Capone's Art-House Round-Up with PATERSON, THE FOUNDER, and TRESPASS AGAINST US!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


PATERSON
The more I watch and think about the latest from writer-director Jim Jarmusch (ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, BROKEN FLOWERS, GHOST DOG, STRANGER THAN PARADISE, DOWN BY LAW), the deeper I fall in love with it. Describing what PATERSON is about is defeating its purpose and doesn’t do it a lick of justice. It’s a quiet film that digs into how human beings find beauty and inspiration in the midst of our day-to-day, seemingly uninspiring routines. But it also concerns the small miracles that happens to us when we stray from our routines, even just a tiny bit. And PATERSON is one of the few films about an artist living in a small town, in which the artist doesn’t feel trapped or confined by his surroundings. This man loves where he lives and writes poetry that looks at his environment with fresh eyes and an open heart.

Paterson encompasses a week in the life of a man named Paterson (Adam Driver, having a hell of a year, also appearing in SILENCE and MIDNIGHT SPECIAL), who works as a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey. He lives with his beautiful wife, Laura (the radiant and quite funny Golshifteh Farahani), who by contrast, is brimming with ideas about every aspect of their lives—from the color of shower curtains to ways she can live out her dream of becoming a country singer. In most cases, she makes the modifications to their cozy home herself with the aide of a paint brush and a boundless creative streak. It’s clear that Paterson is crazy about her and inspired by her passion. The balance each other because he is largely reactive; he’s an observer who saves his responses for his poetry.

Part of his routine is waking up at more or less the same time every morning (no alarm necessary), going to and from work, watching and listening to the riders (look for very amusing cameos by MOONLIGHT KINGDOM child stars Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman), walking his dog, stopping by the local bar for a single beer, and heading home to his wife. Jarmusch always returns to the routine, but on each day, something slightly different and unexpected happens, and by the time Paterson returns to the routine, he has experienced something that some might call Life.

Jarmusch has been making films long enough that he marvelously walks a line with his storytelling where you can choose to search for deeper meanings or simply let the events play out without such considerations. What does it mean that Paterson keeps seeing twins all over town? Why does the history of the town become a major discussion point in the film, even though it never really comes into play in what little plot there is? Why does Paterson’s dog dislike him so much? (Truth be told, I think the dog came with Laura in the marriage.) Jarmusch seems content to create characters that he would enjoy spending time with, and he populates his movies with largely likable people, who sometimes struggle, but for the most part, they are capable of finding beauty in the everyday.

Driver has never been better. For most of the film, he seems mildly amused by the world around him, and that keeps Paterson content and charming in a quiet, unassuming—but not off-putting—way. We watch his small gestures and glances in the same way he notices the tiniest changes in the world around him. Driver is capable of strapping on a full-on oddball performance when the occasion calls for it, but in Paterson, he’s going for something restrained, almost graceful.

It’s almost become cliché to say, but the city of Paterson is its own character as well, and one we get to know quite well since we drive through almost every square inch of it, and are told of its few landmarks, including the Lou Costello Memorial Park (named after the town’s most famous son) to the Great Falls, which served as an inspiration to poet William Carlos Williams, who wrote an epic poem about the town and is Paterson’s favorite poet. It’s one thing to use a location as a beautiful background to your main story, but Jarmusch immerses us in this place until we feel a deep longing to book at least a day-trip to it.

PATERSON is quaint, charming, curious, deeply engaging and one of the finest profiles of the artistic mind that I’ve seen in recent memory. It’s proof positive that not every film about an artist needs to be filled with angsty, edgy douchery. The fact that this character takes a small part of each day to scribble down a few lines of verse that he never intended to show anyone, let alone publish, is extraordinary in this era of devices and gossip and outrage. And it doesn’t take long for us to the the beauty of the world the same way he does. How often does that happen?


THE FOUNDER
In the spirit of the original McDonald’s brothers restaurant, I’m going to make this quick. THE FOUNDER is the story of Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), a traveling salesman, who stumbled upon a pair of brothers in San Bernardino in the mid-1950s who were making burgers, fries and drinks in a matter of seconds, rather than the 20-minute wait of most drive-up restaurants serving similar food. By designing their kitchen to eliminate waste and maximize efficiency, Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) essentially invented the fast-food model, and the montage that illustrates their trial-and-error phase is the first of many fascinating moments in this movie.

