and friends. Expectations of car chases and fiery explosions are quickly replaced by park duty and bike patrol. Luckily, the two are fresh-faced enough to join Captain Dickson (Ice Cube in a hilarious performance of muted aggression) and his covert unit of undercover high school students.

A slimmed-down and reigned-in Jonah Hill plays his usual insecure and luckless man-child, still stammering awkwardly through conversations with coeds. In Moneyball, Hill took a huge step forward as an actor, complimenting Brad Pitt’s movie star machismo with a nerdish reticence that made the geek/jock collision of modern sport statistics seem like a fetching antipodal mélange. Here, that maturity has been washed away and replaced by the Woody Allen-ish, nervous romantic-underdog bit that’s grown tired since Superbad. The far more accomplished performance belongs to Hill’s sidekick Channing Tatum, for whom this project is actually a progressive one. With his West Point crew cut and linebacker’s build, Tatum has an All-American virility and innate physicality that, as Jenko, he gets a chance to subvert with tasteless humor and blockheadedness and belie with notes of sympathetic ambivalence.

High school’s changed a lot since Jenko ran things. Only seven years removed from his glory years, he’s shocked to learn that there’s no room for old-fashioned schoolyard thugs when the popular kids are into tolerance and environmentalism. So he falls in with a trio of AP Chemistry wiz-kids, instead. At the same time, Schmidt’s desperate keggers and drugged-out turn as Peter Pan—complete with tights and feather—wins him favor with the socialites, a group of pretty people who might be supplying the student body with a lethal new designer drug. With the roles reversed, Schmidt has not only infiltrated the crime syndicate he was brought in to bring down, but also the clique of preppies that represent the teen-dream lifestyle he missed out on the first time around.

Like Peggy Sue Got Married, 21 Jump Street is a post-school reverie about getting a second chance at adolescence. But it somehow seamlessly hybrids that with something like Hot Fuzz—an action movie about a generation of kids weaned on action movies, grown up and handed guns with no place to discharge them. The final act really detonates into a blood-soaked shoot ‘em up—poking fun at viewer expectations. At some point in route, all the John Hughes and Lethal Weapon self-awareness starts to feel like felicitous cover-up for a poorly written story that directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller don’t seem to care much about. Forget the hail of bullets and inside jokes, 21 Jump Street remains a raunchy and ribald teen-angst comedy that gets you guffawing, if hardly ever caring.

Jeff, Who Lives At Home

4/5

I never thought the movie Signs could be anyone’s life philosophy. But when we first meet Jeff (Jason Segel)—you know, the one who lives at home—he’s looking into the camera and in pre-credit soliloquy expounding on his deep admiration for M. Night Shymalan’s alien invasion thriller. Though it’s not just the aliens that strike his fancy; it’s the idea of signs—the faith in cosmic order and spiritual destiny with which Jeff lives his life. From the first few moments of Jeff, Who Lives At Home, the gently inspiring new dramedy from the Duplass Brothers, we learn that our hangdog hero doesn’t only live at home to avoid paying rent; he’s waiting to find out where he’s supposed to be.

The prologue also helps us slip easily onto the movie’s purposefully banal but romantically sparkled wavelength, where Segel, the disarmingly kind teddy bear in Judd Apatow’s troupe of Gen-Y slackers, comfortably plants his 6 foot 5 inch self. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the comedian made a joke out of his over-sized vulnerability by appearing completely nude during an emotionally naked break up scene. As Jeff, a 30-year-old couch potato who lives in his mother’s basement and finds even the simplest tasks beyond his capabilities (when his mother asks him to fix a broken shingle, she might as well be Caesar demanding he build the Coliseum), Segel is rich with overgrown childish wonder and simple innocence, selling Jeff’s half-wacky, half-profound confessionals about fate as completely earnest.

The plot of the film follows Jeff’s misadventures over the course of a day, as he chases what he thinks are signs that make up some larger grand design. After a wrong number bellows for someone named Kevin, Jeff is sure to investigate as many Kevins as he can find. Later, by chance, he runs into his more responsible brother, Pat (Ed Helms), who’s marriage to Linda (Judy Greer, the dependable every-woman who played the spouse of George Clooney’s nemesis in The Descendents) is coming apart at the seams—she might or might not be having an affair at the local Comfort Inn. Meanwhile, the boys’ mother, Sharon (Susan Sarandon), sits in her cubicle, on her birthday, puzzling over a mysterious admirer who won’t stop blowing up her computer with instant messages. The film explores how these threads are connected, and it begins to take on the characteristics of Magical Realism: the uncanny and unexplainable start encroaching on the everyday as we follow kind-hearted Jeff in pursuit of his destiny.

