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Of Wolves and Hustlers: American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street

Of this year's contenders for the Academy Award for Best Picture, two of the nine feature constant frenetic movement, explosive bursts of speech, uncontrolled intensity of feeling and unrelenting, feverish, heedless action. "American Hustle" and "The Wolf of Wall Street," both of which are based on true stories about risk-loving con artists, were directed by two of the most lauded and original directors in Hollywood, David O. Russell and Martin Scorsese. Their ability to keep up the hyperactive pace while moving their stories forward with constantly thrumming energy is laudable. There are moments of broad comedy in each movie, and fine actors get to strut and display their big-time acting chops like peacocks. However, the frantic energy of each story kept me from engaging with or feeling much concern for the characters, nearly every one of whom is profoundly, even dangerously, self-absorbed. The manic movement of each story, the outsized and all-consuming appetites of the characters and their frequent disregard for the serious impact their actions had on others made me itch to leave the cinema so I could escape the company of these heedless narcissists.

I have few complaints about the quality of the acting in either film. Each is well cast over all, and the dynamic performers chew their scenery powerfully, bug out their eyes on cue, thrash at each other, spew metaphorical venom and sometimes actual spittle with gusto. They mime their egregious behavior quite capably in scene after scene. But the pace is relentless, the hustle is constant, and the inflated egos bump up against each other with such regularity that I felt they were invading my personal space as well.

This cinematic overkill, especially "The Wolf of Wall Street," felt assaultive instead of merely entertaining. These films feature some of the most skilled and intuitive actors in movies today, and I love their fervent energy, which seems to have been the major element that Russell and Scorsese cared about this year. However, I also value these actors for their intuition, for the quiet intensity that each has shown in prior work. Neither film allowed these actors to show this end of their range, and it is range of emotion displayed in a single story that really wows me, not just intense, unbridled feeling overwhelming scene after screaming scene.

We have seen these actors give outstanding performances, so we know what they're capable of. Christian Bale is a force of nature and has been carrying massive films on his capable shoulders since he was twelve years old. In "Empire of the Sun," young Bale led an epic Spielberg movie on the strength of his performance and made us believe in and fall in love with him. In "Her," Amy Adams must convey emotional exhaustion and fragility as well as inner strength and resourcefulness—and she does. In "The Departed," an undercover cop played by Leonardo DiCaprio lies his way into a dangerous organized crime leader's inner circle, and seeing the cost to his psyche of living in terror is excruciating. Few actors could play that role with such tormented intensity. In "Silver Linings Playbook," David O. Russell's hugely successful and moving Best Picture nominee from just last year, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper are misfits with huge hearts and huge tempers. They hunger but hold back, explode and then retreat. They bob and weave and engage, connect and then just miss each other. The audience shares in their yearning to find a safe harbor in each other. 

But in "American Hustle," the actors rush at each other, scream and punch, and the mascara runs, the hair gets pulled, and the poor Steadicam operator whirls in 360-degree circles to amplify the mayhem going on around him because of the intense, no-holds-barred way in which Russell films his movies. In "The Wolf of Wall Street," Scorsese overloads us with scene after scene of excess: offices filled with screaming, raving, swearing stock traders oozing testosterone and pumping fists, anxious to defraud any patsy they come across; hotel rooms full of hookers and blow; drug-fueled orgy scenes so full of outlandish spectacle that our eyes roam wildly over the screen as we try to focus on a single episode of decadence at a time. It all blurs together in a giant Quaalude-fueled, Armani-clad, cocaine-covered slurry of outrageous excess.

There are rich and enjoyable scenes in each film, of course. "American Hustle" was written by David O. Russell and Eric Warren Singer; "The Wolf of Wall Street" was penned by Terrence Winter, creator of "Boardwalk Empire" and frequent writer and producer of "The Sopranos." Both provide lively, vulgar, rapid-fire dialog, and their actors relish every syllable. Jennifer Lawrence's drunken, desperate, boundary-free turn as con man Christian Bale's wife Rosalyn in "American Hustle" is a knock-out performance. She mixes cockiness with desperation as she warns Amy Adams's character to stay away from her man, and she struts, lures and confronts with stunning confidence and charisma. Lawrence has the instincts and impeccable timing (both dramatic and comedic) of a much more experienced actress. Her performance makes it clear that having won a Best Actress Oscar last year (with the same director and one of the same co-stars) with a self-assured performance at such an early age was no fluke.

Amy Adams's performance here is less successful. She's a talented actress and a very likeable woman; her interview with James Lipton on Bravo's "Inside the Actor's Studio" last month showed her to be a thoughtful, disciplined, generous actor, articulate and devoted to her craft and to those with whom she works. But I never bought her in her role as Sydney, a lying, manipulative homewrecker with nerves of steel who is vital to the con artistry involved in bringing down corrupt politicians. She brings a quiver and insecurity to all her roles which often gives them a spark of life, but here that vulnerability undermines the ruthlessness of her character. The British accent she adopts for part of the film was so uneven and unconvincing I could never believe that any character would buy it; throughout the film I was always aware that she was a playing a role. Adams has a natural softness that suits her well in most of her films, and while she was surprisingly effective as a foul-mouthed barmaid in Russell's earlier and extremely entertaining film, "The Fighter," here she plays too much against type. Her character in "American Hustle" is so conniving and happy to use any and everyone that she left me cold—like nearly every other character in this over-adrenalized movie.

However, I do applaud Russell for providing rich and chewy roles for women in most of his films, roles that allow women to be as lively, influential, exciting and messed up as the men. Scorsese's films are usually all about the men, and in "Wolf of Wall Street," the women are again  primarily foils for stories about over-grown boys gone very, very bad.

Bradley Cooper shows angst and confused anger as well as anyone; he used these skills to great effect in "Silver Linings Playbook," behaving erratically and often badly without losing our sympathy. In "American Hustle," his character is so violent, duplicitous, vain and selfish that despite the good performance, I couldn't care about him and didn't enjoy spending time with his portrayal of nasty, erratic FBI agent Richie. Similarly, Christian Bale (whose Oscar-winning performance in Russell's film "The Fighter" was sensational) gained over 40 pounds and sported the worst comb-over in the history of cinema to become Irving for this film. While he has more heart than the rest and even experiences moments of regret, those fleeting episodes of conscience rarely interfere with his putting his interests first. Jeremy Renner's portrayal of Mayor Carmine Polito is one of the more sympathetic characters here, but when the lying, law-breaking politician is one of the better-behaved members of the ensemble, you know you're hanging out with the wrong people.

The behavior is even more outrageous and consideration for the safety or well-being of others is completely lacking in "The Wolf of Wall Street." As in "American Hustle," the story is told in a nonjudgmental way; indeed, in the character of Jordan Belfort, a corrupt stockbroker who was convicted of market manipulation and fraud, Leonardo DiCaprio narrates the story of his rise and fall himself. Audacious behaviors that threaten people's livelihoods and even lives are presented as sources of amusement and are seen as sexy and exciting. Matthew McConaughey's cameo early in the film as an enthusiastically despicable character is heartily enjoyable, but what seemed like over-the-top self-absorption in that scene proved to be reined in and subtle compared to the rip-snortingly outrageous fever pitch the film builds to over the following two hours. Jonah Hill plays DiCaprio's sidekick Donnie Azoff with relish and delight; Donnie provides much of the comic relief of the film, but Hill plays him not just as a clown but as a man in over his head. Donnie was clearly not born with the gifts of  suave, slick, sick-hearted Jordan, so watching his decline hurts more than seeing Jordan's fall. For dramatic purposes, Terrence Winter was wise to emphasize the relationship between these two men above all others in this film since there is a strange and interesting chemistry between them, but I notice that, again, Scorsese has chosen to present a story in which women are noticeably peripheral to the action, except as sexy visual filler.

Scorsese is an interesting case; he is capable of great restraint and beauty in a film like "The Age of Innocence," and even his most volatile and violent characters live in worlds that are beautifully designed, lit and filmed. He has one of the most aesthetically sophisticated points of view of any director working today, and we owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his many years of efforts to support film preservation. But his enthusiasm for extremes of behavior and expression, and his desire to make viewers not only experience but wallow in assaultive excess, cause me to view his work with a wary eye. Much as I admire a Scorsese classic like "Goodfellas" and admire his guiding touch in the excellent HBO series "Boardwalk Empire," I must always prepare myself for a barrage of ugliness when I enter a cinema that presents his films, for violence is inherent to most of his greatest work. He is famed for working with the meticulous editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and they certainly know how to build tension. But fine filmmaking involves more than bottling up rage until it is compressed to such a point that the bottle shatters. Nobody does explosive rage better than Scorsese, but in his latest film, he does it at the expense of the quieter moments that allow an audience to breathe, to relax, and to get inside the workings of a character so that we can feel enough about him or her to care when something happens to change his or her world. In this film he works more in words than in blood, it's true, yet the energy behind the story feels as violent and visceral as the energy in his more deadly works.