Every so often, the Tribune or one of the other local newspapers will retell the story of Kroc and his relationship with the McDonald’s business. For better or for worse, The Founder does a fairly straight-forward, no-frills, nothing-but-the-facts version of that story. Kroc led the charge to franchise the restaurant chain, beginning with a string of locations in the Chicago area, but the deal he struck with the brothers didn’t make him enough money to live in the lifestyle he dreamed of. Decades of being a salesman had taken a toll both on his self esteem and his marriage to wife Ethel (Laura Dern), and THE FOUNDER does attempt to connect Kroc’s awful behavior to pretty much everyone in his life to justify his unfulfilled vision of himself as a wealthy entrepreneur.

Director John Lee Hancock (THE ROOKIE, THE BLIND SIDE, SAVING MR. BANKS), working from a screenplay by Robert Siegel (THE WRESTLER, BIG FAN) specializes in telling true stories, and he does very little to sugarcoat or smooth over Kroc’s shady dealings, especially when he effectively steals McDonald’s out from under the brothers by buying the land on which the restaurants were built and charging the brothers to lease the land from him. Kroc became a real estate mogul almost by accident, and it made him disgustingly rich. To him, his underhanded deal was the McDonald brothers fault for not being ambitious enough, for thinking too small, when all they wanted to do was make the best food they could and serve it quickly.

So why should you care about THE FOUNDER and its tale of Kroc as the ultimate asshole businessman? First and foremost is Keaton, who allows us to watch the gradual transformation of Kroc from a desperate salesman to someone who finally gets a taste of the good life and it turns him into an absolute monster. If this were a work of fiction, the story might end with Kroc seeing the error in his ways and helping the McDonald brothers out. Instead, he stole their idea and their name and turned it into one of the largest businesses in the world.

Also giving nice turns are Patrick Wilson and Linda Cardellini as Rollie and Joan Smith who team up with Kroc on a money-saving idea that drives one of many wedges between Ray and the brothers. And if it gives you any sense of what type of man Kroc turned into: the much younger Joan Smith became wife No. 2.

THE FOUNDER feels like a noble and worthy attempt to set the record straight, and on that front, it completely succeeds. As a cinematic experience, it looks great, the period details are wonderful (especially the re-creation of the old-school McDonald’s architecture), and Keaton adds a depth to Kroc I’m not even sure was in the script. As I said, it’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done, and it may teach you a thing or two about the death of the handshake deal.


TRESPASS AGAINST US
My takeaway from TRESPASS AGAINST US, the feature film debut from veteran British TV director Adam Smith is that’s it’s exceedingly Irish. I’ll admit, I swoon a bit hearing Irish actors cut loose with their full-on brogue, after seeing them in role after role saddled with an American accents. Michael Fassbender plays Chad Cutler, who lives in a small mobile home encampment with his wife Kelly (Lyndsey Marshal) and two children, including young son Tyson (Georgie Smith), who is just old enough to start questioning what his dad and grandfather Colby (Brendan Gleeson) do for a living and whether he wants to be a part of it when he gets older.

As you might suspect, the family business is a bit of thievery, and Chad is the best getaway driver in the area, but he has grown tired of the game and knows that one day his luck is going to run out and he’ll eventually get caught by the police, represented here by the great Rory Kinnear. But every time Chad voices any sentiment that appears to run counter to his father, he gets accused of being a traitor to his albeit tainted bloodline. And when Colby catches on that Chad wants to leave the community and make a name for himself elsewhere, he suddenly books a risky job that the cops seem to know about almost as soon as it happens.

I don’t mean to make TRESPASS AGAINST US sounds like it’s plot heavy—it certainly isn’t. It feels that about 75 percent of it is just Irish folk talking about being Irish, what family means, how little they disregard what teachers, the government, or the police think or say. I’ve seen character studies of people like this before, but when you slot in such great actors, everything feels heightened and delightful in its defiance.

As a bit of a bonus, the car chase sequences are spectacular and completely unexpected in a film that achieves a high degree of intimacy. But for Chad, driving is an intimate act because he believes, ultimately, it will be that car that will take him and his family far from this broken-down campsite. To heighten the ferocity of the chases all the more, the high-velocity score comes courtesy of Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers.

When it comes down to it, TRESPASS AGAINST US turns into a battle for the soul of young Tyson, who has been skipping school and spending far too much time listening to his mildly insane grandfather, who has opinions on everything from the theory of evolution to whether the world is round or flat. I’ll give you three guesses which side of the debate he falls on both subjects. The film is a tad disjointed and confused about what it wants to be, but in the end, you’ll likely care a great deal about the fate of this family and whether escaping from one’s past is even a wise thing to wish for.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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