Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blount, Jeff Daniels. Dir. Rian Johnson, SONY, 2012
The Unwatched Film Festival is my name for the ongoing project of watching the movies I bought yet never watched over the last few years of collecting. Having acquired some 1200 movies in just under five years, stuff is bound to get missed. Which breeds shame in my frugal heart. Consider these reviews expiation of that sin.
"Selfishness, self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles." -- Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book, p. 52)
After almost 30 years of going to AA meetings and relapsing and going back and leaving again and going back and all that drama, I finally put the bottle down on my own resolve and walked away. That was a year ago next month. I have not had a drink or a desire for one, and now I can see what friends of mine saw and tried to tell me for years, that I was so broken and lonely that I convinced myself I belonged in AA to have something to call a family. I'm still broken, still lonely, but I've lost all taste for booze. Which, given my blood clotting disorder, hypertension, and type-2 diabetes, is a good thing.
Whether or not I needed to be in the rooms, I spent decades sitting in them, listening to what people said and watching what they actually did. They seldom matched. Recovering alcoholics are curious creatures: the successful ones never drink again, some become nicer than before, and virtually none stop being selfish and self-centered, even after half a lifetime sober. I ran into an old friend from the rooms at a coffee house a couple years ago who, while I was in the bathroom, picked up my phone and went through it. When I returned, this 10+ years sober gentleman began excoriating me.
" I looked through your phone! You've got porn downloaded! You know I'm a recovering sex addict! Why would you put that temptation in my path?"
I hadn't seen the guy in more than a year, he went through my phone without permission, but made me the bad guy for not considering his welfare. That is pure self-centered thinking. I wish I could report that as an exceptional case, but in my experience it's too typical. I have no idea how people in AA stay sober. It isn't by changing their whole way of thinking, much as they like to claim otherwise.
In Rian Johnson's 2012 time-travel drama, LOOPER, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a hitman in the year 2044. Time travel will be invented in 2074 and immediately outlawed, putting the technology in the hands of organized crime, which begins sending its enemies back to 2044 to be killed and disposed of in an era when getting away with murder is still possible. A "looper," the mob's name for its hitmen, waits in a designated spot, the victim appears as if from thin air, the looper shoots him/her with a specially designed gun called a blunderbuss, collects his payment in solid silver bars, and disposes of the body. Clean, quick, and efficient.
Those loopers who survive until 2074 have their contacts cancelled and are sent back in time to be killed by their young selves, who collect a payment in gold ingots, and officially retire to a lifestyle of hedonism, decadence, and, as in Joe's case, addiction. When a friend of Joe's, Seth (Paul Dano) recognizes the song his hit - hits' faces are always covered before being sent back - sings he realizes it's himself and refuses to pull the trigger, turning him into a fugitive from the Mob. Seeking sanctuary from Joe, Seth tells him his older self warned him that a mysterious figure known only as "The Rainmaker" has assassinated the heads of all five crime families and begun closing off all their loops, sending them all back to be killed. Joe turns Seth in and, though troubled by the story, continues working to feed his habit and build his retirement fund toward going to Paris. When a target comes back without a hood, Joe immediately recognizes the older man (Willis) as himself. Old Joe overpowers Young Joe, knocking him unconscious. Coming to, Gordon-Levitt finds his truck and his gold missing, a note pinned to his jacket advising him to run.
Old Joe's escape creates a parallel timeline in which Gordon-Levitt retires, moves to Shanghai on the advice of Kansas City mob boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), parties himself broke, and turns to organized crime until he meets a Chinese woman who falls in love with him, gets him clean, and marries him. Captured in 2074 and sent back, Willis and Gordon-Levitt have their confrontation and Young Joe begins hunting his older self, who is bent on finding and killing The Rainmaker in the year of his birth, which he believes will cancel the parallel timeline and reunite him with his wife.
I tend to view films featuring addict characters through the lens of my time around the rooms. Perhaps that's my own self-centeredness at work. Regardless, at one point Old and Young Joe meet at a diner in the countryside where Young Joe carries out his hits and Old Joe explains to his younger self why he ran and what he's doing. When Gordon-Levitt gets angry, Willis berates him, telling him "shut your child-mouth," making the conversation all about Young Joe's addiction and ingratitude, never noticing that all he does is talk about himself, never seeing the irony that, rather than honor his agreement with the mob, he plans to murder little kids and their families so that he can be happy again, that their lives mean nothing in comparison with his own. Again, self-centeredness, in about as toxic a form as possible.
The rest of the film plays out as a struggle by Young Joe to protect the last of three kids likely to be The Rainmaker as well as his mother (Emily Blount.) Without giving anything away, Young Joe will ultimately realize the only way to close the parallel timeline and save the family is to solve for his own self-centeredness. How he does it is neat, clever, and one of those things I should have seen coming and never did.
I never did because Johnson gets all the science out of the way in the first 15 minutes and turns the rest of the movie into a character study of Gordon-Levitt, Willis, and Blount. Keeping the jargon, tech-babble, and endless exposition to a bare minimum opens up the story so that we can engage and sympathize with all three characters, even Old Joe and his monstrous plan. It's a scifi story with a humanistic heart, and Johnson wisely sides with the latter. Gordon-Levitt plays a seemingly functional yet broken man trying to find his way to some sort of redemption in his usual low-key way. I was never a fan of his old sitcom, THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN, because it always seemed to me like a bunch of people making funny faces and shouting about everything. It is such a pleasure to watch him as an adult actor who understands that less is almost always more. Ditto Willis, who plays an action-villain part with remarkable restraint. No John McClain cracking wise and screaming at terrorists here. Blount has some of the heaviest lifting, playing a fierce, ptotective Mom who abandoned, then reclaimed, her son, as she tries to keep herself and him safe by retreating from the world, only to have the world come to her, with guns drawn. At times, the conflict between her need for security and her desire for company renders her almost stupid, but Blount shows us that what appears to be stupidity is rather a potent cocktail of loneliness, fear, and desire.
I tried to watch LOOPER a year ago and couldn't track with it. If, like me, you're a medical marijuana user, don't bake right before starting the picture. Those first 15 minutes of exposition are a little tough to follow even sober, as I discovered last night. It's worth getting through them, however, as LOOPER is a very smart, often funny, and thoughtful scifi more interested in how humans think and feel than in how physics works. If I have any quibble with the movie, it is that the facial prosthetics Gordon-Levitt wears to make him look more like Willis in fact make him look more like Edward Norton. In the commentary, Johnson and Gordon-Levitt say they decided against CGI early on. A choice I usually applaud, LOOPER is that rare case where a little CG would have gone a long way.
Still, that's a minor problem. Rian Johnson went on from LOOPER to helm the worst of the STAR WARS movies, EPISODE 8: THE LAST JEDI, but I cannot hold it against him. His other films, BRICK, THE BROTHERS BLOOM, and KNIVES OUT number among the smartest, freshest, best genre pictures of the new century. LOOPER makes him 4 for 5. In baseball, the guy who goes 4 for 5 earns the megabucks. If no one has done so yet, I hope someone pours money all over Johnson soon. He's an MVP.
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