REVIEWS AND TRAILERS

Incendies - an interview with Denis Villeneuve

In her will, a departed mother leaves a message to her grown children regarding a brother they didn’t know they had and a father they thought was dead. So begins the new film from Quebec-born writer and director Denis Villeneuve, “Incendies.” The children are twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), and they embark on a journey to discover the truth about their family and about their mother’s life. Set against the backdrop of war in the Middle East, “Incendies” is a glorious and powerfully gripping piece, and was recognized as such when it was nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

For such an accomplished director, Villeneuve is remarkably self-effacing to the point of bashfulness. “I have to tell you the truth,” he said, “this morning I looked at the schedule and said, ‘oh my God, I’m going to be with someone from Harvard … that is quite impressive. For me, it has this kind of mythological [appeal].”

From there, conversation flowed freely with this personable man, who had much to say about his movie and about film in general, even as he occasionally struggled with English, his second language after French. The director began with praise for Wajdi Mouawad, the playwright who penned the stage version of “Incendies.”

“I did fall in love with the play,” Villeneuve said. When he decided to construct a screenplay out of it, Mouawad gave him full creative license with the material. “The play was full of very powerful ideas and images but all the images were very theatrical,” Villeneuve continued. “So I did have the freedom to remove even very important characters or scenes … in order to just get the cinematographic elements.”

In choosing an issue on which to focus, Villeneuve stuck to the old adage: write what you know. “To make a film about the Middle East and war … I’m a Canadian, I know nothing of that. I did my homework, of course … but let’s say that my main angle was family,” he said. “For me that was the way I was able to get inside this story. I know war inside a family. I can deal with that. I can talk about it, I will concentrate on the intimacy of the character, and the rest—I will do my best to try for authenticity.”

Thus, despite appearances, “Incendies” is “not a movie about war, it’s about a cycle of anger inside a family.” Villeneuve said. “I do understand that, and I can write about it.”

Villeneuve’s family background wasn’t the only history he drew upon for the movie. To make “Incendies,” Villeneuve returned to his roots as a documentary filmmaker, which among other things inspired him to shoot outside the confines of the studio. “When I started in the studio, it was so comfortable, so controlled,” he said. These convenient confines would not be sufficient to capture the gritty reality he sought. For this reason, Villeneuve and his crew travelled to Jordan to shoot the majority of the film.

Filming on location, for Villeneuve, was invaluable. “We were very welcomed there,” he said. “The country was very generous with us—the people, the landscape … there was so much possibility over there. There was so much gift from life falling in front of the camera.”

But being in such a beautiful setting was also a challenge: “The danger is to fall into exoticism … and to be too excited about everything that is new,” Villeneuve said. “I hope we were able to avoid clichés, and too much beauty … to just concentrate on the dramatic events and not fall into tourism.”

His other strategy for avoiding cinematic excess was humility. “I did try, for this film, … as a director, to be humble. In my previous films, sometimes I was trying to make a shot that would impress other people,” he said, “but this time I was just trying to tell the story the best that I can as a director. The story was so complicated that I just concentrated on storytelling.”

Of course, it was the film that Villeneuve approached with artistic humility which earned him an Oscar nod.

“I was at Sundance film festival with a bunch of friends, among them my producers,” he recalled. “And when they announced it, I thought we would be very civilized if we were [one] of the five nominees … that’s not the case. We began to shout everywhere, crying, like a bunch of Halle Berrys.”

The nomination fulfilled a youthful dream. “For me, the Academy Awards are something that belongs to childhood,” he said. “When I was young and wanted to be a director, I was looking at [Francis Ford] Coppola with his Oscar, and it impressed me a lot. And so when it happened … I was like a six-year-old kid. I was so happy.”

Though Villeneuve holds no illusions about his profession—especially in a market where deeper character dramas seem to be overwhelmed by formulaic blockbusters—he maintains characteristic optimism about its prospects. “Of course there is a lot of Hollywood crap,” he acknowledged. “But there is  [also] a lot of soul.” Perhaps with a few more films like “Incendies,” this talented director will do much to tilt the scales in favor of the latter.

Review: Just Go With It

There’s really only one thing that you can expect from an Adam Sandler movie: potty humor. Dennis Dugan’s “Just Go With It” certainly delivers that—plus a number of other quirks that border on the impressively absurd, even for a Sandler flick.

Sandler plays Danny Maccabee—Jewish characters being another Sandler staple—a plastic surgeon whose past encounter with heartbreak has turned him from an honest, charming dork into a rather manipulative womanizer. When Danny finds himself smitten by an adorable schoolteacher Palmer (Brooklyn Decker), he ends up constructing a fake ex-family to try and win her over. He enlists his loyal assistant Katherine (Jennifer Aniston) to pose as his soon-to-be ex-wife. Katherine herself is a single mom, and before she knows it, Danny has embroiled her kids in his web of lies, and the whole group is off to Hawaii for a weekend to remember.

If the plot sounds almost arbitrary, that’s because it is. The movie presents a string of random and semi-amusing events that don’t pretend to be anything remotely resembling a logical story progression. “Just Go With It” is aiming for chuckles, not coherence.

In Hawaii, Katherine’s children carry a significant amount of the film’s weight. Michael (Griffin Gluck) is a shy but bold six-year-old, and Gluck manages to project an amusing combination of cuteness and intimidation. His older sister Maggie (Bailee Madison of “Brothers”) is an eccentric, wannabe actress with a flair for the dramatic. These well-realized performances by relative unknowns provide much of the charm of the film, and leave surprisingly little pressure on the shoulders of its older co-stars.

In “Just Go With It,” Aniston plays somewhat against type, with a role that is a bit more slapstick than much of her prior work. As Katherine, the overworked divorcée who hasn’t worn heels in years, she does more with physical humor than with dialogue—from crotch-punching and hula-dancing to swan-diving and swimsuit-modeling—to hold the audience’s attention. In this fashion, Aniston’s usual girl-next-door charm is replaced by a badass attitude and some straightforward sex appeal. Sandler, on the other hand, plays the same character viewers have come to expect, from the scatological humor to the on-the-nose physical comedy.

The most unexpected performance in “Just Go With It” is undoubtedly that of Nicole Kidman, who plays dramatically against her traditional Hollywood persona. As Aniston’s ditzy ex-sorority sister, Devlin, she appears in four lengthy scenes of obsessive nose-nuzzling and serious hip-shaking. While it’s hard to judge the quality of the act, this is definitely a Kidman audiences have never seen before, and the performance does grab one’s attention; whether or not it’s the perverse appeal of watching a train wreck in progress is for the individual viewer to decide.

Though it would be the understatement of the century to call the film’s ending predictable—guess who ends up falling in love with whom!—writers Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling pull off the expected with some surprisingly adept romantic dialogue. Of course, this sensitivity is balanced out by some of the script’s slightly racist and sexually offensive segments, which include everything from a incompetent Latina babysitter to a flamboyant gay hairdresser.

For Sandler fans who enjoy the likes of “Click” and “Mr. Deeds,” “Just Go With It” will not disappoint; as far as Sandler movies go, it’s safe to call this one a success. At the same time, for those who eschew slapstick, no review is really needed to suggest that this film will most likely bore and offend more refined cinematic sensibilities. “Just Go With It” is, in other words, just what one would expect.