My favorite Scorsese film, "The Departed," features a crackerjack cast (Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga), including one of the director's favorite actors, Leonardo DiCaprio. Leo has become to Scorsese what Robert De Niro was to the director's earlier films. He is at his best when he channels his vulnerability alongside his rage; we must see the bruised boy within the powerful men he usually plays in order to be drawn into and care about his characters. In "The Wolf of Wall Street," he has a chance to express his explosive power unchecked, and it's damned impressive, but the role misses the element that makes DiCaprio a truly great actor: his range, his fragile core, the pain his characters generally feel when they harm others. His performance here is powerfully ugly, and the character moves along his nasty trajectory so quickly that we get very little time with him before he becomes a monster. DiCaprio deserved his Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination (and perhaps the Oscar itself) for his amazing work in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" and gave exceptional performances in "Revolutionary Road" and "The Departed" and wildly entertaining performances in "The Aviator," "Catch Me if You Can" and other fine films. But "The Wolf of Wall Street" is not the film he should win his first Oscar for.

DiCaprio, like Christian Bale, is one of the finest actors of his generation, and Leo is, over all, a more versatile performer than Matthew McConaughey, who has proven his own mettle over the past four years. However, McConaughey's performance in "Dallas Buyers Club" is the more moving and astonishing feat of acting; his is the performance I would like to see win a Best Actor Oscar this year. In "Dallas Buyers Club" he was able to show range, raw vulnerability, and a talent that moves from abject deathly illness and despair to victorious, cocky success, all in a brittle, emaciated body that is as far as a man can get from the muscled, oiled, powerful physique he displayed in "Magic Mike" just two years ago. Christian Bale is a remarkably realistic actor, and he gives his all here, but the character is limited in his range of emotion and expression as well. Bale whispers, shouts, cajoles and generally shows much more versatility that the other actors in "American Hustle" are allowed, but his role cannot provide us with a breathtaking conversion from lost soul to redeemed hero the way McConaughey does in "Dallas Buyers Club." I don't blame DiCaprio or Bale for not being worthy of Oscars this year; they did what they were hired to do admirably and often enjoyably, but they did not have the opportunity to reinvent themselves on the scale that McConaughey did, and he proved himself as adept and committed any actor alive.

As explosive as the characters directed by Scorsese can be, director David O. Russell is famous for his own scary relationship to anger. He was involved in two of the most famous altercations in movie-making history with two of Hollywood's best-loved movie stars. His ego and temper are legendary. During the making of his wickedly funny, surprisingly moving war film "Three Kings," George Clooney was so appalled by Russell's contemptuous treatment of the film's crew that Clooney and Russell got into an argument so heated it broke down into physical fighting between the star and the director. During the making of his mediocre film "I Heart Huckabee's," Lily Tomlin, with whom Russell worked successfully in the funny road-movie farce "Flirting with Disaster," found Russell and his style so difficult to work with that their disagreement quickly rose to a shouting match that was recorded and shared widely the world over. They've since made up with each other, and in his interviews (as well as in most of his films) he shows a self-deprecating wit, enthusiasm, devotion to craft and (occasional) sensitivity that allow one to see how all-consuming his passion for movie-making is, and how difficult it has been for him to allow a single element of it to elude his control. He is still famously touchy, tightly coiled and sometimes turns adversarial with surprising speed. However, with his great recent success he seems to have learned some element of humility; he credits his becoming more patient and loving to the fact of his having a severely bi-polar son for whom he has had to sacrifice much. He says it was his experience with his son that drove him to make "Silver Linings Playbook," and he certainly brought great love and passion to that project, which deserves its great success.

Perhaps it was his having moderated his expression of anger in his private life that led Russell to find an appropriate professional outlet for his extremes of emotion and led to the boisterous "American Hustle."  As many reviewers adore the film as were overwhelmed by it. Audiences were certainly seduced by the disco-era costumes, interiors and, especially, hairstyles; it is a visual feast of seventies tackiness. But it is the film's energy level that either delights or repels audiences the most. Russell works differently from most directors, and that shows up on the screen. Jennifer Lawrence calls Russell's style "weird and instantaneous," Robert De Niro says it's "spontaneous and chaotic." Russell likes to film in enclosed spaces and to use a Steadicam (hand-held camera) operator to follow the action around the room (or even inside a car) and to film multiple takes of a scene in quick succession without turning off the camera. Actors have to keep their energy levels up and their characters intact because at any moment they might have to repeat, react to, change the dialog in or continue a scene without knowing in advance. (This process is what Lily Tomlin found so unnerving during the filming of "I Heart Huckabees.") Some find it exhilarating, and the energy certainly shows up on the screen. David Denby of the New Yorker says, "'American Hustle' is built around many acts of cynical manipulation, but it is generous, even kindly, in spirit. ... What he puts on the screen here is faster than life and more volatile than common realism, but it’s definitely not farce. His characters act stupidly because they want something desperately, and his actors, all of them taking enormous risks, form an ensemble that is the equal of anything from Hollywood’s golden age."

I did not find it so. I was able to enjoy some of the film as it progressed, but the more I think about it in retrospect, the more it disappoints me. The selfishness of nearly every character wore me down and left me cold. Because the script for "American Hustle" bounces from one fraught, intense scene to the next, the viewer never gets to relax, either. I found this frenetic pace, along with the inherently unlikable qualities of the characters, distanced me from them and made me weary of all the niggling details of their exchanges. The film is ostensibly about the famous Abscam sting operation run by the FBI in the 1970s. The operation set up and entrapped public officials who were on the take by involving known swindlers working on behalf of the government. Since a story that relies on backroom political bribery is not always inherently gripping, the real heart of the film is in the personal entanglements between the people who entrapped the politicians and their motivations for doing such work. I found the explanations of these intrigues overly detailed and the histrionics of the five primary characters tiring enough that I started checking my watch halfway through the film. I was relieved to see Louis C.K. portray the only reasonable, normal person on screen, but Bradley Cooper as the FBI agent treated him so badly that I began to cringe in anticipation every time Louis's face appeared. Christian Bale's character, for all his many flaws, is the only one who shows actual concern for the people he harms along the way, but it came too little and too late for me to enjoy his characterization much.

There is more to a great film than the alternation of emotional compression and explosive rage, and there is more to a great director than the ability to prod an actor into spewing and screaming. While I look forward to future projects from all of the actors, writers and directors involved in these films, I hope that at this year's Academy Award ceremony their directors are not rewarded for these exhausting, overwrought paeans to excess.

Judi Dench and the Lost Child of Philomena Lee

Judi Dench, like her close friend Maggie Smith, is one of those nearly universally liked and admired British actresses who can be relied upon to add both dignity and dry humor to any production. Solid performances by these two celebrated Shakespearean actors, both born in 1934, have been sprinkled liberally throughout popular culture over the past decade or so (Judi in the James Bond franchise, and Maggie in the Harry Potter films and television's "Downton Abbey"), and though they have a century of acting experience between them, they are far better known by the U.S. public today than they were when they were the toast of the London stage and earning leading-lady roles in film and on British television. Maggie Smith became an international film star much earlier than her friend when she won an Academy Award for Best Actress in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" in 1969, but among Americans she is best known for her supporting actress roles playing dry old ladies with withering insights. Judi Dench is much better known in the United Kingdom than in America; she was the star of several popular British television series and had successes on the stage in productions like "Cabaret" in London's West End as far back as 1968 as well as in serious roles like Lady Macbeth. When she became the first female incarnation of M in the James Bond film series beginning in 1995, she became better known to a wider assortment of international filmgoers, and winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Queen Elizabeth I in 1998's "Shakespeare in Love" gave her career a huge boost.

Like her friend Maggie Smith, Judi Dench often plays unsmiling, all-knowing, uncompromising women who cannot be fooled, but in her Oscar-nominated role as Philomena Lee in Stephen Frears's film "Philomena" she gives a unexpectedly soft, poignant and sympathetic performance that celebrates her versatility and range. The film is based on the true story of Irish woman Philomena Lee who became pregnant as a teenager in 1951 and was sent to a remote Irish abbey during her pregnancy. There she was forced by nuns to work as a laundress alongside other unwed mothers, and was made to stay on working at the laundry without pay for four more years both as penance for the sin of having had premarital sex and to pay the abbey for the costs of caring for her during her pregnancy. This practice of locking up unwed mothers in their teens (or even twenties) in what were known as "Magdalene asylums" or "Magdalene laundries" was common in Ireland and Britain in the 19th century, and it spread to other European countries and to the U.S. and Canada. The practice lasted well into the 20th century. The last Magdalene asylum in Ireland was in operation until 1996. At these workhouses girls were sometimes beaten, often locked inside against their will and sometimes forbidden to leave even after they became adults. The Catholic Church got a great deal of free labor from these women, and embarrassed parents of unwed pregnant teens were often so relieved to avoid the public shame of having their daughters' sins paraded before society that many abandoned their children to the Magdalene sisters forever. Families often told neighbors and friends that their daughters had gone to live with family, or emigrated, or even died, all in an effort to save themselves from shame and social ostracism.

