MYSTIC RIVER
If Clint Eastwood proved anything in Unforgiven, it was that actors don’t have to be showy to be effective. Too bad that nobody told Sean Penn, who brings his full actor-y powers to bear in Mystic River, Eastwood’s latest effort. Too often, the film feels less like the well-crafted whodunit at its center and more like a freshman acting class: Penn thrashes and grimaces, Tim Robbins acts numb, and Marcia Gay Harden wobbles her voice so much that you wonder if she’s standing on the San Andreas Fault. On the other hand, Kevin Bacon does some of the best work of his career as a reasonable cop beset by marriage problems. He strikes a note of casual verisimilitude and, in an Eastwood film, that’s about the only note that’ll work. (BJS)
TOUCHING THE VOID
This story of a 1985 Andes mountain-climbing disaster comes courtesy of director Kevin MacDonald, whose film One Day in September won the Oscar for Best Documentary a few years ago. But in the vein of his last work, Touching the Void is not a clear-cut documentary; the events it examines are real, but MacDonald uses re-enactments of the story’s events to supplement a narrated account from the disaster’s survivors. The nut of their crisis: halfway through a climb, one of the two team members falls and breaks several leg bones. The other climber decides to lower his injured partner to safety, 300 feet of rope at a time, until he accidentally lowers him over a precipice. Knowing that soon both of them would tumble to their deaths, he makes a critical decision and cuts the cord. (BJS)
THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE
This film bears absolutely no resemblance to Japanime or any Disney movie, and is undoubtedly the best animated feature released in 2003. Sylvain Chomet’s film aims for a multinational texture and is largely devoid of dialogue, but nevertheless retains a distinctly French sensibility with a penchant for shrewd cultural allusions. A clubfooted widow, Madame Souza, trains her chubby grandson Champion to become a stick-thin cyclist with the help of bulky canine Bruno and her restless whistle. One day, Champion is mysteriously kidnapped, along with two of his fellow Tour de France riders, by amusingly ominous members of the French mafia. In hot pursuit, Madame Souza travels to the Dionysian metropolis Belleville, where she enlists the help of the eponymous triplets—former scat singers turned household-item instrumentalists—in liberating Champion from the clutches of a diminutive wine magnate. A marvelous fusion of color, music, and caricature, each splendid offbeat frame restores faith in traditional hand-drawn animation, and we have Chomet’s superbly macabre imagination to thank. (TIH)
—Happening was compiled by Michelle Chun, Ben B. Chung, Julie S. Greenberg, Jayme J. Herschkopf, Tiffany I. Hsieh, Lucy F. Lindsey, Gina C. Schwartz, Sarah L. Solorzano, Benjamin J. Soskin, and Scoop A. Wasserstein.