As a lost child in a costume of hoodies, unkempt facial hair, gray sweat pants, and bong smoke, Jason Segel gives his best performance since Sarah Marshall. He speaks for a generation of developmentally arrested young people who know they won’t be as rich as their parents, so decide not to grow up instead of trying. Helms, a veteran of TV’s The Office, is a pro at handling the story’s broader comedic bits—like when his spanking new Porsche plows straight into a tree—but also proves considerably adept at navigating the character’s more emotionally complex shades. Sarandon’s poignant subplot is like an independent vignette about an aging woman coping with the growing ambivalence she feels about her sexual allure and ability to make interpersonal connections. The element bubbling below the surface of things is the father and husband whose death ten years prior has become, to each individual person, an open sore of unhealed grief.

Mark and Jay Duplass, whose previous film Cyrus made an actor out of Jonah Hill, have again proved that their trademark mumblecore cinema is probably the closest thing we have to American Realism. Shot on location with naturalistic lighting, digital cameras, and quick zooms straight from a sitcom mockumentary, this sub-genre of Independent Films focuses on out-of-the-crowd protagonists with an Average Joe’s problems and relationships. Films like this one are refreshingly light and achingly human, sacrificing grandeur or Hollywood’s high-stakes faux-grandeur for the delicate sweetness and genuine sorrow that ordinary people feel in their ordinary, mundane lives. Moreover, their protagonists, as is the case here, are often young men free-floating in ennui per post-grad dislocation, pinpointing a generational malaise spurned on by an uncertain zeitgeist.

Jeff is like the literal incarnation of unchecked American entitlement and Peter-Pan-Syndrome anxiety. But he’s a charming and loveable ragamuffin who’s just waiting for the right day to take responsibility for his life. And like they say, there’s no day like today. Beautifully written, directed and acted, with a simple but acknowledgeable xylophone score, this movie captures the spirit of American middle-class listlessness, but doesn’t propose wallowing in it; rather, taking action and seizing life. So, get out of your mother’s basement, follow the signs, and find your destiny at the theater with Jeff, Who Lives At Home.

Wanderlust

2.5/5

We can all celebrate! Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston have finally reunited many years after that one 90’s romcom nobody remembers. You know, the one where he played the gay guy she was in love with. Oh, and I think she was pregnant, or something. Anyway, this is Wanderlust! A don’t-drink-the-Kool-Aid satire about a couple cash-strapped bohemians who join a commune of hippy-dippy cartoon characters, this Apatow-esque comedy from writer/director David Wain (Role Models) has its share of goofy gags and look-at-the-weirdoes comedic bright spots. But the pairing of two likable stars and the assembly of several uproarious supporting loons can’t help this Trip from feeling like all jokes and no movie.

George (Rudd) and Linda (Aniston) are New Yorkers whose efforts to purchase a high-status, if smallish, Manhattan bungalow are shot down by bad luck in the workplace. They swing down to Atlanta to stay with George’s rich, but materialistic and shamelessly foul brother, Rick (Ken Marino). On the way, they spend a night at the Elysium, a backwoods cult of neo-hippies and flower children supported by an off-the-map gem of a B & B. George and Linda are lured in by the hospitality and tranquility of the colorful characters they encounter: Seth (Justin Theroux) is the community’s free-love obsessed “charismatic leader”; Carvin (Alan Alda) is its old-coot founder who can’t stop rattling off the names of his long-deceased co-founders; Karen (Kathryn Hahn) is an overblown version of the quintessential no-nonsense hippy-chick; and Wayne Davidson (Joe Lo Truglio) is the resident nudist with a penchant for writing sordid political thrillers.

After just one night of drum circles and good vibes the couple walk away elated. When 20 minutes at Rick’s seriously harshes their buzz, they return to the Elysium to become permanent members. But can peace, love, hemp clothes, and homegrown weed really live up to the hype? Aniston and Rudd have both come a long way since their last big-screen adventure together (by the way, it was called The Object of My Affection). They retain an adequate level of girl-and-boy-next-door chemistry. Though, Aniston, who’s been pigeonholed into playing spin-offs of Rachel Green in various scenarios, makes Linda nothing more than a one-note free spirit floating transparently through. Rudd has a bit more range as an actor, and can play outlandish and weird as easily as he can play his typical 21^st century, cynical nice-guy. As George, he gets a chance to showcase his own inner nutcase. In one scene, he preps for his first go at “free-love” with the local beauty Eva (Malin Akerman) by staring into a mirror and spouting an extended monologue of nonsensical and surreal pep-talk ramblings.

By the time he gets to the bedroom, he can’t stop acting moronic long enough to get on with the show, a symptom of his idiotic-impotency. Wanderlust itself shares a similar pathology—this ribald comedy is more concerned with reveling in its caricaturist’s portrait of silly earth-lovers than it is with establishing strong central characters then evolving them and their relationships. With really funny support, enough winning jokes, and a good director, the ground is fertile for something tasty (and organic!), but unfortunately a worthy movie never really sprouts from it.

