Tony Gilroy

The Cutting Edge (1992)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-11-182023-03-18 Movie Review

(In French, On TV, November 2019) Modern studio filmmaking is all about attracting as many audience quadrants (young/old, male/female) as possible, so you can see the attraction in The Cutting Edge pairing up a hockey player with a delicate figure skater to form a skating duet. It allows for some ballet fantasy, underdog formula and mismatched romance along the way. Mechanical in intention, it ends up potable largely due to decent execution. Screenwriting buffs will recognize Tony Gilroy as having penned the script (his first screen credit), which makes for a very, very off-persona debut for someone best known for thrillers both cerebral and muscular. But maybe the credit should go to director Paul Michael Glaser, as he overuses slow-motion shots and keeps some romantic tension going on between the characters played by D. B. Sweeney and Moira Kelly. The skating footage is decent and well integrated—there’s clearly some creative cutting going on to make both actors look like Olympics-level skaters, but it’s not too distracting. The fun is largely in the interludes off the ice anyway, as our two mismatched leads gradually fall for each other. Everything here is familiar and predictable, but it’s executed with a decent pacing and adequate means. Audiences with more affection for figure skating will certainly rank The Cutting Edge higher.

Movie Review

Beirut (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-05-202023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2019) Catch me on a bad day, and I will talk your ears off about how grown-up adult cinema has been evacuated from the multiplexes and shuffled off to art-house cinema, minor streaming releases and the corners of the cable channels. I’m not even talking about meditative character studies, here—I mean geopolitical thrillers such as Beirut, heavy in suspense and action but somehow a bit more complex than the save-the-world Manicheism of modern blockbuster films. Beirut doesn’t do anything outlandish—it simply takes us back to early-1980s Lebanon, near the peak of the unbelievable civil war that took it from a world-class city to loosely arranged rubble. In this complex environment, with half a dozen factions fighting each other under the watchful eye of two superpowers and the powder-keg environment of next-door neighbour Israel, comes a negotiator being asked to secure the release of an American hostage. There are several complications, not the least of them being that the protagonist knows both parties to the hostage exchange and is returning to the city ten years after tragic events involving him. Beirut has the heft of a good thriller, with a flawed world-weary protagonist unsure of who’s trying to help or kill him in an environment where there are no certitudes. Every year, you can read about a dozen similar novels … but you’ll be lucky to find even one movie with that kind of ambition. Of course, there’s Tony Gilroy writing the script, one of the few Hollywood screenwriters with the clout and chops to tackle such a project. Director Brad Anderson has an uneven filmography, but he handles the material well, backed with capable production design taking us credibly to 1982 Beirut. More crucially, he can also depend on a good script and decent actors: Jon Hamm is great as the bruised negotiator, Rosamund Pike is fine as his local liaison (she even gets to have some well-delivered French dialogue) and there’s Dean Norris with a hairpiece in a secondary role. The ending is suitably satisfying—with characters more or less getting what they wanted, but with the impending irony of the 1983 bombing just around the corner. The plot is a full order of magnitude more complex than the usual blockbuster, so it will take some sustained attention to follow. Beirut is the kind of film in my wheelhouse, the kind of film I wish I’d see more often. It’s not a slam-bang thriller, but it’s engrossing enough to be worth a look—especially if the modern blockbusters have let you down.

Movie Review

Dolores Claiborne (1995)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-03-172023-03-19 Movie Review

(In French, On TV, March 2019) The history of Stephen King movies across the 1990s is … shaky, but Dolores Claiborne is not going to count as a bad one. Much of this success can be traced back to the original material, which (despite featuring murder in most unusual circumstances) lends very little freedom for filmmakers to go wild in bad ways. Keeping the tone close to the novel, screenwriter Tony Gilroy and director Taylor Hackford deliver a film that sticks close to reality—and thankfully so, considering the film’s themes of domestic violence and abuse: inserting supernatural elements would have been a distracting mistake. A great sense of place, in a small island community off the coast of Maine, certainly helps in creating the film’s convincing atmosphere. Dolores Claiborne is Kathy Bates’s show as she delivers a full-featured performance, but the supporting cast is unusually strong, what with Jennifer Jason Leigh as an estranged daughter, Christopher Plummer as a detective and a pre-stardom John C. Reilly as a policeman. There’s some skill in the way the film blends a modern-day timeline with flashbacks, complete with specific colour schemes and makeup. The eerie colour manipulation throughout the film—and most intensely in the eclipse sequence—clearly prefigures more ambitious (and now commonplace) efforts in current movies. The result, as skillful as it is, can’t avoid a few missteps that reinforce its melodramatic nature—the soundtrack is too insistent at times, adding far too much to something that didn’t need it. The slow start of the film reinforces the impression that it is too long and overdone—a shorter climax would have helped. Still, Dolores Claiborne does stand as a rather good adaptation of the King novel, despite taking a few justifiable liberties (notably in beefing up and adding more characters to the present-day frame). Dolores Claiborne is probably too often forgotten in the King filmography—not horrific enough, not necessarily fitting the mould of what people expect from him—but it’s a successful effort, and one that can still be watched with some satisfaction nowadays.

Movie Review

The Bourne Legacy (2012)

ByChristian Sauvé 2012-12-292023-03-14 Movie Review

(On-demand Video, December 2012) You’d think that the ending of The Bourne Ultimatum wouldn’t necessarily lead to a sequel, but there we have one: The program that created Bourne was only the tip of the iceberg, and other operatives are forced to react when their own programs (and selves) are terminated with prejudice. Add a few considerations about artificial cognitive enhancements and you have a plot: a threadbare, familiar plot, but a plot nonetheless. Fortunately, writer/director Tony Gilroy’s treatment of the premise is better than its foundation: The Bourne Legacy proudly continues its predecessor’s hyper-modern treatment of espionage thriller conventions with an acknowledgement to real-world moral dilemmas, high-technology used lethally and an exploitation of the possibilities of a network world under constant unaccountable surveillance. The blend is potent, and the headlining presence of both Jeremy Renner as a capable protagonist and Edward Norton as his pursuer anchors the film into a credible reality. (Amusingly, the film is able to use in a straightforward fashion a few speculative elements that would have been considered pure science-fiction a few years ago.) For its first hour, as mysteries are still presented, The Bourne Legacy is solid action filmmaking: the action scenes are well-handled, the atmosphere is grounded and the plot mechanics are decently handled as the film takes place concurrently to The Bourne Ultimatum. Things slow down to a far more ordinary result in the second half, as the plot stops advancing almost entirely and leaves all the screen time to an increasingly redundant chase sequence. The final result may not be as compelling as what was promised earlier, but it’s still a surprisingly energetic follow-up to a series most thought was finished. Don’t worry –from the unresolved threads left by the conclusion of The Bourne Legacy, it looks as if we’ll get at least another trilogy our of the Bourne name.