'Jupiter Ascending' Will Make You Grateful To Be Scrubbing Toilets

21 February 2015 | 9:33 am | Anthony Carew

...and Jon Stewart's 'Rosewater' has no cinematic qualities

JUPITER ASCENDING

In Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowskis stage a two-hour, $200mil intergalactic space-opera of Shakespearean sibling-rivalry, chosen-one mythos, and runamok CGI effects just to teach a woman she should be happy cleaning toilets. If anyone claims the latest eyesore debacle from the ambitious, ridiculous Matrix siblings is some kind of female-empowerment action-movie, punch him in the cock for me.

Mila Kunis is our fated, titular heroine, a half-Russian, half-English, Chicago-raised cleaning-lady who lives in a house populated by an extended family full of screeching Ruski caricatures (Kick Gurry!). But she’s also —hold on, you might need to start taking notes— the exact genetic replica of the recently-deceased Queen of the Universe(!), whose will has deeded various populated planets to a trio of squabbling siblings long on erotic decadence, Shakespearean soliloquy, and evil-plotting-to-take-control-of-Earth.

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They’re played by Tuppence Middleton, Douglas Booth, and Eddie Redmayne, suggesting that if anyone is going to own the universe, it’s attractive English private-schoolers. They’re the Riot Clubbin’ scions of an industrial empire in genetic trading; genes harvested from human cattle (Soylent Green is people!), synthesised into a profitable fountain-of-youth elixir, and then used to keep the upper-crust alive immemorial. No sooner has Middleton appeared in unconvincing old-lady make-up than she takes a dip in the geney waters, coming out —miraculously!— looking not a day over 26.

Middleton lives, for real, on a day-spa planet of endless flowers and waterfalls and scented candles(!); Booth gets his intergalactic fuck on in an erotic Roman space-palace of non-stop interspecies orgies; whilst Redmayne, in contrast, sits brooding alone, looking out full-length windows that must be a bitch to clean, alternating between Heath Ledger-esque mumbles and attention-seeking ooh-he’s-evil screams at his hapless henchmen.

Redmayne may’ve already won an Oscar for The Theory Of Everything by the time you read this, but I found his hysterical turn here far more entertaining. Much of the cast —which also includes Channing Tatum, Sean Bean, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and poor Doona Bae, who looks utterly depressed underneath her blue carnival-prize wig— play up the winking quality of Jupiter Ascending’s silly script (which gets explicitly zany in extended bureaucracy-gone-space-mad! homage to Brazil that actually features Terry Gilliam himself). Redmayne is the only one truly in touch with its lack of quality, revelling in the camp of the disaster as it’s happening.

Redmayne’s pouty prince isn’t just out to chew scenery, but people; wanting to harvest the Earth’s teeming billions, he screeches, “TOMORROW!”. As the only Earth-girl who’s versed in intergalactic gene-trade politics —and, y’know, Queen of the Universe— Kunis is seemingly all that’s standing between Steady Eddie and mankind’s imminent demise. If that were truly the case, we’d’ve had our genes drunk dry by toffee dandies long ago, as no cinematic chosen-one has ever seemed so much like a victim.

Kunis is no feminist heroine, but a fucking hopeless Penelope-in-Peril. She survives —lash-tastic make-up remaining flawless, whether she’s scrubbing toilets or being attacked by Skeksi-esque dragon-men— thanks only to Tatum’s man-wolf, who ‘surfs’ through the skies on anti-gravity roller-blades and largely gets about topless, clad only in a pair of leather pants (leather is, seemingly, the chosen fabric of genetically-spliced space-hunters). If you wanted to get so drunk that you could actually enjoy Jupiter Ascending, take a shot for every time Tatum saves Kunis: from near-death, from free-falling to her doom, from the clutches of a dastardly villain. Or, worst of all, when he rescues her at the altar —from marrying the wrong space-prince!— just in time.

Where an unsuspecting viewer might assume Kunis’s workaday-drone-turned-chosen-one is a successor to Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, instead, her character is more evocative of Judy Garland in The Wizard Of Oz (obsessed with going back home to a depressing domestic shithole even when in an unimaginable fantasy-world full of technicolour wonder) or Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries (a regular All-American gal transported into a realm of stiff-upper-lip English royal rigmarole).

Where most tales of lower-class nobodies rising up to overthrow an oppressive Empire are freedom-fighter fantasies, Jupiter Ascending’s narrative is never so noble. Instead, it hews to the conservative, forwarding ideas of ‘rightful’ royal heredity, a natural order of dominion (bees mystically sense that Kunis is a queen) that is usually the rationale of the oppressors. And, ultimately, it gives us a pissweak heroine who scrubs up pretty well in a succession of haute-couture frocks, but should really just get back to scrubbing dunnies, and be grateful for it.

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR

“I’ve spent my whole life trying not to become a gangster!” laments Oscar Isaac, an immigrant who’s clawed his way up the oil-industry ladder with his virtue intact, fighting a good fight that’s, ultimately, futile. For this is New York City in 1981, a cesspool of crime and corruption, and trying to crack the heating-oil market means muscling in on a racket run by the mob. Set on America’s eternal frontier, A Most Violent Year —the third film from J.C. Chandor— is a dour, fantastically-acted thriller that chronicles the personal costs of doing business.

Isaac may act all noble, but Chandor soon reveals his self-appointed piousness is all bluster; he keeping his nose clean whilst his wife-cum-accountant, Jessica Chastain, cooks books, keeps old organised-crime ties alive, and serves as his own personal Lady Macbeth. When their car runs into a deer in a snowy exurban street, Isaac wants to put it out of its misery with a tyre-iron, but before he can, Chastain shoots it in the head. He may “feel completely comfortable standing around like some fucking pussy,” but when rival companies, hired goons, and the DA come for their business, their money, and their family, Chastain’s not going to sit idly by.

