‘Dark Horse’

Todd Solondz’s “Dark Horse” continues the writer/director’s fascination with sad, damaged characters searching for happiness, whose suffering we empathize with at times and relish in at others. All the while, Solondz dares us to look away, perhaps into the closest mirror, from the frightening sincerity on screen. As a filmmaker, he is fearless and pushes so far over the edge of what P.C. is these days that he circles back again and reminds us of the importance of breaking the laws and blurring the lines between the tolerable and the taboo.

Jordan Gelber is dynamite in this movie as Abe, an overly confident and confrontational toy collector who is in his thirties and living with his parents. Neither his emotionally distant father, Jackie (a stellar, subdued Christopher Walken), nor his coddling mother, Phyllis (Mia Farrow), expects much of him. His brother, Richard (Justin Bartha) is a successful medical doctor.

Abe works for his father at his real estate office, but Jackie’s secretary, Marie (Donna Murphy) does all of Abe’s work while he spends his time scoping out rare collector’s editions of toys on eBay on his computer.

In the opening scene of “Dark Horse,” Abe is at a wedding sitting at a table beside Miranda (Selma Blair). They are not together, and as he leans in and coolly tells her he doesn’t usually dance, she appears unsettled and uninterested. Later, he finds her again and, in a scene as painful, funny and awkward as Solondz has ever filmed, asks for her phone number.

On their first date, another painful scene where Abe rambles on about fate to a lethargic Miranda, he proposes to her.

Miranda, an emotionally troubled, depressed and medicated woman, at first refuses Abe’s marriage proposal sending him into a spiral of aggression in which he quits his job and curses everyone on the planet. Miranda soon after develops a sense of guilt and changes her mind. She wants to rebound from her passive, morose lifestyle and decides to settle for Abe, telling him as they embrace that “it could have been worse… so much worse.”

We come to understand Abe as a pretty delusional guy. Even from the opening scenes, as we see him pursue a girl who is the farthest thing from interested, and then drive home in his big, bright yellow eye-sore of a hummer while jamming to pre-teen pop music, what Solondz has referred to as “‘American Idol’ music,” we get the sense that Abe is hopelessly holding on to something that is long gone and never to be seen again.

As the film gradual evolves from its more straightforward first half into a kind of surreal series of events punctuated by Abe’s dreams and visions of interactions with Marie, his father’s secretary, we learn that Miranda has hepatitis B and will survive. But Abe is troubled by this and comes to question everything that has come before, and even argues with his mother and brother in one imaginary scene where he wants to know why Richard was the favored son.

With “Dark Horse,” the ever-subversive Solondz twists the “boy meets girl” story to its breaking point, and then in a truly unexpected finale, reveals the underlying sweetness of the whole damn thing. Although it is far from his darkest film, “Dark Horse” feels completely “Solondz” in its approach to telling a story in the age of the man-child. His film is darkly comic and moving without ever feeling sentimental.

Solondz tells a great story, and after his somewhat cold, distant “Life During Wartime,” an interesting but redundant continuation of his masterpiece “Happiness,” “Dark Horse” reveals that he still has a lot more stories to tell.

★★★ 1/2 (out of 4)

‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’

Watching Benh Zeitlin’s first feature length film, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” I couldn’t help but soak in like a sponge the story, the characters and the atmosphere of a flooded Louisiana bayou community named “the Bathtub” where a brave, ferocious little girl called Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis, in an earth-shattering screen debut) lives with her sickly, unstable father, Wink (Dwight Henry, another revelation).

Powerful images pervade nearly every scene as Hushpuppy, Wink and the rest of their community face storm devastation and torrential rain on a path toward survival during the worst of times. Zeitlin’s script, co-written by Lucy Alibar and based on her play, “Juicy and Delicious,” explores the lengths to which these seemingly otherworldly people will go to prove their love and self-reliance, as they rebel against emergency evacuations to refugee centers and blow up a levee to drain away the accumulated saltwater that is killing the wildlife in “the Bathtub.”

