REVIEW 195: NOW YOU SEE ME

Release date:	June 7, 2013
Director:	Louis Leterrier
Cast: Language:	Mark Ruffalo, Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman, Melanie Laurent, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, Michael Caine English

Sometimes not getting a movie ticket ends up being good luck. I’d gone to my neighbourhood multiplex this weekend with the intention of watching Manoj Night Shyamalan’s After Earth. Since tickets weren’t available for the film, and since no self-respecting film buff would return from a theatre without watching anything, I opted for Now You See Me.

This is the story of four solo magicians/illusionists who are brought together by a mysterious fifth person to form a touring quartet, grandly – and it turns out, quite appropriately – called The Four Horsemen. They’re a formidable bunch: sleight-of-hand expert Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg from The Social Network), escape artist Henley Reeves (the glamorous Isla Fisher who we recently saw in The Great Gatsby), mentalist and conman Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) and safe-breaker/pickpocket/lock-picker Jack Wilder (Dave Franco, who can best be introduced to Indian viewers as actor James Franco's brother). As a team when they hynotise an audience member during a live performance in Las Vegas and apparently teleport him to Paris to rob a bank even while the show is on, they get the attention of the FBI and Interpol. The sleuths can’t prove that the theft took place through any means other than magic, and of course they can’t admit to a belief in magic. Thus begins a hot pursuit to catch the foursome in the act of stealing before, during or after their subsequent shows. Running parallel to the joint investigation by FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Interpol agent Alma Dray (Mélanie Laurent) is another by Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), a former man of magic who now earns a living by cracking practising magicians’ tricks and revealing them to the public.

There’s not much by way of story in Now You See Me, yet there’s a ton of fun to be had in the chase. Make sure you're there from the very first scene involving a card trick carefully orchestrated to ensure that the audience in the hall picks the same number as the audience on screen. What follows is equally intriguing. How are the Horsemen doing what they’re doing? Are they acting on their own? Considering that the fruits of their illusions/thefts seem to be divvied up among their viewers, what’s in it for the four? Eisenberg, Fisher, Harrelson and Franco have the challenge of getting us to care though we are told next to nothing about them... and they live up to that challenge. In the brief time we get with them off stage, the actors’ natural charm and attractiveness are in evidence, well complemented by a sense of humour and some good chemistry between them. In a film where the star is the plot, veteran Freeman and young Laurent (the lovely French actress who played Shosanna in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds) bring credibility to material that had the potential to be silly. The pick of the cast though is Mark Ruffalo who is supremely convincing as the scruffy, grouchy lead investigator on the case. Michael Caine - who plays insurance tycoon Arthur Tressler, sponsor of The Four Horsemen - is the only one of the lot who seems shortchanged by the screenplay.

The conception and execution of the shows by The Four Horsemen are among the film’s many selling points. Everything’s all glitzy and spectacular here, always audacious, sometimes even funny. Heightening the sense of drama is the fact that much of the action is indoors and in a muted palette of colours. When the camera does travel to the outside world, it feels like a burst of freedom, yet the shades remain understated as if the film is loathe to give us a complete escape from the mysteries it holds. Add to the production design several chases and magic tricks designed to keep us on edge, and what you get is a compact two hours filled with thrills.

Where the film slips up is when it makes what seems like a semi-cooked attempt to pre-empt criticism by those who might think it lacks depth. Towards this end, we are served up some superficial talk about the secret world of magicians and something that I didn’t even bother to understand called “The Eye”. It’s at this point that it seems like director Louis Leterrier (Transporter, Transporter 2, The Incredible Hulk) and screenplay writers Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt were confused about whether to make a profound film or remain doggedly flimsy. The result is a half-hearted effort towards profundity. Mercifully, it’s extremely brief. Leterrier is also awkward in the handling of one of the romances in the film. Yes, there are two: one is barely brewing and we’re left guessing whether it will ever happen (which is nice and in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film); while the other is predictable and a tad tacky.

Now You See Me is unusual in the sense that except for the aforementioned portions, it’s a defiant hurrah to slim storylines without being foolish. While the film is on, the unrelenting energy and pace, the slick editing and the thumping background score make it impossible to give much thought to its flaws or the questions that remain unanswered (to me). Were they loopholes or was I inattentive? A couple of queries, I confess, occurred to me only after I began writing this review, which goes to show just how engrossing the film was. You see, while Now You See Me is unspooling on screen, there’s not a moment to think, blink or breathe.

