Knight and Day *

Director: James Mangold
Cast: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz
Peter Sarsgaard, Jordi Mollà, Viola Davis, Paul Dano
Marc Blucas, Celia Weston, Dale Dye

When thinking of Knight and Day, the word "throwback" might come to mind but it's definitely not the word that best helps describe it.
It reminds us of a throwback because we understand the film wanted to be something in the tradition of The African Queen or Charade; a show for grownups featuring two big movie stars who romance each other while running away from peril.
In execution though the movie feels more like a bad TV pilot, done just to pair Diaz and Cruise (who had been wickedly good together in Vanilla Sky, her more than him, but still there was something there).
This time around the tables are turned and it's Cruise who's in control as he plays Roy Miller, a seductive rogue spy who teams up with unsuspecting ditzy civilian June Havens (Diaz) as he tries to clean his good name from the people who framed him...or so we think.
After meeting "by accident" in an airport, Roy takes a liking to June (some might call it plain old stalking) and spends most of the movie trying to convince her he's a good guy trying to do his best to protect an important weapon designer (Dano in full geeky glory).
She's approached by an FBI agent (Sarsgaard) and his boss (Davis) who tell her, Roy is in fact an agent who lost his mind...
But who to believe?
The film in a way acts like an analogy for Tom Cruise's latter days career. On one side we have Cruise trying to remind us how he's the irresistibly charming movie star we always thought he was, this part is essentially conveyed by Miller, who needs to do not more than flash his million dollar smile and scoff (in that very Tom Cruise way) to get away with anything.
On the other side we have what seems to be the voice of reason in the shape of the FBI who informs us that despite our best knowledge this man is in fact insane. This could very well represent, well, our opinion of what Cruise has been doing for the past seven years; meaning action after action to convince us something's not quite working up there.
So on a very basic level the film is an endurance test of how much Cruise you can take. If you think he's an obnoxious midget you'd be better off watching something else because besides the whole lotta Tom we get, the plot also asks us to push the boundaries of coherence in order to accept what's going onscreen as something remotely real.
There is a recurring gag throughout the film where Roy drugs June, mostly to move locations without her having a panic attack, which are represented visually by a series of mostly blurry snippets that give us an idea of what the hell is going on.
We see Roy hanging upside down, Roy on a plane, Roy on a boat etc...the difference between this and say something like North by Northwest (another example of polar opposites in a cross continent adventure) is that we don't care where June will wake up next, or if she'll even wake up at all.
Deep inside we know everything will turn out well for these two and the movie fails to raise even a second of real excitement, thrills or even fun.
The one thing that remains a mystery throughout the film is what got Sarsgaard and Davis to star in this?

An Education ***1/2

Director: Lone Scherfig
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina
Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike, Cara Seymour
Olivia Williams, Emma Thompson, Sally Hawkins

"Coming of age" in films has become synonymous with cliché, unoriginality and by the numbers storytelling.
Therefore it's a mystery how Lone Scherfig is able to make "An Education" so damn refreshing.
The story, based on journalist Lynn Barber's memoirs turned into a wonderful screenplay by Nick Hornby, takes place in 1961 London, where 16-year-old Jenny (Mulligan) finds herself involved in a romantic affair with David (Sarsgaard) a man twice her age.
They meet one inconspicuous rainy afternoon when David offers Jenny's cello, and not its owner, a ride. She walks next to the car surprised and more than charmed by David's odd behavior and before soon she's accepting an invitation to go with him to a concert.
But Jenny lives with her parents (Molina and Seymour both simply extraordinary) and before she can go to a concert with David, he must seduce them.
Jenny's parents have planned her life ahead for her, therefore she is enrolled in an exclusive girls' school, which along with proficient extra curricular activities will pave her way to Oxford, where she will find a husband and live peacefully.
The notion of happiness isn't questioned or perhaps remains implicit upon achieving economic and social tranquility.
In such a way Jenny's parents show no objection to David taking their daughter out. Her dad just points out he's "a Jew", but they allow their relationship to flourish.
Can it be that they just see the potential husband material in him despite the obvious incongruences this has with everything they have done for their daughter.
It does help that Sarsgaard is so charming playing this part.
He works around his type, and a forced British accent, by playing it cool and honest. We know that he wants to get into Jenny's pants, but he's never the menacing pedophile lurking around the playground.
His interest in Jenny in fact seems to be real, "isn't it wonderful to find a young person who wants to know things?" he asks finding himself self appointed guide in Jenny's unofficial education.
In every scene they are together he's also getting something out of Jenny that goes beyond the sexual. Sarsgaard conveys the "too good to be true" traits we can't help but fear as well as a sense that he's learning from Jenny too.
As with every character in the film, there is in him a sense of subversion. The possibility that David is taking revenge on the system by proving he can romance a girl who is in every way in a different class, is quite possible.
Same goes to his friends Danny (Cooper) and his girlfriend Helen (Pike) who bewitch Jenny with pure style and glamor. Little does she stop to see how they sustain this lifestyle with methods she might never agree with.
At first Jenny says she wants "to talk to people who know lots about lots", but in their company she is more seduced by the constant array of activities-concerts, trips to Paris, parties, pre-Raphaelite art auctions-than the actual knowledge she gets from any of it.
The problem is actually that Jenny only sees this and the flashes of humanity we get from the characters are merely nuances.
Therefore the bittersweet affection and repressed rage of Danny is brought to life beautifully by Cooper in unexpected small moments.
While Pike is brilliant as the trophy girlfriend who plays the blond card to avoid being compromised by morality and ethical issues.
Jenny, like most teenagers fails to see past their facades and impressed by their glitz becomes rebellious to the other side of the equation: her teachers.
Her English teacher (a moving Williams) asks her to contemplate her future more carefully, but Jenny assumes she's just trying to live vicariously through her, while the Headmistress (Thompson who obviously steals all her scenes) sternly reminds her the rules of society in the face of such upheavals.
But as long as she's learning more than school has to offer and imposing her newfound adulthood over her childlike classmates, Jenny remains in a world of her own.
This world is a beautiful creation at the hands of Carey Mulligan who inhabits Jenny from the moment the movie begins.
Even if we know she's a poser of sorts, who speaks French out of the blue as if it was the most natural thing in the world, there is a lovable quality to her.
She's trapped in the limbo between childhood and adulthood, trying to take too much in at once and learning the hard way.
But watch Mulligan's eyes, as they convey a lustful thirst for the unknown juxtaposed with utter innocence and you will be transfixed.
When she experiences sex she sighs before she wonders why "all that poetry about something that lasts no time at all", her life so far has been made up of what she read in books and heard in French music.
Her life after the events in the film is something made for books and music.

