FILM: "Sunshine"

Sunshine may be a science-fiction flick, but its core is that of a natural disaster on par with Deep Impact, and the emotion is right up there with that of the similarly claustrophobic and aesthetically pleasing independent film, Cube. It's a merging of the kinds of big-budget special effects that make a tidal wave of solar fire with the low-budget artistry that gets just the right color of blood against a sterile, flickering white.

Sunshine, the tale of an eight-man crew of scientists on their way to reignite the dying sun with a stellar bomb, may not sound like a bright idea, but it's directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland (who last brought you 28 Days Later... and The Beach). For Boyle, it's a technical step up from his previous films, and a striking success in the genre where similar stylist Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain) failed. However, while Boyle handles the heat of the kitchen, Garland's third act doesn't hold up well under the focus of the sun, and his great ideas are saved only by Boyle's imagineering and the excellent casting of Cillian "Can't Miss" Murphy, who hasn't been in a bad film since '02. For the first two-thirds of the film, you'll notice that Boyle's camera is wide, focussed on the majestic, deafening nature of space (scored by the epic electronica of Underworld) and that the inevitable deaths of this thriller are clever, and according to character. It's only in that final stretch that Boyle is forced to focus on narrow corridors, dark passages, and Murphy's piercing, panic-stricken eyes. (It's no surprise that the solar-plated space-suits of the film are carefully designed to show the eyes, and the eyes alone.)

Then again, there's another way to look at Garland's plot, and that's as a mirror of the utilitarianism of this crew. Just as the majority of them sacrifice themselves to ensure the mission succeeds (what are eight lives in the face of all life's extinction), so too does Garland's script sacrifice plausibility -- one of the least necessary features of a science-fiction film -- in order to give Boyle the climactic shots that cinch the film. Along the way, he actually mirrors another plot point: Capa (Murphy) votes to deviate the ship's course to investigate the distress beacon of Icarus-1, the ship that preceded them seven years ago, hoping that their fissionable payload will give them a better shot at succeeding. However, the deviation from their plotted course backfires, and, due to the human error of their naviagator, Trey (Benedict Wong), their solar shields are damaged. From that point on, things go badly for our crew, just as Garland's eventual deviation (for Boyle's greater good) results in some bad writing. The crew faces immolation, suffocation, and even the irony of hypothermia as they desperately try to finish their mission, and while I won't tell if you they succeed or not, Garland's script holds up well enough under the pressure to go from coal badness to some diamond-like grace.

Eerily beautiful as Sunshine is, it's also a great character piece. The film isn't played for laughs like Serenity was, but there are tones of those anti-heroes in our last-ditch crew, from the resolute do-or-die computer technician Mace (Chris Evans) to the high morals of the love interest, Cassie (Rose Byrne), and the cool calculations of the doctor, Searle (Cliff Curtis). In the efforts to stay under two hours in length (the one focussed success this has over films like 2001: A Space Odyssey), not all of the characters get as much development, and some are reduced to stereotypes, like that of the selfish communications operator, Harvey (Troy Garity), or the zen-like oxygen specialist, Corazon (Michelle Yeoh). Luckily, Boyle manages to find a nice resolution here, compressing his action scenes to the barest essentials of testosterone and the most critical moments, as achieved by jagged flashcuts and solarized double-vision. His greatest feat is in his utilization of light: from the blinding sun to the ash-covered blackness, Boyle makes the confines of his spaceship far more extensive than they are, and manages to make single scenes far more vivid than they would otherwise be (which is where he saves Garland).

The only thing missing from Sunshine is a prolonged tension: things go wrong, but always in small, self-contained doses, and we, as an audience, are given far too many chances to recover. Alien, which is the other great science-fiction film this will be compared to, didn't have Boyle's range of effects, but it had a more exacting atmosphere, and the tighter focus actually scared us, as opposed to Boyle's epic focus, which simply awes us. But, hey, if you've got a problem with just being awe-struck, perhaps you should just cake on the sunblock and stay in today; for the rest of you, grab the cool sunglasses, because Sunshine is a film with vision, and you'll want to look directly at its brilliance.

Tribeca 2007: Day Six

-Watching the Detectives
Comedy is a very fine art: there's highbrow, lowbrow, and then genre-specific -- we're talking the sort of niche humor that entertains a smallest common denominator. Writer/director Paul Soter has taken a little bit of the low and the genre work that he mastered working with Broken Lizard, and he's made a fitting salute to the old Noir detectives with his fantastic film Watching the Detectives.

Neal (Cillian Murphy) is a staid, movie-obsessed video-store owner (fitting, if you think about it), who gads about on a plush sofa like some upper-class version of Randall (from Clerks), imitating films and mocking customers with his two friends, Lucien (Michael Panes) and Jonathan (Jason Sudeikis). As romance has it, the girl of his dreams is his total opposite, a foxy wildfire of a dame (Lucy Liu, all foxfire, is luminescent in her reacquired giddiness). This girl, Violet, is a practical joker who suffers from boraphobia (yes, the fear of boredom), and who invents all her own fun in the absence of TV. She's "pretty consistently out there," and she allows the film to range from awkward to terrifying to sweet, all while staying absolutely endearing. Whether Soter is doing a straight-spoof of old detective shots (birds-eye through the ceiling fan, golden light spilling through slits in the shade) or the glitzy mockery of digital graininess in his flashbacks, Watching the Detectives is great fun. As Violet says about Neil, I say about this film: "I'm crazy about [it]." Both parts of that sentence are true.