While these teen girls worked long hours in the steamy laundries, their children were watched over by nuns in nurseries. At the abbey where Philomena lived, children were often adopted out to American married couples who sought children in return for generous donations to the abbey. Philomena was only able to spend a short time with her son each day, and her much-loved child was adopted by an American couple and taken away from the nursery with no warning one day while she was working. Philomena had no chance to say goodbye, she had no idea that her little boy had been flown to America, and she was not told that his named had been changed. All her efforts to learn what became of her son were rebuffed by the abbey, which destroyed her records and denied knowledge of her son's name and whereabouts. Ashamed by her plight but desperately sad to have lost her son, Philomena sought him secretly for a half century without luck, and then finally told her daughter the truth. She and her daughter enlisted the help of Martin Sixsmith, a journalist and former government advisor to the Labour Party who was out of work and searching for a journalistic assignment, and the two convinced him to help Philomena in her search. Martin and Philomena ended up traveling to America together and learning extraordinary things about Philomena's son and about the abbey's deceptive practices. Their story of their adventure together was published by Sixsmith in 2009 in his book "The Lost Child of Philomena Lee," described by the L.A. Times as "a serio-comic travelogue full of heart-rending discovery and the triumph of forgiveness over hate." For a link to a Daily Mail article describing the story in detail (including spoilers that you might want to wait to read about if you plan to see the film and want to be surprised), click here.

When I first saw previews for the film, I feared it might be a manipulative tear-jerker about a sweet, naive old lady with a can-do attitude and a big heart, the sort of story that could turn sickly sweet in under a minute if directed poorly or written by a sappy screenwriter. On the other hand, it stars Judi Dench and satirist Steve Coogan, two actors famous for their droll, dry, whip-smart screen performances. I doubted Coogan in particular would want to completely suppress his innate sarcasm and cynicism throughout the course of an entire film. Furthermore, Coogan was the cowriter of the screenplay, and I've seen evidence of his dark wit in films like "The Trip" and "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story." In England he's well known for his popular creation, a character named Alan Partridge decribed as "a socially awkward and politically incorrect regional media personality." I knew better than to expect mindless, treacly antics from him or from director Stephen Frears, whose dark, smart films like "My Beautiful Laundrette" (which starred a young Daniel Day-Lewis), "Prick Up Your Ears" (with Gary Oldman), "Dangerous Liaisons" (with Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer) and "The Grifters" (a dark little masterpiece with John Cusack, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston) have impressed me for three decades.

Frears directed John Cusack to delicious perfection in one of the few comic films I find worth watching repeatedly, "High Fidelity," and he led Helen Mirren to her Academy Award for Best Actress playing Queen Elizabeth II in "The Queen." Frears has no fear of difficult subjects or ugly moments. Weighing all these facts, I put aside my worries that this could be a manipulative feel-good movie that would make my eyes roll and went to see it with a bit of a "prove yourself to me" attitude. Happily, my fears that the too-cute trailer for the film would prove to be an accurate microcosm of the film itself proved unfounded, and I instead found it a movingly acted film about an unworldly, seemingly simple woman who is more complex and determined than people expect.

The battle between the jaded, antireligious cynicism of Martin and the every-day-is-a-gift positivity of Philomena is at the core of the film, but we see a spirited openmindedness in devout and seemingly old-fashioned Philomena. Her sense of hopefulness and appreciation for small kindnesses is nicely balanced by exasperation with Martin's dour, dark, angry worldview. He is not won over by her endless sweet simplicity; he is moved by her because he recognizes that she has insights into people and situations that he, with all his experience and inside information but lack of empathy, misses. Martin recognizes that her story is a door into a huge and devastating world of widespread, long-term institutional abuse of the most vulnerable among us: abandoned, pregnant teen girls and small children. He sees that Philomena has a power to connect with people that he lacks because he is often closed to anything but the fulfillment of his own expectations and prejudices. The journey they take together becomes more tangled than they expect, and it becomes more personally engaging and meaningful than Martin could have guessed.

The real Philomena Lee will attend the Academy Awards presentation in early March, where her story has been nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score awards. Though now eighty years old, Philomena is currently traveling the world in her effort to help mothers who have lost children to forced adoptions. I doubt that she could have found a more effective or talented mouthpiece for her story than Dame Judi. Nor could Judi have found a more agreeable and appealing inspiration for her work than Philomena.

Phoenix Rising

Some actors have a gift for making audiences uncomfortable. They know when to hold a gaze too long or whether to avoid eye contact altogether; how to let panic, malice or discovery flit across their faces almost imperceptibly; how to touch their faces absentmindedly, betraying their anxiety or concern. We who watch them thrill to the feeling that we alone have discovered their secrets or noticed the tell-tale change in their mood that everyone else has missed. But sometimes the naturalism of their discomposure makes us worry that they are not really actors at all, but rather embodiments of the troubled characters whose lives they inhabit for our entertainment. James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano was so commanding and charismatic that the world believed the actor and the character must be two sides of the same being. Seeing him interviewed and hearing his intelligent, slightly shy delivery expressing insights with quiet, wry humor was disorienting. When speaking in his own voice, Gandolfini betrayed a tenderness and self-deprecation we would never have expected based on the behavior and body language of his most famous creation. When Bradley Cooper is asked about his mentor and co-star Robert De Niro, he describes a thoughtful, articulate and generous man who is nothing like the belligerent and threatening characters he is best known for playing in the movies.

Joaquin Phoenix is such a modern master of discomfort. As a child actor then known as Leaf Phoenix, he had steady television work and was in occasional movies, like "Parenthood," but he grew up in the shadow of his talented older brother, River. The two were together when River died of a drug overdose in 1993; a 911 emergency audiotape featuring Joaquin's anguished voice asking for help for his brother was played incessantly on television and radio for weeks after River's death, and the trauma and the constant media hounding so devastated Joaquin that he retreated from acting for a year. In 1995, however, he got a big break playing an important supporting role in the Gus Van Sant film "To Die For." Phoenix played Jimmy, a lonely, slow-witted, desperate boy who becomes obsessed by a perky local news television personality played with sociopathic relish by Nicole Kidman. Kidman's manipulative character strings the Phoenix character along and wraps him dangerously around her finger. Kidman plays her part with an earnest yet sprightly quality that's meant to be outsized, colorful, almost cartoonish, along the lines of the characters in "Edward Scissorhands." By contrast, Phoenix plays his role as Kidman's pawn with great vulnerability and realism. His confusion feels painfully real as he slowly tries to make sense of the situation he's been drawn into. A lesser actor could have played Jimmy as a sap or stooge not worth worrying about, but Phoenix gives him a shape and a heart; his character is the one touches us the most and makes Kidman's transgressions feel especially chilling.

It was his performance as Commodus, the twisted, desperate young emperor who ruins the life of Russell Crowe's Maximus in "Gladiator," that drew the world's attention and earned him his first Oscar nomination. The performance holds up powerfully all these years later, despite his on-again, off-again attempts at a British accent. His character is by turns vulnerable and tyrannical, and like a Shakespearean villain, his evil deeds are offset by scenes in which we see him squirm painfully as his father, Emperor Marcus Aurelius (played with appropriate disdain by Richard Harris), and the gladiator Maximus humiliate him emotionally and physically. We can't help but feel a measure of pity for him as we see the contempt heaped upon him by his father; evil-doers are always so much more fun to watch when we get a glimpse at what twisted their souls in the first place. Phoenix alternates a pouty, whiny narcissism with dangerous hubris in what is, to my mind, the most compelling performance in the film.

His second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor came five years later in 2005 when he starred in the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line." Though he didn't win the Oscar that year, it was his strong performance that allowed Reese Witherspoon to play off him so effectively that she won her own Best Actress award. Johnny Cash had a jangling agitation in the way he sang and in the way he held himself, and Phoenix tapped into that perfectly. There's a low hum of anxiety and suppressed energy in Johnny's seemingly straightforward songs, and while Phoenix doesn't look particularly like Johnny, nor is his singing a spot-on impersonation of Cash as Jamie Foxx's impersonation of Ray Charles was in the film "Ray," Phoenix nonetheless gets the feeling right, captures Cash's charisma and energy and makes the story flow along a satisfying and seemingly inevitable path.

In 2010 Phoenix played a bizarre fictionalized version of himself in Casey Affleck's mockumentary "I'm Still Here." Where his odd, seemingly addled character ended and Phoenix himself began wasn't clear as he appeared barely coherent and gave conflicting stories about himself in talk show appearances and in written interviews while the film was being made. Like comedian and performance artist Andy Kaufman in the 1980s, he challenged people to recognize that he was playing tricks on them. Happily, his statements that he was quitting acting to become a rapper were false, and he was back costarring with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Paul Thomas Anderson's film "The Master" in 2012.

Phoenix played Freddy, an amoral, emotionally stunted deviant who regularly swilled cocktails concocted from shots of fuel and paint thinners. The character was so disturbed and outrageous that the rumors of Phoenix's own emotional instability spread. His portrayal of Freddy was simultaneously over-the-top odd and yet believable. To inhabit this broken and frightening man's persona, Phoenix turned memories of his own physical injuries into tics, and he slurred and mumbled his way through lines in a parody of his own shambling speaking style. (For a fascinating description of how he created his character, listen to his highly entertaining interview with Terry Gross, host of National Public Radio's "Fresh Air.") His intensity and rawness make the character of Freddy hard for the audience to spend time with; he has no boundaries and no filter, and his recklessness makes him appear capable of anything at all. When Phoenix plays off the hale and hearty, but no less frightening, charisma of Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, who is based on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, there are almost literal sparks on the screen, so exciting is the contrast between their styles. These two actors were so fiercely focused and totally in the moment with each other that you believe everything they say occurred to them for the very first time as the cameras roll. Despite the loathsomeness of their personalities, they are so compelling and their performances bounce off each other so thrillingly that the resulting film is worth the discomfort of spending over two hours watching them behave atrociously.

