“Masterminds” (Jared Hess, 2016)
Showing on DStv M-Net Movies Premiere (Channel 104) on Monday, 9 October, at 16:55; Saturday, 14 October, at 13:00; available on Microsoft; on Amazon; on Vudu; on DVD.
Though Jared Hess’s frenzied new comedy is far more conventional in flavour than the earlier two that I’ve seen — Napoleon Dynamite, from 2004, and Nacho Libre, from 2006 — it’s just as much a delightful and distinctive treat. It’s based on the real-life Loomis Fargo robbery in North Carolina that took place in October 1997, in which David Ghantt, a supervisor for the cash handling company Loomis Fargo, stole over $17 million in cash from the regional vault in Charlotte, North Carolina where he worked, collaborating with an ex-employee, Kelly Campbell, her associate, Steve Chambers, and a number of co-conspirators. I don’t know the precise degree to which the film has stuck to fact — from what I can see on the Wikipedia entry on the robbery, the main points of the story were all kep intact for the film, but a high level of invention and imagination is displayed openly by Hess in his telling.
Zach Galifianakis plays David, a decent and naïve security employee, who falls for Kelly (Kristen Wiig) when she starts working as his partner, even though he’s already engaged, to a rancorous store clerk named Jandice (Kate McKinnon). When Kelly leaves the job and moves in with her childhood friend Steve (Owen Wilson), who is now a professional thief and scammer, she keeps contact with earnest and infatuated David, who, through his indulgent affection and eagerness to win Kelly over, is persuaded by Steve to help them rob the cash vault one weekend. They then get David out of the country while keeping the cash to themselves, while Kelly’s continuing contact with David introduces unforeseen complications to their plans. Jason Sudeikis plays an unnervingly avid (and zanily funny) hitman who is roped in as part of Steve’s attempts to simplify matters, and Leslie Jones plays an FBI special agent assigned to the case of the heist, whose hilarious efforts to secure a confession from her suspects reminded me of the task of a director who seeks to extract a meaningful performance from his actors — both have to modify their methods from one individual to the next, the moment they’re looking for may not arrive when and where they had expected or planned it, and both have to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and to capture moments as they arise.
Hess has clearly assembled a first-rate cast of comic actors, and the spontaneous level of performance and free-wheeling comedy he elicits from each of them is among the finest work on offer in today’s Hollywood comedies (Wiig and Wilson are on par with their performances in Bridesmaids and The Grand Budapest Hotel, respectively, and each of the others is better than I’ve seen them before). The humourous situations, settings, character traits, and pure gestures and lines he has devised for the story, though not consistently funny, are continuously inspired, lively, and enlightening. The film was produced by Lorne Michaels, and the SNL cast members suggest what you can expect: some fun over-the-top antics in their caricatures of southern workers, some fun wisecracks, some snide riffing on topical subjects. But it’s all underlaid with Hess’s characteristically singular and outlandish worldview and visions.
Hess, as I saw in Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, takes on something of a spiritual duty when making a film. He suggests the temporal struggle that must be undertaken, as well as the flaws and shortcomings in each of us that make that endeavour such a struggle, to reach a higher and enlightened state of being. He offers heartfelt portraits of inspiration by not only emotional but deeper spiritual connections between people, as in Napoleon’s spontaneous, rhapsodic dance for his friend Pedro’s class president campaign. He offers doctrinal visions and convictions, as in the unification of Roman Catholic devotion with Protestant liberties in Nacho Libre. Here, he displays the sincerity, the innate as well as practical goodness, of someone making terrible mistakes in service of a deep personal connection, blinded by infatuation and goaded by pop culture, though striving to make good on his personal devotion. Think of all the ways Hess presents (and has presented, in his past films) a sensitive and good-natured person, who implicitly refuses to conform to arch and contemporary requirements by a more mainstream segment of society. Consider, as a physical abstraction of this, something as commonplace as his characters’ hairstyles. Hess’s characters embrace their natural hair, keeping their haircuts long and, in the case of the men, their body hair unhewn; they work with and mould what they’ve got, rather than hiding or removing it, as some more cosmopolitan types would (notice that Steve’s snobbish neighbour has a totally bare and sculpted upper body), for the sake of superficial allure. The entire film is as delightfully engaging, and a sure treasure to anyone quick enough to catch the remaining showings of it this month on M-Net Movies Premiere.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s new film, the first I’ve seen by this French director, stars Isabelle Huppert, in the first performance I’ve seen by this French sensation. Love for Huppert, in America at least, has been so ardent recently, following the release of a number of her films in a short burst, that she easily picked up an Oscar nomination earlier this year (which she predictably lost to Emma Stone) and A.O. Scott, of the New York Times (at whom I hear frequent, fleeting jabs in the satirical Netflix comedy Bojack Horseman) was prompted to wonder whether she’s the greatest female actor currently making movies.