Meanwhile, fever dream-like images depicting rising temperatures and melting ice caps appear between certain scenes, and from these shattering glaciers come prehistoric beasts that ominously charge toward some destined location to meet Hushpuppy in a sequence reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” must be experienced first hand, for no words can truly communicate the elaborate yet simple events that occur on screen. Watch for a scene where Hushpuppy screams a primal scream, or another scene where Wink, during the height of a relentless storm, raises his shotgun to the open sky and fires, challenging the storm itself and daring it to retaliate.

Willis is a force of nature with a mighty career ahead of her. Henry was a local baker, a non-actor whom Zeitlin and his casting team found for the part of Wink. He will next be seen in “12 Years A Slave” directed by Steve McQueen (“Shame,” “Hunger”), which indicates a budding career for him as well.

Zeitlin’s work here is filmmaking at its most potent and powerful as he captures the fear, love and spirit of these characters living in a country within a country, rooted to their homes and to each other. Masterfully made on a production budget of next to nothing, “Beasts” is one of the most captivating films of 2012.

★★★ 1/2 (out of 4)

‘Silver Linings Playbook’

Writer/director David O. Russell has a gift for exploring and staging the complexities and dynamics of dysfunctional families, shown in his previous film, “The Fighter,” and again in his newest film, “Silver Linings Playbook,” a romantic comedy that transcends the genre in many ways and features career best performances by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

Cooper plays Pat, a bipolar ex-teacher who has been in a mental institution for several months after beating his wife’s lover to a bloody pulp and nearly killing him. Pat’s mother, Dolores (Jacki Weaver), signs him out of the facility and brings him home with hopes that he is ready to start his life again.

Pat has the same desire, and pledges to look on the bright side of things, and seek out the “silver linings” in his life. He clearly hasn’t yet worked through his emotional issues and frequently has bouts of depression and anger. His father, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro), suffers many of the same emotional and mental problems, and has developed obsessive-compulsive tendencies that prove to have an interesting effect on his football fanaticism — they live in Philadelphia, so the Eagles are a second religion.

The internal fissures and knots surface slowly throughout “Silver Linings Playbook” as Pat’s path to healing reaches several jerks and turns before coming to a screeching halt one evening when he is agrees to eat dinner with his friend, Ronnie (John Ortiz), and his wife, Veronica (Julia Stiles).

Veronica’s sister, Tiffany (a stunning, Oscar-worthy Jennifer Lawrence), shows up and rocks Pat’s universe at first sight and forever more. She is as peculiar as Pat and has emotional problems of her own, on top of being an ex-sex addict. She proves to be a saving grace in disguise as she promises to help Pat in his quest to rekindle romance with his ex-wife, while also making some plans of her own to guide Pat toward another path, another light.

“Silver Linings Playbook” features one of the finest ensemble casts in recent memory. Indeed, the four principal actors all received well-deserved Oscar nominations. Of the four of them, I predict that Lawrence, one of the most gifted young actresses around today, will win. She floored me with her work in “Winter’s Bone” two years ago, and again in “The Hunger Games,” but this may be her best, most nuanced performance. I say give her the gold.

The film also features De Niro’s best performance in ages, and manages to melt away all of the self-parody and pretense that have hardened around the veteran actor in the past decade. It is an emotional, poignant performance that draws us back to the golden age of De Niro, and reminds us of what a powerful actor he truly is.

The subject of mental illness is fascinating to me, and particularly in the way O. Russell, adapting a book by Matthew Quick, deals with it and weaves it into “Silver Linings Playbook” and into the characters’ lives. The way he handles the subject is so deeply and painfully sincere, that as it moves along, we become involved in these characters’ lives and lose ourselves in the story in a rare kind of way.

O. Russell is a unique, edgy and talented director who lost his way with the abysmal, unwatchable “I Heart Huckabees,” but has found his voice again as an important storyteller interested in flawed, relatable characters and families. “Silver Linings Playbook” is one of his best films to date, and one of the best films of 2012 because it manages to balance its humor with the painful realities of mental illness, love and heartache.

★★★ 1/2 (out of 4)