Considering Joaquin Phoenix's history of playing one disturbed, fragile, inappropriate man after another, I feared that his character in the Spike Jonze film "Her" might be more than a little creepy. He is, after all, a man who feels such awkwardness among real human beings that he spends his days pretending to be other people and writing their most personal letters for them as a ghost writer. He then forms his most intimate attachment to a simulated woman, a disembodied, computerized voice, because he can't make a go of actual human relationships. Yet, despite the extreme oddness found in the careers of both Phoenix and writer-director Jonze, there is a beautiful, gentle quality to Theodore that drew me in and made me care for and want to protect him. Phoenix portrays Theodore with an immense vulnerability that builds up through small gestures: the way he presses his glasses back up his nose; the joyful, relieved smile that spreads across his face when he converses freely and delightedly with his computerized companion; the way his body seems to crumple inward when he has to interact with actual three-dimensional people. Theodore is fragile and scarred by life experience, and he is awkward and confused about how best to handle other people one-on-one, but he doesn't lose his basic decency even when others take him for granted or unleash their own rage or fear on him. He may be shy and scared, but he is also brave enough to be vulnerable, to try something altogether new, to pick up the pieces after a heartbreak. There is joy in watching this stunted soul open his heart and set aside his pain, and great sadness at seeing him struggle when adversity strikes. In another actor's hands, Theodore could have been too dark or too off-putting, or embarrassingly dorky, but Phoenix plays him with a gentle touch and the understanding of one who has himself been misjudged or or written off.

The willingness to lay oneself bare for others to view can be either narcissistic or generous; for many actors, it's both. Joaquin Phoenix and Spike Jonze seem to have found perfect partners in each other in creating "Her." While the story is Jonze's very personal vision, the process of making Phoenix disappear into the part was very much a collaboration. Initially, Jonze hired the talented English actress Samantha Morton to be the voice of Samantha. Morton, herself an indie film favorite who played Agatha, the senior precog in "Minority Report," is often described as quirky, sat in an uncomfortable little wooden box while on the set, far away from Phoenix, and the two of them communicated only via earpieces, like their characters. They did the entire film that way, and then Jonze realized that, lovely as their performances were, there was something not quite right in the chemistry between the two of them. He is circumspect about explaining what the problem was since he doesn't want to denigrate anyone's acting, and he and Phoenix have only praise for Morton's work on the film, which they say was very helpful in inspiring Phoenix's performance. The only thing Jonze has implied is that Morton's voice may have come across as too motherly, and that rather than instilling a belief in the audience that there could be a romantic spark between them, she may have sounded a bit too nurturing instead of sexy in her interactions with Phoenix. As a result, in post-production Jonze recast the computer love interest with Scarlett Johansson. As Spike Jonze put it, "[Joaquin] was speaking to Samantha Morton the entire time—she was in his ear, in another room, and he was in her ear. Samantha is a big part of the movie because she was with us, and gave Joaquin so much and gave the movie so much. And then in [postproduction,] when we decided that what we did wasn’t working, and we ended up recasting with Scarlett [Johansson]. [Joaquin] worked with Scarlett in post—but to help her do her part, so off-camera and off-mic with her.”

Phoenix was generous in coming back onto set to work with Johansson to make sure her performance sounded like a true, emotion-packed conversation; some actors refuse to run scenes with other actors once they've shot their own close ups and recorded their own looping (voice dubbing). Less generous actors leave the set after filming their own scenes, expecting crew members to read lines for other actors to react to, which can, unsurprisingly, result in less convincing results. By all accounts, all the actors in "Her," including Amy Adams, who plays Theodore's dear friend and confidante with warmth and tenderness, were generous and devoted to making the communication in this film feel genuine and organic. Their work underscores the theme of true connection with another being not depending on looking into his or her eyes.

There is a sadness beneath all four of the feature films Spike Jonze has directed, the threat of a dark underworld that drags all of his characters into melancholy. This Jonzian undertow brings a depth to stories that are often populated with slightly cartoonish, overdrawn characters who are going through midlife crises and react by turning their worlds upside-down. In his first two films, "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," this depressive quality played off a sometimes manic, off-kilter humor. There was an occasional meanspiritedness to the characters that left me feeling admiration for the skill involved in the films' creation, but distaste for most of the people portrayed. "Where the Wild Things Are," though based on the classic children's book by Maurice Sendak, is more wryly bleak and dark than many filmgoers seemed prepared for. Max, the boy in his wolf suit who tames the the wild things and becomes their king, befriends Carroll, a depressed wild thing voiced touchingly by the late James Gandolfini. Although "Wild Things" is more moody and adult than audiences expected, it is a worthy effort with some moving performances.

This tender quality continues in "Her," and the film feels very personal to Jonze, who is an amiable and charming man, but who says that he spends vast amounts of time alone as he gets into the heads of his characters and creates his stories. He is a ruminator and a dreamer, which is surprising for a man who made a name for himself by directing kinetic, quirky music videos for groups like Weezer (and a brilliant one featuring a dancing Christopher Walken for Fatboy Slim), creating clever advertisements for Ikea, Adidas and The Gap and establishing youth culture magazines Homeboy and Dirt (the latter of which was once described as "Sassy Magazine for boys"). He was producer and co-creator of the MTV TV series "Jackass" and he produced "Jackass: The Movie." He's an occasional (and talented) actor as well. He makes a cameo appearance in "The Wolf of Wall Street," but his finest role was as Conrad, the dim but loyal redneck soldier in the excellent David O. Russell film "Three Kings," which also starred George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and rapper Ice Cube. The film is by turns seriously dark and outrageously fun, and it is the initial jovial oddness of the characters, especially Spike Jonze's Conrad, that makes the later, rougher scenes even more poignant.

Jonze himself is ever affable, open and approachable in his interviews, and is known to foster a collaborative, creative atmosphere on set with his actors. He is well-liked by the film community, but his work points to a darker, sadder person within who enriches his films by incorporating his awareness of the melancholic side of the human condition into works designed to entertain and encourage connection, no matter how odd and unorthodox, between lonely creatures who hope to find homes in the hearts of others. Jonze was fortunate to find a partner in Joaquin Phoenix, whose performance in "Her" should have easily qualified him for a place among the five Oscar nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role this year. His is a stunning and unusual performance in one of the more thoughtful films of 2013.

The Jaded Worldview of the Coen Brothers

While I will review all nine of this year's Best Picture Oscar nominees in the coming weeks, I want to share my thoughts on the Coen Brothers' latest film, "Inside Llewyn Davis," while it's still in theaters. This film only received Oscar nominations for cinematography and sound mixing despite having drawn a lot of attention from critics for the performance of its star, Oscar Isaac. It's well-acted, was created by a talented team of film-making professionals and covers an important historical moment, but it has one major problem: when a main character is this unlikeable and unable to learn or grow from his experiences, it's hard to care what happens to him. Yet the film has stuck with me because of the talent I saw in Oscar Isaac. Though I found the personality the Coens created for him to inhabit unpleasant, I admire him for the courage he showed in taking on such a role and playing it straight, not as a somehow likable loser whom we can care for despite careless behavior. Isaac allows Llewyn to be a jerk and stay a jerk. His dedication to naturalism gives me hope that his future performances will allow him to play someone I actually want to spend two hours with next time.

I promise you, I will get to the rest of the Best Picture nominees very soon, but for now, here are a few thoughts on "Inside Llewyn Davis" and the era in which the story takes place.

This film is about one of the prevailing countercultural forces in the early 1960s. The term "counterculture" is usually a form of shorthand used to describe the hippie movement of the 1960s. It conjures up images of blissed-out youths in miniskirts and bellbottoms grooving to psychedelic rock music in public parks, protesting the Vietnam War or haranguing their uptight parents. Some believe this was a brand-new challenge to a prevailing conservative military-industrial-complex-led America, that 1960s folk music was a movement that appeared out of nowhere and opened the eyes of the world's youth, but that's not so. The folksinging beatniks of the 1950s (and radical social protesters of decades long before that) made the advent of hippies possible. We generally underplay the importance of the folksinging tradition as a goad to social progress throughout the 20th century. When we consider how powerful a medium of political education and impetus to social change folksinging was from the 1910s through the 1960s, it's surprising that so few movies have examined the heyday of folksinging in the United States just before it was subsumed into the hippie culture and was overtaken by rock and roll.

With "Inside Llewyn Davis," the Coen Brothers have taken up the task of introducing the modern world to a moment just before folk music became one of the dominant influences on North American youth culture. Their story begins in the Greenwich Village folk music scene of 1961. Their antihero, Llewyn Davis, is a struggling, couch-surfing folksinger trying to snag a place to sleep each night, grab an occasional studio gig to make enough to scrape by on, and, eventually, secure a record contract that might help him earn enough to live on. The story takes place during that moment just before Bob Dylan became a household name and folk music exploded with politically relevant meaning and exhortations to wake up, get up and go change the world.