A Most Violent Year is a portrait of masculinity and morality in crisis, of a corrupt society corrupting all those who dwell within it. “Mr. Fuckin’ American Dream!” Chastain spits at Isaac (managing to make it both venomous emasculation and quasi-sub-dom foreplay), a rebuke intended to get her husband’s head out of the clouds, to get him into the game. When everyone is trying to make it —at the expense of everyone else— upward mobility requires walking all over others; the capitalist marketplace a dog-eat-dog world in which “fucking pussies” are easy prey.

Like Robert Redford in Chandor’s prior picture, All Is Lost, Isaac is a man in a sinking ship, trying to plug an ever-mounting number of leaks, and keep his head above water. But where Bobby Sundance had a slow sink into oblivion, Isaac is put in a position where he must fight; begging for time, money, gentlemanly conduct, and virtue; ultimately ‘forced’ into becoming a vigilante (“there he is, the caped crusader,” mocks a rival, played by Alessandro Nivola) out to protect his piece of the pie.

That Isaac’s scratching, tooth and nail, for a stretch of industrial wasteland is all too telling. Chandor’s New York City is a lawless warzone, smothering the audiences with filth figurative and literal; its effluent shores and smoggy skies a sure symbol of the American dream’s dark underbelly.

ROSEWATER

Rosewater, a piece of well-meaning, earnest-mounted, politically-resonant Oscarbait that’s been shut out of this awards-season, will only ever be known as the film Jon Stewart left TV —first for a stint, eventually forever— to make. Except, stylistically speaking, he never left TV behind. Artistically speaking, Stewart’s directorial debut has essentially no cinematic qualities. Stewart has all the hallmarks of someone who’s come from the trenches of daily television: always seeking out shortcuts, be they emotional or intellectual. The drama is spelt out; every emotion is underlined by the awful, overdetermined music; montages run wild; and the sentimentality feels unearned, sometimes even cheap.

It shouldn’t be this way, given the real-life story that he’s telling. Gael García Bernal —a very attractive man and fantastic actor who is certainly not Persian— plays Maziar Bahari, an ex-pat Iranian journalist who returns to his homeland, from England, to cover the soon-to-be-contested (and, like, contested) elections. Having been swept up in the rising tide of the Green Wave, Bernal’s sure the vote (cue: uplifting music over a ballot-box montage) will mark the dawning of a whole new democratic epoch. Instead, the election gets stolen, the pricks stay in power, and soon he’s under lock and key, being tortured on suspicion of being a CIA spy.

Stewart is unsure whether to mount the resulting prison stay as absurdist comedy —“you have to dial 9 to get out,” his interrogator, Kim Bodnia (very Danish, not so Persian) fusses, at one point, when getting Bernal to call home— or grim tragedy. Ultimately, he tries a bit of both, before taking a turn towards straight-out Inspirational. It’s determinedly middle-brow stuff; a safe telling of a story for mass-consumption. Rosewater is certainly ‘worthy’, if we must use criticis’ most beloved backhanded compliment. But that worth comes from the fact that Bahari was a real man who really suffered, not from anything the film does itself.

EASTERN BOYS

In the great opening to Robin Campillo’s Eastern Boys, Olivier Rabourdin, a softly-spoken, country-club-casual, middle-aged gay man, meets eyes with Kirill Emelyanov’s fresh-faced Ukrainian rent-boy across the crowded Gare du Nord Metro. They eventually rendezvous under a stairwell, and negotiate rates for a housecall. Only, when Emelyanov arrives on his door, it’s with a posse of immigrant bros —lead by Daniil Vorobyov’s preening, pecking peacock— who raid Rabourdin’s liquor cabinet, make off with all his electrical equipment, and rub his nose in his bourgeois complacency and ruling-class complicity. Wracked by white guilt and sexual shame, emasculated in his own home, Rabourdin becomes a passive victim.

There’s hints of the social provocations of Michael Haneke and Ruben Ostlünd in this opening act, but as the film progresses into its next three numbered chapters, Campillo proves himself to be more romantic and hopeful; Eastern Boys carrying immigration-fantasy-as-ultimately-uplifting-thriller echoes of Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things. Rabourdin and Emelyanov’s attraction persists, and their ongoing relationship both keeps to its early mark/grifter dynamic, whilst growing into something else.

Campillo, these days, is best known as the guy who created French undead franchise Les Révenants/They Came Back/The Returned. But more notable is his career-long collaboration with Laurent Cantet, which has involved co-writing a host of brilliant, brutal socio-realist films, including Time Out’s downsized-dad drama and The Class’s peerless portrait of high-school’s savage social dynamics. But it’s the Cantet/Campillo sex-tourist drama, Heading South, that’s most resonant, here; Campillo again seeking out the emotional and political terrain of first-world wealth buying sexual/emotional connection.

Whilst Campillo is a realist in his socio-realism, ultimately he can’t resist indulging in the desires of his star-cross’d lovers, and finally enacting moral ‘revenge’ on Vorobyov and the two-bit hoods who so victimised our leading man. But he does so with an artful, thoughtful flourish; pivoting away from the main story, in its final chapter, to take up with an entirely-new character, a suffering motel manager played, brilliantly, by Edéa Darcque. She’s, eventually, drawn into the middle of the drama, and represents a social stratum somewhere between Rabourdin’s virtuous sugardaddy and the lawless Ukrainian youths. It shows Campillo’s gift as a writer, a further complicates a picture utterly unafraid of moral greys.