I myself was heartily impressed by Huppert in Things to Come, which was shown in Cinema Nouveau theatres earlier this year, and in which she plays a philosophy lecturer at a Paris university named Nathalie. Hansen-Løve surrounds Nathalie with a wide and busy web of exterior goings-on, and Huppert’s performance provides the only view of Nathalie’s interior, but, as something held up by an actress alone, it’s a gratifyingly insightful one. As befits a philosophy professor, Nathalie is always thinking about and thinking through things, but, beyond that, Huppert is visibly thinking through them herself; a viewer can see Huppert thinking through Nathalie’s experiences, Nathalie’s expressions, and how to embody them in her performance — all that actor’s work is done on screen, in front of the camera, and, rather refreshingly, Huppert’s strong intellectual presence doesn’t conceal or flatten the portrayal of Nathalie, but reveals her to the camera.
There are political protests going on at Nathalie’s university, but, committed as she seems to empiricism, she rejects the apparently socialist, ostensibly radical activity of the students. I myself am not well read in philosophy, and the discussions between her and her students sound to me more political than philosophical in dimension; perhaps that’s simply the French trait of continually mixing culture, politics, and philosophy all into each other; or perhaps it’s some sort of statement from Hansen-Løve, on how politics interferes (necessarily) with other cultural and intellectual pursuits, hopefully to keep things from veering into remote abstractions; or perhaps she has something to say about the current dearth of philosophical interest and advancement, and how students have to turn to politics (again necessarily) to discuss their way out of personal conflicts and confusions. Similarly, as I’m totally unfamiliar with her work, I don’t know if the unrelenting briskness of the characters in their interactions and activities, and of the plot itself, is a French trait, one of the Parisian intelligentsia, or one of the director; I’d guess it’s Hansen-Løve again, because she reinforces it with her quick and restive editing, and dynamic camera movements.
Nathalie herself is confronted by questions of happiness and satisfaction in life. One by one, events occur that free her of her professional, personal, and domestic obligations. She realises this release later in the film, with an ambiguous relief, taking stock of the individual losses that each cut away at the constraints on her life: her children grew up and moved out, her husband left her for another woman, her mother died, and her publishers cancelled her projects. Her anchors have been yanked away, and she’s free to sail where and when she pleases; perhaps out of fear of floating away, she holds on to her mother’s fat black cat, Pandora. Like the clear thinker she is, she doesn’t seem blown back by a single one of these events, but freely embraces their effects on her emotional life, and opens up to the richnesses of those emotions. She ends Hansen-Løve’s window onto her story by discussing a quote and an idea of happiness with her students, musing on the practice of supplanting concrete satisfaction and accomplishment with hope and desire, thinking ahead to imagined gratifications, living in a fantasy state of fulfillment, and finding pleasure in mental situations; but she herself lives through hard reality, and finds a more reliable and sturdy fulfillment because of it. Uncharacteristically, for a French art film, it doesn’t involve any of Paris’s famous carnal pleasures.
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