During the 1950s folk music had been growing in popularity but had been taken over by clean-cut, wholesome close-harmony groups like The Kingston Trio. These groups were often populated by talented musicians who were fun to listen to, but much of their music bleached the traditional soulful, bluesy influences out of folk music. The stories their songs told weren't so much about mining disasters or laborers ground down by corporate avarice, as many folksongs had been in the 1920s and 1930s (and long before), but were often lighthearted and humorous ditties, middle-class musical slipcovers over what had been a working-class art form. The Christopher Guest mockumentary "A Mighty Wind" is wonderful parody of the era of whitewashed, relentlessly upbeat folksongs. In the 1960s, the novelty folk songs started to be crowded out by grittier songs, compelling tunes and stories that encouraged an end to war, demanded equal rights and celebrated the innate equality of all. Folksingers encouraged outrage over social injustice and turned popular opinion on its head by singing simple tunes in earnest, nasal, sometimes piercing voices full of humorless sincerity. In dramatizing this important time, you might expect important directors to choose a highly political folksinger in the Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan or Joan Baez tradition. But of course the Coen Brothers are too cynical to make movies with political overtones, and their way of storytelling is too perverse and dark to for them to want to follow such an obvious or uplifting road.

Unlike Bob Dylan, Llewyn Davis has no interest in saving humanity, or in telling emotional stories that urge young people to take up causes, or in leading underdogs in nonviolent protest against their oppressors. He isn't worried about subverting the dominant paradigm or taking over the world; he just wants to make a living with his guitar. His more successful contemporaries aren't necessarily more talented—in fact, his scenes show that he has a more subtle and sophisticated innate musicianship—but the pale WASP competitors for singing spots in the Greenwich Village folk clubs are more immediately appealing and accessible, less complex, and easier to relax around. Llewyn is an uptight misanthrope without social graces who is surrounded by Peter, Paul and Mary wannabes and well-scrubbed Irish close-harmony quartets in matching Aran-knit sweaters. One of his best friends, played with an appealingly sweet-voiced earnestness by Justin Timberlake, gets him a gig playing guitar and singing backup on a terrible novelty song about flying into outer space, and you can tell right from the get-go that this cutesy dreck will have much more appeal in the marketplace than the intense, lonely blues-folk that Llewyn plays. His character was in part inspired by real-life folk singer Dave Van Ronk, an admired singer in his day who is little known now, having been completely overshadowed by Bob Dylan in his day.

Llewyn's way of singing is more in tune with the traditional folk songs of the earlier 20th century, the singers people like Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan listened to, the working men and itinerants and down-and-outers who inspired Steinbeck to write "The Grapes of Wrath." Oscar Isaac's style should appeal to those who enjoy the current folk music revival enjoyed by "nu-folk" and "indie-folk" bands like Mumford and Sons and Of Monsters and Men. (Indeed, Marcus Mumford appears in the movie.) But Llewyn has little empathy for causes or people (and notably little luck with animals, either). His lack of ability to connect with anyone else very successfully leads him on a series of frustrating misadventures which usually bring out the worst in him and don't do anyone else much good, either. But he has one thing going for him: he's a good musician. Not that most of the people in the film notice or care about that, but the Coen brothers must have thanked their lucky stars when they found singer/guitarist/actor Oscar Isaac to play the title role, since he has significant hangdog charisma despite his unpleasant behaviors. He has enough self-loathing to make the viewer able to care for him somewhat, despite his consistently bad behavior, but what empathy we can manage for this jerk is dissipated by one scene after another of him failing his friends, strangers and himself. Oscar Isaac has a natural affinity for folk singing, a beautiful way with an acoustic guitar and a naturalistic acting style—he's a real find. It's too bad that his break-out role is such a downer of a character.

There's a vein of meanspiritedness that runs through most of the Coen Brothers' films, even ostensible comedies like this one, which I find off-putting. Joel and Ethan Coen are clever fellows with a strong aesthetic sense; they choose excellent art directors and cinematographers to mold their vision, and their visual sense is powerful. Their film tableaux rival Sam Mendez's in their portrait-like stillness and attention to detail in each frame. However, their sense of humor runs dark, and despicable behavior is played for laughs. They have a nasty lack of empathy for their own characters; they revel in discomfort and like to watch people squirm. The sadistic element in most of their movies generally makes me feel like I'm spending time in the company of sociopaths. "Inside Llewyn Davis" isn't ruthlessly ugly like "Barton Fink," or gleefully grim like "Fargo," or psychopathic like "Burn After Reading" or "No Country for Old Men." Indeed, there's no glee in this film at all. Depression and angst run through Llewyn's story in an unstinting stream. His life is as relentlessly tatty as the dim folk clubs he plays in and the dingy old sofas on which he crashes each night. There's little peasure built into this film for the characters, not to mention the audience that pays to spend two hours watching this nasty young man roll through people's lives, making everyone he touches a little worse off for his influence.

Despite the Coens' usual blunted, blasé attitude toward man's inhumanity to man, there are times when dark humor shines in their work, and when a certain manic, outsized joy springs forth from characters that knocks us all sideways and delights us by its incongruity: George Clooney in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is the best example, though that cartoony mania appears in the characters of Paul Newman, Charles Durning and Tim Robbins in "The Hudsucker Proxy" as well. Of all their films, I find their version of "True Grit" their strongest film of all: it retains their jaded world-weariness and portrays a dark and nearly lawless society in vivid and ugly detail, but it is redeemed by the pure, earnest sincerity of Hailee Steinfeld's shining portrayal of Mattie Ross. She is out for vengeance, it's true, but her focus is tight and she has no desire to harm anyone along the way unless they block her path. Her respectful politeness and integrity combined with her ruthless purity of vision brings out the last vestiges of honor in the most jaded and self-serving of men. It gave me joy to see the Coens recognize and celebrate the finding of good in a seemingly dessicated heart after dragging their work down such a dirty path for so long, but they appear to have gone back to the comfort of their dank, dark, jaded ways since then.

Unlike biopics about true musical superstars like "Ray" or "Walk the Line" which feature one engaging, compelling performance after another, "Inside Llewyn Davis" recycles its few songs. We see Llewyn play them repeatedly, even using the same patter between tunes. Rather than fashion fresh performances and engage with his audience, he seems stuck in a loop of depressive self-absorption. He angrily turns down the opportunity to sing at a party after being well fed and taken care of by friends, and instead of finding joy in performance or fostering friendship between himself and those who are already disposed to like him, he seems to begrudge people their desires to enjoy and admire his talent. He doesn't want to be fresh or in the moment, and repeatedly turns down opportunities to connect with people. He wants to keep offering the same thing up instead of giving any thought to what others find appealing. He has more talent but less love of humanity than anyone around him except for the jaded folk impressario played by F. Murray Abraham and the abusive, drug-addled jazz musician played by the Coen brothers' regular John Goodman in an ugly, unpleasant performance. His character inspires even the usually sparkling Carey Mulligan to give a growly, foul-mouthed, mirthless performance.

Llewyn's misanthropy keeps him from caring enough to put effort into expanding his repertoire or pleasing his listeners, and we see his chances for happiness grow dimmer by the moment. He is thoughtless, disconnected and seemingly incapable of growth, characteristics which do not make for a particularly enjoyable two hours at the cinema. There is pleasure in the quality of the performances, and there are moments of wit and wry humor, as in every Coen brothers film, but the story itself is deflating and hopeless.

"Dallas Buyers Club" and the Reinvention of Matthew McConaughey

I'm back! After a multi-year hiatus, I'm coming back to my blog to share my thoughts on the nine films nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Picture. Let's get right down to business with the first of them: "Dallas Buyers Club."

Though Matthew McConaughey gave good performances in some of his early, serious roles in films like "Amistad" and "Lone Star," he was best known for playing relaxed slacker dudes or for taking off his shirt and greasing back his hair in a series of lightweight, forgettable romantic comedies. When he turned 40, however, he seems to have decided to take himself and his career more seriously, and he's appeared in a several surprisingly gritty, sometimes dark films since 2010, proving that he actually has range, power and considerable talent. His lead performance in the film "Mud" in 2012 really got my attention; his character is wary and careful at times, surprisingly trusting and vulnerable at others, and McConaughey had me caring about his character and wondering where he'd been hiding this subtlety for so long.

That same year he gained even more attention for his brazen, raunchy turn as Dallas, the male strip-club owner in "Magic Mike." He's often played keyed-up, self-confident characters, but here he pulled out all the stops and toyed with his greasy lothario image, turning it up all the way until he was simultaneously charismatic and repellant. McConaughey's cameo as a coked-up financial executive in this year's best picture nominee "The Wolf of Wall Street" was a high point of the film: he goes completely over the top, charming Leo DiCaprio's young stock broker character and drawing him into a web of lawlessness and lascivious living with gusto. His perhaps five short minutes of glory had everyone in the cinema around me giggling at his character's complete and gleeful amorality.