Elegy ***

Director: Isabel Coixet
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz
Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, Debbie Harry, Dennis Hopper

When describing his approach to a woman as "I go yacking away mainly because I want to fuck her", you realize that David Kepesh (Kingsley) is either the world's most honest man or the biggest asshole.
Isabel Coixet's beautiful work in "Elegy" is delivered when she finds the balance between the two.
We learn that Kepesh is a divorced, celebrated author and culture critic whose most stable relationship comes in the shape of Carolyn (an affecting beautiful performance by Clarkson), his mistress of twenty years who always drops by for sex and then leaves for business.
He has become estranged with his son (the reliable Sarsgaard) after he abandoned him as a child and spends time talking about his conquests with his best friend and poet George O'Hearn (Hopper).
One day he meets Consuela Castillo (Cruz), a beautiful, intriguing woman who captures his imagination and happens to be his student. They embark in an affair (after the semester is over, the film isn't about academic scandals...) that then becomes something like love, until he begins to obsess over the fact that she will probably leave him for a younger man.
Based on Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal",the film at first plays like middle age male fantasy where you have an interesting, mature man who never lost his sexual charm finding himself smothered by the unthinkable love that comes in the shape of a beautiful woman thirty years younger.
Narrated by Kingsley with an tone and enunciation reserved for hard boiled film noir, the first part of the plot plays out like what an affair would play out imagined by a Raymond Chandler fan. Here David becomes a distrusting creature, always lurking in the shadows (even the ones inside his head) looking for the right moment to attack.
It's no surprise that during this time we also wait for Consuela to reveal the femme fatale we're convinced she has in her somewhere. Because as David assumes: everything that people will see in them is an old dirty man and a sly young woman trying to get something from him.
When Consuela insists this is love David panicks, taking the story into a path that alters his and our consciousness about age, feelings and mortality.
Because yes, among many things "Elegy" is about coming to terms with death (the opening monologue has David quote Bette Davis herself) but it doesn't pretend to make you settle with this idea, instead Coixet seems to draw from the now overused conception that "life is what happens when you're waiting for it to happen".
Kingsley of course brings a sense of self to David unlike any other actor could. Not only do you feel him connect to the character in a personal way (after old it's a well known film myth that it's the bravest of actors who dare to play their age) but he also gives David a backstory that makes him difficult, but not impossible to understand.
In his scenes with Hopper (which are probably the best in the film) Kingsley portrays the kind of comraderie that takes years to take shape. Hopper also is helpful in creating this sense of a masculine world that sometimes seems impenetrable for women.
If it wasn't for Coixet's delicate, even sensuous approach Roth's hero would stay at a surface level and it would be easy for the audience to decide he's either good or bad.
Her aid in this task is the ever more surprising Penélope Cruz who could've made Consuela a sex bomb, but chooses a restrained, almost ethereal approach and never lets her cultural background become a caricature.
Her performance is extremely sensual, but unintentionally, because she lets her character put a spell on us without showing it. She brings an emotional challenge to David that doesn't even need to rely on a third act twist that feels more like punishment than fate.
The film's major flaw might be the fact that it puts too much emphasis on events that should've felt more organic, but in these mistakes Coixet highlights the duality that has always made women and men so different.
She lets her mistakes be part of who she is and ignores the pride attributed to men who try to play everything like uninterested, unaffected heroes.
It should result ironic that it's a woman who was able to tap so well into the testosterone club of Roth's mind (just take into consideration the title change) to make it something deeply universal.