A Separation

5/5

Sometimes a film’s characters are so complex and realistic they don’t feel like fictional characters at all, but actual human beings. The superb Iranian drama A Separation is one of the top five best films of 2011, it just won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s populated by figures that feel more authentic than any other movie’s in recent memory, short of documentary subjects.

Actually, director Asghar Farhadi, working from his own excellent screenplay, does display an aesthetic that has documentary-like realism and intimacy. With a grainier, dustier film stock and a shaky camera, the film all but drops the viewer down into Tehran’s arid and hoary urban landscape. In the city’s local courthouse, where the movie’s extraordinary opening scene takes place, a man-and-wife, Nader and Simin, sit pleading for a divorce that the courts refuse to grant them. Simin, a stronger-than-your-average-stereotype Iranian woman, recognizes the hardships and lack of opportunities that come with living in Iran. She wants to take her pre-teen daughter, Termeh, and leave. However, her father-in-law is afflicted with Alzheimer’s and there is no way her husband will leave his sickly father destitute and alone. Without a court-authorized divorce, Simin cannot get custody of her daughter, and the two can never leave the country for a better life.

The scene plays out in an unbroken, static two-shot, in which the couple sit facing the camera and stare directly down its barrel. In a touch lifted from Kurosawa’s Rashomon, we never see the judge at all. With the actor’s looking desperately in our eyes as they beg for a way out, we become the judge, and the rest of the film’s intricate narrative unravels as a series of lies, deceits, misunderstandings, colliding perspectives, and contradictory stories that leaves it to each individual viewer to seek out their own comprehension of truth and justice.

Simin and Nader agree to a trial separation, but with Simin gone, Nader needs to find someone else to care for his father everyday. Along comes the highly incompetent—and highly pregnant—Razieh who only takes the job because her hotheaded husband, Hodjat, is stuck in debtor’s prison. An incident occurs between Razieh and Nader that initially seems mundane, but escalates into a criminal investigation with disastrous potential. As we watch these people’s lives go from bad to worse, it’s our job to prune through the film’s more compounded entanglements and characterizations to form our own opinion about what really happened and who’s responsible for the consequences. The task is complicated, however, as Farhadi uses a semi-omniscient narrative style that picks and chooses, very carefully, what information to divulge and what to keep hidden from view.

Brilliantly, A Separation avoids easy archetypes and clichés at every turn. Each character is highly sympathetic, but not completely in the right either. It’s a film without any traditional villains—one whose four central characters are all guilty of making bad decisions, yet somehow those decisions remain understandable and identifiable. Simin wants to leave Iran, which to Western eyes seems like a pretty good realization, but her callousness towards her father-in-law is hardly graceful. In fact, her abandonment of her family in the film’s first minutes—a choice she makes out of what seems like stubbornness and spite—kicks off the entire spiral of mishaps and pitfalls. Nader is no saint, either. He’s loyal and loving to his father and daughter, and even agrees to the divorce, but becomes perhaps the most dishonest and remorseless character in the film.

While the picture is obviously a condemnation of Iran’s draconian criminal justice system, it also provides a lens into the state of the rest of Iranian society. Since Nader and Simin are middle class while Razieh and Hodjat are struggling and impoverished, their fight becomes one of class distinctions. Both couples have young daughters that watch with open and impressionable eyes as their parents sink down rabbit holes of petty malice and feuding vindictiveness. The condition of Nader’s father, and the way he’s treated by those around him, helps the viewer understand the culture’s traditional familial obligations, but also the insensitivity regarding the undesirability of the nation’s old and infirm. Razieh’s Achilles Heal is her piousness, which keeps her from swearing to anything she cannot be 100 percent certain of. While Nader’s more secular nature gives him an advantage in court, as his only responsibility is to his own wellbeing and that of his kin.

Working out of a theocracy notorious for its cinematic censorship, Farhardi has braved the courts himself to make a film that has all the trademarks of a conventional melodrama, but its verisimilitude and copious complexities make it a film that far transcends its genre to become something provocative, accusatory and moralistically ambivalent. His approach achieves a universal relate-ability coupled with a more cultural specificity that gives Westerners a fly-on-the-wall view into a world that couldn’t be more similar and different.

The most extensive and essential dichotomy A Separation explores is that of gender. The bitter and resentful man and wife whose stubborn rivalry causes a world of harm: it’s a tale as old as time. But A Separation gives it an international flavor that makes the whole discourse feel fresher and more vital. As multi-dimensional as its title, this slyly transgressive Iranian masterpiece depicts its nation’s greatest schisms and introduces Westerners to a world on the edge of transition, caught between customs and modernization, between liberty and oppression, all perfectly realized in the movie’s ambiguous final tableau. Back in the courthouse, we observe another two-shot of man and wife. The battle continues. The woman, now boxed in by a frame within a frame, is separated from her husband by a pane of glass. In Farhardi’s world, her desperate protestations have vilified and entrapped her. Maybe she was foolish for thinking they could have ever set her free.