McConaughey's most powerful and moving performance yet is that of Ron Woodroof, a homophobic Texan rodeo rider and electrician diagnosed with late-stage AIDS in this year's best picture nominee "Dallas Buyers Club." His performance in this film is my favorite by an actor this year, despite a slate of excellent performances by Robert Redford for "All Is Lost" (an excellent performance that deserved but did not receive an Oscar nomination), Chewetel Ejiofor in "Twelve Years a Slave," Tom Hanks for "Captain Phillips," Bruce Dern for "Nebraska," another physical and emotional transformation by Christian Bale in "American Hustle" and some outlandish scenery chewing by Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wolf of Wall Street." In "Dallas Buyers Club," McConaughey progresses from playing a strutting bantam carousing, fighting and drinking his way through one-night stands to a fragile and broken man at the edge of death. In short order he goes from a rail-thin invalid fighting for a few more weeks of life to a successful entrepreneur. He uses his brains, wiles and cockiness to provide himself and others with life-sustaining antiviral drugs even if he has to lie, cheat and travel the world under assumed identities to do it. In two hours we see his character (who is based on a real man of the same name) at turns showing vulnerability, rage, total self-absorption and touching selflessness. He's charming, he's disgusting, he's both ordinary and extraordinary, cowardly and self-serving for a time, then outrageously brave minutes later.

While the writing and direction are strong, it's the intensity and sheer force of will behind McConaughey's performance that makes the film hum. We must forget the usually buff, slick and confident ladies' man who comes to mind when we hear his name, and the moment we set eyes on his emaciated form (McConaughey lost fifty pounds for this role) and see the desperation behind his cocksureness, we believe his story and him. His face and character reflect the tiniest changes; he can be a powerhouse of grandstanding explosivity when a role requires it, but the delicious surprise of the past few years has been seeing how much he has learned to internalize a moment and let us see it register on his face without even a word.

Much has also been made of Jared Leto's supporting performance as a transgender woman named Rayon who is herself seductive and charismatic, but is also a drug addict with late-stage AIDS. Like McConaughey's Ron, Leto's Rayon required huge physical transformation; Leto became scarily thin himself in order to play her. His performance is lovely; there's a languid, drugged-out quality to Rayon, but there's also a warm and motherly aspect to her. She is unreliable but she nurtures to the best of her ability, and while vulnerable, she also has a steel core to her that appeals to Ron. Leto plays her with a slightly stoned, rather campy quality that fits her character but must walk a sharp edge between being jokey and being realistic. We must believe that she is real and at the same time a made-up construct, a woman in a man's body who is dealing with a very real drug addiction and a terminal illness who is at times shockingly lucid about it and at others is dreamy and not entirely present. Leto, who first gained fame as the gorgeous but none-too-bright love interest of Claire Danes' character on the short-lived but enjoyable 1990s TV series "My So-Called Life," has never shied away from difficult characters or extreme portrayals; he played a heroin addict in "Requiem for a Dream," and played John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, in the film "Chapter 27," for which he gained over 60 pounds and became all but unrecognizable. He has also had success as the lead singer of his rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars for the past 15 years. In a recent interview with NPR's talk show host Terry Gross on her radio show, Fresh Air, Leto came across as affable but enigmatic; it was often difficult to tell when he was being sincere and when he was pulling Terry's leg. However, his commitment to and respect for his characters was as clear in his discussion with her as it is in each of his performances. Like Matthew McConaughey, Leto has a relaxed, casual slacker-like aspect to him that makes him appear not to take life too seriously, but the quality of both men's performances and their descriptions of the intense and earnest preparation that goes into their roles belies their apparent insouciance.

 Four years ago I found McConaughey an annoying, unctuous presence who appeared to be coasting on his looks and well-worn charm; I now find him one of the freshest and most appealing actors of his generation. He has long been a charismatic figure, and he uses his Texan drawl to wonderful effect, drawing out his words and phrases, letting syllables flow over his tongue like honey in an slow and steady stream when he needs to flatter or cajole. He has a soft, low, lilting voice that reads as both manly and intimate, which is probably why the American Beef Council used him as the voice for their "What's for Dinner" ad campaign for several years and also helps explain his appearance in so many romantic comedies over the past decade.

McConaughey's persona has long been seen as shorthand for confident sexiness, and for many that quickly became tiresome. He can have an easy, seemingly effortless way about him that makes him look as if he's not trying very hard, but in a film like "Mud" we see that he can use such mannerisms to fool the characters around him while letting us in on his private thoughts. In "Dallas Buyers Club" much was also made of his ability to misdirect characters with his smoothness and confidence while occasionally showing us moments of desperation or tenderness. He makes it all look easy; that's why he's a star. He's already won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Ron Woodroof; I predict that he'll take home the Academy Award for Best Actor this year as well.

Cancer Candy

At the end of October I was in a huge home improvement store with my daughter, and we noticed that Christmas decorations, ornaments and displays were already out in full force and had taken over half the garden department. We walked past three-foot-tall lighted garden decorations featuring frogs and chickens holding sparkly candy canes and wearing tinseled Santa hats. We marveled at the unseasonable earliness of the display and the nontraditional symbolism of it all. Then we were stopped dead in our tracks by sparkly bright pink forest creatures. As we drew closer to the Barbie-pink-colored nearly life-sized buck and doe covered in pink fairy lights we noted the store's signs that proclaimed them to be KOMEN BUCK and KOMEN DOE. Sure enough, the big pink breast cancer awareness ribbon and the logo of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation were emblazoned on their boxes for all to see, assuring would-be pink deer owners that their holiday lawn decorations, like nearly everything else available for sale in the United States nowadays, could now be constant reminders of cancer.

Throughout the month of October each year, I am used to seeing special pink editions of everything under the sun marketed to encourage breast cancer awareness, from perishables like M&Ms to $300 kitchen mixers that will last for thirty years or more. Once there were pink T-shirts, hats and stickers available to those who have endured breast cancer or been touched by it when those they loved were afflicted and were fighting, or had lost the fight. Then already-pink items produced for the female market such as lipsticks and perfumes were sold in special editions during October, which was officially designated Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now there are cell phone charms, socks, jewelry of all sorts, newborn baby onesies, special edition designer purses, teas, dishes, staplers, towels (even Terrible Towels), helmets, yoga mats, pushpins, even specialty fabrics like flannel and fleece, so you can sew up your own breast-cancer-reminder jammies, blankets, pillows and scarves in case you can't find every single thing you might want to eat, apply, wear or use pre-stamped with a pink ribbon logo or wrapped in Komen-emblazoned shrinkwrap all year long, everywhere you go.

I understand the original mission of the Komen Foundation, and the desire to promote awareness of a cancer that used to be hidden and whispered about by women who were embarrassed to draw attention to their breasts. I applaud the desire to raise money to get millions of women to watch for signs of illness, to be aware of risk factors and to avoid behaviors that could lead to increased risk of cancer. I am delighted that they have raised millions of dollars for research into the causes and possible cures for this horrible disease. The diagnosis can be wrenching, the treatment terrifying, the waiting excruciating, the physical and emotional pain intolerable. I have lost loved ones to cancer, including breast cancer, and I agree wholeheartedly that helping people to avoid it or make it go away is a wonderful idea.

What I do not like is the assumption that blanketing the world with reminders of cancer is an appropriate or effective way of dealing with our fear of a disease which, despite our throwing more money at it than just about any other disease, is not affecting fewer women despite all our efforts but is increasing at an alarming rate. I understand why a woman who has been fighting breast cancer or whose life has been touched by it would want to let people know so that they could give her encouragement and be reminded to be vigilant so that they would not end up in her shoes. I can see wanting to show solidarity for those who have fought or lost the fight. But to want constant reminders of a devastating disease all over one's house, one's body, one's garden, one's canned goods, one's ears, one's cupcakes, one's Christmas tree or one's menorah is, to me, disturbing.

Some call this constant swathing of the world in baby-girl pink a desire to celebrate life; I believe it is an effort to totemize these pink items as if they were charms so that they might ward off cancer. See, you bad cancer! We're not afraid of saying your name and drawing attention to you! We'll hang cancer streamers (from the party store), float mylar cancer balloons (from Safeway), put out the breast cancer Kleenex, use the special cancer edition disposable Swiffer cloths, eat the Campbell's chicken noodle soup from the pink can, and serve breast cancer ribbon-bedecked Hershey's Kisses and drink cancer-awareness-labeled wine (both of which increase our cancer risk: increased body fat and moderate alcohol consumption significantly increase the likelihood that a woman will be diagnosed with breast cancer). That will show you, cancer! We'll use hair colorants and shampoos with ingredients proven to be carcinogenic, but we'll feel good about it because the Komen logo is on the box, even when there's nothing on the packaging saying that any portion of the proceeds from the product will benefit the Komen Foundation. We'll buy fatty snacks with pink ribbons on them and feel good that we just did something important to end cancer, when actually the company will make a huge profit by using pink packaging that tricks shoppers into feeling like eating their chips will save the world, then may pay only a tiny portion of the proceeds (sometimes less than a penny per unit sold) to an organization which actually does something to help women or men with breast cancer, or which helps people not to get it in the first place.

Cancer candy, shoes, spaghetti sauce and mouth guards constantly remind everyone with and without the disease of the existence of cancer in the cutest, pinkest, girliest fashion, until we become completely inured to it. Many women fetishize the color pink; some coyly post Facebook status updates with the colors of their bras because they somehow believe that making sexual innuendoes and encouraging people to imagine our breasts in lingerie will certainly lower the incidence of a vile disease that maims and damages and hurts and kills those we love. How?

Getting more women to pay attention to changes in their breasts and believe in the importance of regular mammograms results in more cancer diagnoses, but the increase in breast cancer cases over the past three decades is clearly correlated to other factors as well, including diet, alcohol use and environment. This is the information we need to spread. Is this information getting out there as much as it should, or does it get washed away in the tide of pink-packaged Pepperidge Farm partially hydrogenated cookies and rosy-hued Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets?