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	122 minutes (as per pvrcinemas.com) PG-13 (for language, some action and sexual content)
Release date in the US:	May 31, 2013

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_You_See_Me_(film)  

REVIEW 188: THE GREAT GATSBY (3D)

Release date:	May 17, 2013
Director:	Baz Luhrmann
Cast: Language:	Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Carrey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher, Elizabeth Debicki, Jason Clarke, Amitabh Bachchan English

It’s a small but significant role... That should answer the question on the minds of all Indian film-goers about Amitabh Bachchan’s turn in The Great Gatsby. Now that that’s out of the way… The Great Gatsby is Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920s book, widely considered to be among the greatest American novels ever. This is the story of the decadent rich of the time and their emptily lavish lifestyles; of superficiality and hypocrisy; of a woman who’d rather run away with her lover than make an open declaration of this love before her husband; of a man hopelessly in love, who needs to know that his woman did not feel an iota of emotion for another man in the years they were apart; of a husband who bursts into rage at the realisation that his wife is having an affair, unfettered by the fact that he’s widely known to be sleeping around himself. 

The triumph of Luhrmann’s film – and indeed Fitzgerald’s book – is that it could be transported to the present times with nothing lost in translation. The setting could be a Page 3 party in Delhi in 2013, with guests bitching about their host while sipping glasses of wine; where men still demand a standard of morality from wives that they do not adhere to themselves; where women will go to any lengths to maintain a veneer of ‘respectability’.

Our narrator is Nick Caraway, a World War I veteran who has been advised by his psychiatrist to write out his story as a cathartic exercise. Nick’s typewriter takes us to New York City where he returns after the war, settling into a small house next to the extravagant mansion of a certain Mr Gatsby. No one seems to have ever seen this mysterious billionaire yet his impossibly spectacular parties are attended by everyone. At one of those dos to which he finds himself invited, Nick is sought out by Jay Gatsby. He discovers then that the huge home, the attention-seeking parties, had all been set up by Gatsby to win back the love of his life – Nick’s now-married cousin Daisy Buchanan who was parted from Gatsby many years earlier. 

At one point in the story, Nick tells Gatsby that he’s worth a 100 of those money-laden guests at his parties… It’s a poignant moment, because Gatsby has just been taunted for his roots in poverty and for the source of his present income. Poignance, though, is not the dominating force in this film that is touching in places, but in the overall analysis is sadly pulled down by Luhrmann’s obsession with flawless visuals. No doubt Gatsby’s galas – complete with fireworks, acrobats and live singers – required a helmsman with a grand vision (and who better than the director of Moulin Rouge for that). But that vision somehow translates into a sense of detachment from the goings-on as the second half comes around. Even the 3D seems like a pointless indulgence. Towards the start, Nick sees himself as a figure both inside and outside his story. As a viewer, the persistent feeling is of being outside; of not being entirely drawn into the proceedings on screen, somewhat like in a Sanjay Leela Bhansali production where there is so much perfection in the visual settings that the film is robbed of sentiment.

The costumes in The Great Gatsby are to-die-for. The music builds up the frenetic pace of the dizzying celebrations in Gatsby’s home. The parties have been excellently re-created by the film’s production design team with a deliberately undisguised use of CG enhancing the sense of artificiality and sterile beauty. Now if only they had been restrained elsewhere, giving the characters more natural-looking spaces to unleash themselves with full force upon us.

Of the cast, Tobey Maguire as Nick is a disappointment, walking through the entire film with pretty much the same facial expression, except when a touch of incredulity flits across his face at the wild party he attends with Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan and his mistress. Carey Mulligan as Daisy aptly conveys the character of a woman so flippety that she is not indifferent as much as she simply forgets the people she supposedly loves. What she does not do though is convince us that she has the charisma to have kept Gatsby in her thrall for so long. This failing is underlined by the striking presence of actress Elizabeth Debicki playing Jordan Baker, a golf player who belongs to the Buchanans’ social circle and has more to her character than Daisy’s puddle-deep feelings. Bachchan is effective as Gatsby’s business associate. It’s a cameo that required a star with a towering personality, and Luhrmann has chosen well here.

The pick of the cast though is Leonardo DiCaprio who is wonderful as the protagonist living a lonely, hollow life despite being surrounded by material goods and people. He is confident yet not pompous as he strides past his guests, not entirely displeased with the knowledge that he’s important enough to be gossiped about; he’s tender and vulnerable as he watches Daisy dance through his home with joy at seeing what he has made of himself; he explodes like a prize fighter in that scene when he is being reviled for his background; and when he meets Daisy for the first time since his return, he is a shy, awkward kid. This is what we needed more of to put the Great in The Gatsby. Alas, there’s just not enough.

Rating (out of five): **3/4

  

CBFC Rating (India):	A
MPAA Rating (US):	PG-13 (for some violent images, sexual content, smoking, partying and brief language)
Release date in the US:	May 10, 2013
Running time:	146 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby_(2013_film)