Movie reviews
Now a Young Adult (15A) living in a cramped apartment and reduced to ghost-writing a series of books for teens, the hard-drinking Mavis receives an email telling her that her old flame, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), has become a father. Ignoring the fact that Buddy is married, Mavis heads for home, determined to rekindle their relationship.
Ivan Reitman’s movie, which is written by Diablo Cody, is a study of arrested development that begins as a comedy of embarrassment as Mavis swans around Mercury pretending to be a glamorous author, but quickly develops into something darker as the increasingly desperate Mavis reveals her sociopathic tendencies. The character is nowhere as dark as the serial killer Theron played in Monster (2003), but there’s a compelling incongruity between her beautifully manicured exterior and the dangerously self-absorbed narcissism that lies within. Her pursuit of the easygoing Buddy, played in a winningly laidback style by Wilson, ignores the fact that she has far more in common with her ex-high school peer Matt (Patton Oswalt), a cripple who is no less dependent on his visible crutch than Mavis is on her carefully calibrated self-delusion about who she really is.
Brash, brazen and wilfully destructive, Mavis is a charming creation given a thoughtful and occasionally touching reading by Theron. Her performance is rewarded by Reitman and Cody with a script that gives her plenty of laugh-out-loud lines.
Jack and Jill (PG) stars Adam Sandler twice, as Hollywood advertising executive Jack Sadelstein and Jack’s twin sister, Jill. A shrill, overbearing woman, Jill saddles herself on Jack’s family for the Thanksgiving holidays, leading a desperate Jack to embark on a quest to find Jill a man. That this involves Jack dressing up as Jill gives his initial drag routine as Jill a self-reflexive dimension is odd enough; what takes the role into the realms of the truly bizarre is that Jill is being pursued around Hollywood by Al Pacino, who plays himself. A notion gaining currency is that Sandler’s portrayal of Jill is so unfunny as to be deliberate, and something of a two-fingered gesture to the critics who claim he has lost any talent he might once have had. Part of the fascination is in wondering how spectacularly awful a script received a green light, but mostly it’s a case of gaping at the sight of Al Pacino cavorting like a loon, such as when the actor interrupts his on-stage performance of Macbeth to take a phone-call from Jack, and ‘breaks out’ his Michael Corleone role from The Godfather (1972) to quell audience unrest. An act of utter debasement? It’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry, but there’s no denying that Jack and Jill is a weirdly compelling movie.
Two other releases engage with how brittle are polite society’s values when they come under strain. In Martha Marcy May Marlene (16s), written and directed by Sean Durkin, Elizabeth Olsen puts in a superb performance as Martha, a young woman who escapes from a cult in rural New York only to discover her life is no less repressed when she is expected to conform to the middle-class expectations of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law Ted (Hugh Dancy).
In Roman Polanski’s Carnage (15A), Nancy and Alan (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) sit down with Penelope and Michael (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) to discuss how best to deal with the violence that has erupted between their young sons, but their liberal instincts and reasonable tones are quickly stripped away as both sets of ostensibly respectable parents reveal their true colours.
Despite the high-profile cast, Carnage is stifled by its stage-bound setting of a single living room and plot twists that reek of contrivance. By comparison, there’s an edge-of-the-seat menace underpinning Martha Marcy May Marlene, with Olsen’s co-star John Hawkes excelling in a riveting role as the abusive, malevolent cult leader.
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