The Wall Street Journal-20080118-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Review - Film- Latifah Is Rich- Plot-s Bankrupt In -Mad Money-- Heigl-s Easy Charm Can-t Mend -27 Dresses-- A Slapdash Chick Flick
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Review / Film: Latifah Is Rich, Plot's Bankrupt In 'Mad Money'; Heigl's Easy Charm Can't Mend '27 Dresses,' A Slapdash Chick Flick
There's an old saying that dates back to the days before email: "I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one." In the case of "Mad Money," I'll write a short review because the movie won't sustain a long one. (It barely sustains itself.)
The plot is simple to the point of perfunctory. Three women working as janitors in a Federal Reserve Bank perfect a scheme to steal piles of worn-out bills destined for destruction by shredding. Their method involves switching locks (the bank's locks look like they came from a hardware store), then hiding the purloined currency, first in garbage bags and later under their clothes. Seldom has the arm of coincidence been longer, or shakier. But their heist is only the pretext for jinks that range from medium high (as played out by Queen Latifah and Diane Keaton) to painfully low (as perpetrated by Katie Holmes, who pops her eyes, scrunches her nose and shakes her booty in lieu of acting). If the movie gets by, as it surely will during the current entertainment drought, most of the credit should go to a couple of performers who come from different traditions, yet share a gift for breathing life into moribund material.
Queen Latifah, a rapper and singer before she turned to acting, does it with calm geniality, a warm speaking voice, unshakeable confidence and the timing of the accomplished musician that she is; often she'll hang back half a beat from the rhythms of her dialogue. Diane Keaton does it with a lovely vivacity that's all the more affecting for the span of her stardom. Who could have imagined that the spring-fresh star of "Annie Hall" would be keeping it fresh three decades later? (Stephen Root is amusing as Glover, the bank's obsessive-compulsive security chief, a role that might have been played seven decades earlier by Eric Blore.)
"Mad Money" was directed by Callie Khouri from an airless script that Glenn Gers adapted from a British TV production called "Hot Money." The movie makes a stab at being a morality play: Ms. Keaton's cheerfully materialistic suburban matron, Bridget, is driven to devise the scheme when her husband loses his job, while Queen Latifah's hard- working single mother, Nina, is anti-consumerist and a reluctant recruit. The real moral, though, springs from these two performances: When all else fails, verve will carry the day.
'27 Dresses'
Katherine Heigl carries "27 Dresses" when all else fails, with great regularity.
Always a bridesmaid and never a bride, Jane has served in that acolyte capacity at 27 weddings and has kept the clothes to prove it. This half-hatched chick flick, which was directed in broad, erratic strokes by Anne Fletcher, asks us to accept Jane's solemn dedication to the institution of marriage, even though the early scenes, staged as flat-out farce, show her chasing like a lunatic between two bridesmaid gigs in different parts of town. Only belatedly, and slapdashedly, does Aline Brosh McKenna's script come around to an awareness that Jane's romantic illusions have something to do with her shaky self-esteem and her fear of commitment: i.e., with psychology.
Through it all, though, Ms. Heigl manages to make her character endearing, as well as borderline-believable. That's no small feat, but neither is it an astonishment, given the ostensibly effortless charm -- and, more to the point, the comedic skill -- she displayed last year as Alison, the career girl who gets in the family-without-a- family way in "Knocked Up." Malin Akerman is Tess, Jane's younger sister, and not a woman to be trusted. James Marsden, who was so likable as the fatuous prince in "Enchanted," seems disenchanted here. He plays Kevin, a journalist and an insufferable cynic about his beat, which is weddings. As the writer of a newspaper column called "Commitments," he urges his editor to let him write a feature piece that will be, he says fervently, "an incisive look at how the wedding industry has transformed something that should be a rite of passage into a corporate revenue stream." The guy needs editing before he touches his keyboard.
'Taxi to the Dark Side'
A taxi driver is the central, spectral figure of "Taxi to the Dark Side," a troubling, often shocking documentary feature by Alex Gibney. The driver, a young Afghani named Dilawar, was taken into custody by American forces as a suspected terrorist on December 5, 2002. He died five days later after intensive interrogation at the Bagram air base, and a "homicide" box was checked on his death certificate, which listed the cause of his death as blunt-force trauma. (Dilawar's legs, according to a coroner's finding, had been "pulpified.")
In Mr. Gibney's previous feature, "Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room," the prevailing tone was freewheeling -- and entertaining -- irony. In this one, it's free-floating rage. Treating the taxi driver case as a Kafkaesque whodunit -- Dilawar had been fingered by a bounty hunter and was almost certainly a hapless innocent -- the film expands into a coolly furious polemic against the Bush administration and its policies on what does or does not constitute torture.
By now many of the charges and countercharges will seem familiar, or overfamiliar. And at times Dilawar gets lost in the swirl of larger events; the film will win no awards for neatness of structure. Still, "Taxi to the Dark Side" adds something new to our awareness -- interviews with soldiers who served as interrogators in Afghanistan, and in Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and who, in some cases that ended in courts martial, served prison terms themselves. And the film takes a surprising turn by evoking sympathy for these men as victims in their own right, pressured by superiors who demanded results but failed to provide clear rules of conduct.
'Teeth'
During the opening sequence of Mitchell Lichtenstein's "Teeth," the camera studies the twin stacks of a nuclear power plant, surveys the suburban neighborhood that surrounds it and then takes us to the home of the film's heroine, a little girl named Dawn. When Dawn grows into a not-so-little girl, played fetchingly by Jess Weixler, she comes to realize that she's the living embodiment of the vagina dentata myth, a mutant Lolita who does dreadful things to boys who disrespect her. There's no scarier myth for males, and Mr. Lichtenstein turns various images of emasculation into a black comedy that flirts, fairly tediously, with pornography. But you can also see his film, if you choose -- and you won't -- as green. Dawn might have been spared her fate if she'd grown up near a wind farm.
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DVD TIP: Diane Keaton directed "Unstrung Heroes" (1995), a beautiful coming-of-age comedy that's little-known by now, and wasn't much better known when it first came out. Nathan Watt is Steven, a 12-year- old with a sick mother (Andie MacDowell) and a remote father (John Turturro) who runs off to live with his eccentric uncles. They're played, con gusto and brio, by Michael Richards and Maury Chaykin. Richard LaGravenese adapted the script from the splendid memoir by Franz Lidz. Thomas Newman's score got a richly deserved Oscar nomination.