Part of the huge increase in breast cancer diagnoses over the past two decades is because of increased awareness and treatment, it's true; partly it's because diseases of affluence, like obesity, have seen a shocking increase over the past few decades, and they also increase the risk of breast cancer. And partly, well, we just don't know; we don't understand why breast cancer is rising, and why the Pacific Northwest, where I live, has an especially high number of incidents of breast cancer. It may be because vitamin D deficiency is extremely common here because of the frequently overcast skies, and such a deficiency is correlated with increased risk. But there seems to be more than that. Should we do more research? Sure! But should we think we're doing our part because we buy pink Komen deer lawn ornaments from the Lowe's garden department?

Don't all of these product tie-ins raise huge amounts of money for research or awareness? Some have, and that's great. But did you ever notice that may products sport pink labels but give no specific information about how much of your purchase price will go to charity? That can mean a particular purchase can net $5 for a good cause, or 5¢, or nothing at all. Sometimes a company will pledge a set amount from the sale of every package, say 50¢ from each sale, up to a total amount, like $10,000. So, after they've sold 20,000 packages, they keep all the proceeds from every package sold thereafter. If they print a half-million pink bags that make people feel better about the company and encourage consumers to pay full price for their wares because of the feel-good factor, they can make a huge profit from their supposed largess.

Is this bad? It does raise some money for a good cause, but the public is often misled regarding how much. If consumers feel they've already done their part in the fight against cancer because they bought three pink-labeled snacks, some dish soap and a bottle of nail polish, all of which actually provided a grand total of 30¢ to charity, one can argue that being misled into thinking that one has done enough is not good for society.

The Komen Foundation is extremely marketing driven, but according to Charity Navigator, a research organization which publishes statistics about thousands of charities and their incomes, expenditures and effectiveness, the Komen Foundation is well run. It is not, however, the only organization which benefits breast cancer research or encourages awareness. Other top-rated breast cancer charities with lower overhead than the Komen Foundation include the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (which also puts its logos on and benefits from sales of many products), Living Beyond Breast Cancer, the National Breast Cancer Foundation and the Breast Cancer Network of Strength.

You can also donate directly to research institutions like the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which does groundbreaking cancer research and works with the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance to provide treatment to thousands of people each year. If you have difficulty with the idea of giving to an organization which does some of its testing on animals, you can direct your gifts toward divisions of the organization which do not do research but provide treatment, or choose an organization that focuses on awareness instead of research, or you can donate to any of the wonderful hospice organizations around the country. They do remarkable work alleviating pain and providing comfort for those with terminal diseases. They give great aid to their families, friends and caregivers as well.

Should you give up on buying things with pretty pink ribbon emblems? Not if you already like those products and you like the color pink. But purchasing them won't confer immunity to cancer or buy you good karma points; your pink items aren't totems that will save you or those you love, nor do they provide as much funding to anti-cancer charities as most people think they do. What does help? Healthy living, regular screening and donating directly to or volunteering at good organizations. Also important is helping those you know with cancer (or any serious illness) by telling them you'd like to bring a meal (or meals), babysit, clean house or do other chores for them, and mean it. Rather than asking "Can I do anything?" try to offer something specific. See if they really want it (maybe they don't need what you're offering) and then ask when it would be most helpful instead of doing it on your schedule, which may not work with theirs. Provide reading material, movies or company (if they want it) to distract them during treatment. If you have time, let them know you'd be happy to to take them to radiation or chemo appointments. Offer encouragement often so they don't feel forgotten or alone; people with long-term illnesses or extended treatments suffer when people get compassion fatigue and stop checking in. These small but meaningful actions will go a lot further than buying a new pair of pink breast cancer awareness sweatpants.

The Robin Hood of the Art World

Is graffiti art? And if it is, is the defacement of others' property ever justifiable in the service of art? When is graffiti (or "guerilla art," or "street art") okay? When it says something meaningful? When it's well done? When it's pretty? When famous people say it's art?

Let's suggest for a moment that it's always wrong to deface others' property. After a graffiti attack, once a property has already been defaced, is there ever a justification in leaving the defacement/art in place? What if it's really great-looking, astonishingly intricate, brilliant in its message: would those circumstances justify the illegal (and some would say unethical) action that created it?

These are important questions to consider when discussing or viewing graffiti art or "street art," and a documentary that addresses them would be fascinating. However, Exit Through the Gift Shop, the excellent new documentary on street art, doesn't address any of them. And it doesn't need to. Subtitled "The world's first Street Art disaster movie," it's a fascinating film on its own merits, even though it leaves the ethics of all the principal characters in the film essentially unexplored. The film itself may be at least in part an elaborate hoax. If it is, it's still worth seeing.

The most famous graffiti artist in the world, and certainly one of the most talented, is a Briton who goes by the pseudonym Banksy. Banksy is a wily and elusive character who has been creating graffiti art, first in England and then internationally, since the early 1990s. He began as a common tagger but after too many run-ins with the law, he decided he needed to develop a new style that would allow him to prep a public outdoor space, create his art as quickly as possible, then disappear before cops could show up and arrest him. He developed a system in which he created a series of stencils, then smuggled them to various spots around Britain and used one or more of them to build up intricate and often sophisticated images, sometimes adding freehand strokes to the stenciled areas. His pieces often feature wry comments spray-painted next to or within the images. Subjects have ranged from small single-color rats (a frequent motif) to huge murals of policemen in riot gear dancing with daisies to pop culture parodies. He's often created life-sized people or animals, including policemen kissing each other and children in surprising situations. His messages are usually usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment.

Over time, Banksy's wit, talent and cleverness at hiding his identity made him a cult figure, and his art became so desired and in such great demand that people began removing his works from walls, cutting chunks out of tagged buildings and selling them at auction, even on eBay. He has created a number of pieces on canvas as well, and they now sell for grand sums at no less august an institution than Sotheby's.

Banksy often paints works that mimic the style and subject matter of old masters but which show clever twists, such as a 17th century village scene in which the buildings are covered in modern graffiti. He has repeatedly smuggled his paintings into major art galleries such as the Tate in London and New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum, then hung each piece, complete with fancy frame and descriptive placard, among famous masterpieces. Sometimes museums have taken weeks to discover the subterfuge before removing his works. In 2005 his version of a primitive Lascaux-style cave painting depicting a human figure hunting wildlife while pushing a shopping cart was hung in the British Museum. When it was discovered, the British Museum, home to such important pieces as the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon's Elgin Marbles, wisely added Banksy's painting to the permanent collection.

Despite his remarkably varied artistic talent, Banksy fits well into the graffiti artist or "street artist" genre because of his guerilla-style illegal forays into public places, which he then vandalizes, albeit wittily and with great skill, leaving evidence of his cunning alongside artistic talent. Many street artists have more swagger than technical skill, and the "Screw you, society!" anarchic message their graffiti announces to the world is usually more compelling than the actual art they produce. Banksy is not unusual among graffitists in his desire to remain anonymous and avoid arrest for his illegal activities, but he does show particular skill, subtlety and cleverness.

Some of his ruses, such as cutting a red British telephone box in half, reassembling it and welding it so looks as if it's been hacked in two and bent, and then burying a hatchet in it, take not just daring and skill but some major resources to create, transport and maneuver into place. For fun several years ago, he counterfeited a million pounds worth of British currency with the face of Princess Diana taking the place of Queen Elizabeth II, but the results were so believable that attempts to spend the faux currency were all too successful, and he ended up with boxes of funny-money that he didn't dare distribute for fear of being prosecuted for a federal crime.

Banksy's story is perhaps the most compelling one in the world of graffiti art, but it takes an unexpected back seat to the story of his videographer in the Banksy-made film Exit Through the Gift Shop. The documentary made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is packing arthouse cinemas around the world just a few months after its debut. The gist of the story is this: In the 1990s, Thierry Guetta, a French-born entrepreneur, ran a successful LA clothing boutique which sold vintage rock-and-roller and punky clothes which he bought for almost nothing in scrap bundles and sold for obscenely high prices. On the side, he began obsessively videotaping everything, including the illegal activities of his cousin, a French graffiti artist who made small mosaics based on bit-mapped Space Invaders videogame characters. His cousin, who called himself Space Invader, allowed Guetta to film him gluing his guerilla-art mosaics around Europe and America, and Guetta's videotaping obsession finally had a focus. He started documenting almost all the top players in the street art movement to the exclusion of doing almost anything else throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s.

One artist who allowed Guetta constant access was Shepard Fairey, first famous for spreading over a million images of Andre the Giant's face on stickers and posters around the world, all atop the word OBEY, as if he were the ubiquitous Big Brother of Orwell's distopian classic 1984. Later Fairey became famous for the red and blue poster of Barack Obama above the word HOPE that becames an official image of Obama's campaign and has since been endlessly parodied. Fairey is now being sued by the Associated Press because he didn't have permission to use the AP photo he based the poster on. A likeable guy who gets around, Fairey had become friendly with Banksy. Fairey was impressed after seeing Guetta's obsessive compulsion to document graffitists and Guetta's willingness to put himself in harm's way and spend his own money and time helping Fairey and other street artists create and hang their work. According to the documentary, he felt Guetta could be trusted to meet and even videotape Banksy when Banksy came to Los Angeles. Guetta proved himself an extremely willing, friendly and helpful assistant, driving Banksy around, showing him the best public walls on which to ply his craft, and making his life and his art easier. Banksy soon allowed Guetta to film him at work, trusting that Guetta would keep his identity safe, which he did.