-Born and Bred
Pablo Trapero's Born and Bred is another one of those Spanish films that mixes an exotic location with a savage truth: in this case, the wastes of Patagonia mixed with the almost inevitable (these days) car crash that causes Santiago to try losing himself, as he has lost his wife and daughter. It's an adequate film, but it's lacking the extra edge of crispness found in directors like Alfonso Cuaron, the jagged beauty of a fabulist like Guillermo del Toro, or the epic scope of a panoramic artist like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (to go for the obvious names).

The acting is what woos the audience: there's a heartfelt camaraderie between Santiago and his new best friends, the Santa-like Cacique, and the rough-cut ladies man, Robert. Their friendship is well documented in all walks of life, from the drunken lows of an attempted three-way to the beautiful highs of clear hunting in a snowy forest, all the way to their mundane work on an eroding airstrip in the middle of nowhere. Trapero does well to show us a man drowning in his own sorrow, and the musical selections only serve to pull him further underwater, and there's nothing about Born and Bred that doesn't work (except, perhaps, the extreme cut between the accident and the present day); it's just an unfortunate reality that this sort of narrow-minded tragedy is, for the moment, tapped.

-The Optimists
Let the critics waste their breath finding the good films among the new premieres: the best bang for your buck is letting the best come directly to you, courtesy of Tribeca's Spotlight series. The Optimists, a Serbian film by Goran Paskaljevic, is a fantastically dry and witty meditation on the nature of optimism, by means of Voltaire: "Optimism is insisting everything is good, when everything is bad." Five short films, which share only the actor Lazar Ristovski (from the excellent film Underground), take up this saying as we leap from a miraculous master of hypnosis, come to save a town (that he's an escaped mental patient shouldn't matter, should it?), to a young son, come to make good on his father's (and grandfather's, and great-grandfather's) gambling debts by . . . gambling it all away himself.

What Paskaljevic does so poetically is to capture the grim determination of suckers after the fact, that is, to show the actors at the moment of realizing that they've been had, but that since there's nothing they can do about it, that they should put on a happy face anyway. And so, in the second film, we are immersed in the smoldering rage of an impotent father who cannot avenge his daughter's rape because the rapist is his boss, and the owner of the foundry. In the final film, a bus full of terminally ill or permanently crippled victims are conned into seeking out a spring of youth, only to settle (with a forcefully giddy enthusiasm) for an oily pond that they discover in its place. Here, the shot that lingers is that of the father, clutching his blind daughter in a tight embrace as she continues to say, "I think I can see, Papa, I think I can see something," even though it's painfully obvious to both of them that there is no light at the end of her tunnel. But who am I to say what hope is and isn't? All I can say is that The Optimists has the savage wit of satire down cold: I hope more American directors take note (Thank You For Smoking was the closest we've had, and that was tamed by its political nature).

FILM: "The Wind That Shakes the Barley"

Is there a worse thing than countryman killing countryman? Yes: brother killing brother. Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a period piece about the creation of the IRA, encompasses all that and goes one step further with his brutally sincere and unflinching camera: he makes us understand the dire necessity that calls for such reckless killing.

In many ways, this is the first film I've seen that justifies terrorism, and Paul Laverty's script deserves recognition for its moral balancing act. Loach supports Laverty by shooting the film with subtle grays, taking long shots of fog-swept marches, and setting up delicate ambushes on the barley-covered roads, and showing us the beauty of Irish culture only in the context or aftermath of bloody British savagery (the film's title song is delivered at a funeral). The Wind That Shakes the Barley may cheat occasionally by only showing the worst of one side, but it doesn't exactly show us the best of the Irish either: the organized killings often look like scenes from gangster flicks, complete with hidden weapons and swift vengeance. But no matter how you frame some of these shots, they're bound to provoke gut responses: it hurts to watch a thuggish group of policemen deliberately beat a man to death in front of his mother (especially when the crime is insignificant).

It's no great stretch to see Damien turn away from his medical aspirations in the light of such things, and to join in with the men he grew up with (especially when one's his brother, Teddy). After some solemn training, it's a pleasure to watch them turn the tables on the police; when their violence lands them in jail, we pray for them to escape (that they are tortured is further provocation); when they escape and kill the traitor, it's a necessity, not a crime.

If only The Wind That Shakes the Barley were one-dimensional; if only it weren't such a struggle for Damien to fire his gun; if only we didn't have to watch the wind taken out of his barley-like frame as the curses of the traitor's family run through his mind. But Loach is too savvy a director for such agenda-driven comfort: while the film's escalation seems logical and necessary, each step forward feels as if it's been ripped from the someone's heart. We don't want to see Damien splinter away from Teddy, but we agree with both of them, and that's what makes the onset of Irish-against-Irish revolution so tragic.

As Damien, Cillian Murphy is perfect. His fragile features (as in Red Eye) make him far more innocent than he is even as his cold blue eyes give him steely resolve. Padraic Delaney, who plays his brother, is more of a brute: gruff, huge, and unflinching. But just as Murphy plays against type to exploit our emotions, so does Delaney. He doesn't sag with the repercussion of his actions, he implodes, which is the very essence of heartbreaking cinema.

These quiet moments are The Wind That Shakes the Barley: the silence shared between brothers who will not back down from their beliefs, or the unspoken rage of our heroic rebels as they helplessly watch their innocent cousins pay the price for their actions. A grandmother, whose house has just been burnt down, refusing to leave the land she was born on: her tottering body filled with a grim determination to stay in the chicken coop, even if that means cleaning out the corpses already stored there.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a brutally sincere film filled with haunting images and the sorrowful inevitability of the past. The methodical pacing illustrates why neither side can back down (without seeming like a history lesson) and the raw emotions of these actors ripple through the scenes like the light wind through that even lighter barley.