Here's where the questions of who is an artist and what is art get confused. If you want to keep the upshot of the documentary a mystery, you might want to skip the next three paragraphs.

Eventually, Banksy felt it was time for Thierry Guetta to edit his huge collection of Banksy videos into a documentary, something Guetta had said he would eventually do but for which he had no training or experience. According to Banksy, after six months Guetta had cobbled together a headache-inducing, chopped-and-diced fiasco of a film without any narrative at all, a barrage of undifferentiated random images from his thousands of uncataloged videotapes of Banksy and other graffiti artists. Upon seeing this mess, Banksy suggested that Thierry give over access to all the videos and Banksy himself would create a movie out of them. To distract Guetta, Banksy suggested that Guetta should go off for six months and create art of his own and then have a little show. This made some sort of sense; the videographer had started doing some stencils of himself around LA and signing them MBW, which he said stood for Mr. Brainwash. Banksy thought Guetta would have a small vanity show someplace and the distraction would get him out of Banksy's hair while Banksy put together a reasonable documentary out of Guetta's frightening mishmash of videotape.

However, Guetta, now consumed with the idea that he was an artiste who could make a fortune and have a giant, splashy, expensive solo show that would wow the world, mortaged his house, hired a cadre of actual artists, prop designers and contractors, and rented a huge, expensive space in downtown LA. He told other artists to make largely unattractive knock-offs of Andy Warhol-style pop art pieces and spray painted silkscreen images of pop culture icons, claimed and signed them all as his own work, and relentlessly hyped himself around LA as the next big thing. Seven thousand people lined up to see Mr. Brainwash's opening and his hundreds of derivative paintings, many of them created by others with almost no or no input from Guetta at all.

LA loved him. He sold a million dollars worth of "art" in two weeks. So many people flooded the gallery that what had been expected to be a two-week show stayed up for two months. Madonna asked him to create a Warholesque image of her for her latest greatest hits album. Mr. Brainwash has his first New York show this spring. And the joke was on Banksy. Or was it? While it illustrates the phoniness of the art world that he's always reviled and parodied, a significant contingent of art world critics and followers believe they recognize the clever guiding hand of Banksy himself behind this cynical, clever and amusing film; they believe he put up the money for Guetta's show and is using Guetta as a frontman for his ruse.

Whether this is a clever con or simply a wild situation that spun out of control while Banksy was distracted by the editing down of Guetta's archive of tapes, it is a perfect illustration of the sort of art world nonsense Banksy has always opposed. Banksy has staged it as the story of an authentic (if anarchistic) hermitic artist who hides out among us and goes by a pseudonym vs. the faux-artist con-man entrepreneur with little if any talent for art and no insight into what makes it good, important or inspiring. Even when Banksy has created art meant to be sold to the throngs angling to pay real money to own a genuine Banksy, he has happily bitten the hands that feed him.

In 2007, Sotheby's auction house auctioned off three of his pieces for a total of over £170,000; to coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website with a new image of an auction house scene showing people bidding on a picture that said, "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit." In his quest to meet and videotape all the bright lights of the street art movement, Guetta, on the other hand, became so hungry to be seen as a creator and star rather than part of the supporting cast of the art world that he created a huge show out of nothing but borrowed money and chutzpah, and, horribly, pulled it off.

The question of whether what guerilla street artists do (trespassing and defacing property that is not theirs) is ethical or justifiable is never addressed in this film. That's understandable; Banksy is an outlaw hero who probably sees himself as akin to Butch Cassidy or Robin Hood, someone who points out the flaws in the system in an outrageously public way while remaining essentially invisible, only popping out often enough to build his legend and prove his existence. There's no reason why such a person would want to draw attention to the dark side of what he does, especially when he doesn't appear to recognize any darkness in it.

A film this cleverly and entertainingly made adds to his allure and stature while presenting his actions in the best possible light. Without ever explaining or justifying himself, he wangles his way into the audience's affections and makes the story unfold in a way that builds sympathy for the characters, all of whom are literal outlaws. We find ourselves rooting for them to get away with their trespasses without ever feeling like we're being manipulated or spoonfed with obvious and unnecessary explanations or justifications. Banksy really knows how to tell and sell a story, and, like a sleight-of-hand master, how to distract us from many of the important issues without our stopping to think, hey, what about the elephant in the room?

Speaking of which, there's a great scene in which Banksy places an actual live elephant in the middle of a gallery show in order to prove a point. Of course, the point is lost on the media; they report that PETA (and LA Animal Services) didn't like him painting an elephant with children's facepaints and putting it on display, which is indeed newsworthy, but they seemed to have no concern with what the point of his painting the elephant was. This example of his disdain for people who don't think about the meaning or point of art is astute, but it also shows his arrogance in thinking that, because others don't share his sophisticated ideas and opinions on art, their own tastes, questions and concerns about what he does and how he does it are not just debatable but abominable proof of their philistinism. While I share his disappointment that people are so happy to accept pop culture simplifications of art rather than develop opinions of their own, I find his open contempt for people who don't share his worldview distressingly self-absorbed and arrogant.

Banksy shows himself to be a witty and articulate man, both via his art and in the speeches he makes to the camera in this documentary. He speaks and gesticulates while wearing a dark hoody that obscures his face and and has his voice altered digitally. He could have been interviewed off camera and had the documentary's narrator Rhys Ifans, the dryly entertaining Welsh actor, repeat his words to ensure that nobody could recognize his speech patterns or accent, but Banksy clearly enjoys scooting out of the shadows just a bit, providing blurry-faced proof of his escapades to the world via Guetta's videos, letting people hear his accent, albeit in altered form. He is playing with his anonymity here, heightening the drama yet again, just as he does in his art, working the darkness and spray cans and stencils until he's constructed a shadowy version of himself that he can carefully control access to.

Banksy appears to have a strong system of values (often fine ones, like looking out for the little guy and avoiding governmental tyranny), but seems to have little respect for the rights of others whose values differ (such as those who own property which he would like to cover in examples of his self-expression). This places him squarely alongside other heroes of the anarchistic British punk movement who have determined that destruction and defacement of things that they don't value is justification enough for ignoring laws which seek to respect property and and which respect the needs of a society based on the rule of law.

In an attempt to focus attention on exploitative flaws in the capitalist system, socialists or, even further to the left on the political spectrum, anarchists like Banksy sometimes feel justified in ignoring property rights entirely, saying they are an artificial and damaging construct which enslaves the poor and empowers the rich, thus denying basic human rights and dignity. If you believe that an entire system is wrong, it can be tempting to determine that you will no longer acknowledge its rules or its power over you and decide to do things your own way. But just as unfettered capitalism can lead to great selfishness and a lack of awareness or concern for the needs of others, unfettered socialism can lead to societies which refuse to give incentives or rewards for exceptional efforts or remarkable talents, and which can be perverted into unhealthy organisms which stamp out originality or innovation. Fortunately, hybrid societies with capitalistic bases and strong (though imperfect) social safety nets exist in several nations around the world. They show that a respect for the innate worth of every individual and the responsibility of society to look after its weakest members can be balanced with respect and recompense for exceptional talent and effort. They also show that respecting a person's property rights is an important component in respecting the person herself. No nation balances these opposing needs perfectly, but it is encouraging that millions around the world still strive to perfect their systems.

A healthy and safe hybrid society runs on respect for all the people in it, as well as for their legally-obtained possessions. And while Banksy has often shown himself to have a certain integrity, pointing out flaws in the art world and questioning the values of modern society, he has also shown a willingness to profit (sometimes enormously) by engaging in the same art world he mocks. To have true integrity, one could argue that he would have to turn down chances to make money off his art, but by selling works directly through Sotheby's, even as he mocks the process, he has become a part of the system he claims to disdain. On the one hand, I want to see someone so talented and original, someone of his wit and insight and great skill, benefit from his ability and be able to make a good living as an artist. On the other hand, it saddens me to see him revel in becoming rich off the sale of his own private possessions while feeling no compunction about messing with the possessions of others and mocking the owners in the process. He then makes those whose property he has vandalized look bad when they seek to remove his art, even though, if they leave it in place, they give a message to all graffiti artists and other vandals that if you're famous and clever or do a good enough job at it, the rules of respecting other's space and property no longer apply.

A society which makes exceptions for disrespect of property and laws of trespass invites evisceration of the social compact. Sad as I am to see some of Banksy's work disappear, I cannot blame the owners of the defaced spaces for showing their resolve not to let themselves become victims of vandalism, even clever or attractive vandalism, without a fight. Furthermore, Banksy knows that much of his work will be defaced or destroyed; he has chosen his medium and locations for precisely this reason. The impermanence makes seeing it as quickly as possible imperative, and that makes him an extra hot commodity and burnishes his oppressed outlaw image. It makes him a romantic figure of brash mystery.

Banksy can act as cynical about the superficialities of the art world as he wants, but he's making huge sums of money off that very world nowadays, so he's benefiting from the system he finds so corrupt. His hands aren't clean, either.