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The Night Before: Mini-review

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Seth Rogen

Seth Rogen reflects on his drug trip in The Night Before

B-Moviegoers this holiday season have already had the opportunity to see the umpteenth version of the prototypical Christmas get-together film, Love the Coopers. Now, they get to see a most non-prototypical Christmas get-together movie, The Night Before, a film that has far more Seth Rogen than jolly St. Nick.

Rogen plays Isaac, who along with best buds Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) meet every Christmas Eve and visit the same places they did since they were teenagers. This year will be their last go-around, since Isaac’s wife Betsy (Jillian Bell) is expecting her first child and Chris’s NFL career is taking up too much of their time. But Ethan gets tickets to the best Christmas Eve party of all time, the legendary Nutcracker Ball, and the three friends plan to end their evening there. Of course, they run into numerous detours along the way.

Director Jonathan Levine and a host of writers, including Rogen’s comedy partner Evan Goldberg try to blend Rogen’s usual crudities with a sentimental Christmas movie and mostly succeed. Much of the crudity comes from an early Christmas present Betsy gives Isaac, a box filled with seemingly every drug known to man. When the drug jokes work, as when Isaac imagines the statues in a manger scene talking to him, The Night Before is hilarious. But Levine hasn’t mastered the art of keeping cutups like Rogen and James Franco (who plays himself in a cameo) under control, so some of the crudity simply falls flat and, worse, keeps going on anyway. Yet once the audience gets past the sex and drug jokes, The Night Before is, at heart, an often sweet bromance about three 30-something manchildren who finally realize they need to act like adults. Isaac has his fatherhood issues, Chris needs to address his steroid use and the impending end of his pro career, and Ethan must get over his fear of commitment that sabotaged his relationship with Diana (Lizzy Caplan), his ideal woman. Along the way, the guys do get some guidance from a most unlikely source, a scene-stealing drug dealer from their youth, played by Michael Shannon. The film’s attempts to mix raucous humor and the gentler moments don’t always work, but, with the help of a solid ensemble cast, The Night Before  winds up being a pleasant holiday surprise. 
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99 Homes: Mini-review

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Andrew Garfield

Andrew Garfield gets far away from the Florida of 99 Homes

A-Although the 2008 recession affected all segments of the American economy, the working class was hit the hardest, many losing the very roof over their heads. For the first time, a movie shows just how devastating those losses were. 99 Homes is an uncompromising, albeit fictional, look at what happened when thousands of families were evicted from their homes. But the movie is far more than a docudrama on the housing crisis; it is also a powerful morality play about greed and the corruption of the American dream.

As 99 Homes opens, hard-working but hard luck contractor Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) gets evicted from his home, along with his son Connor (Noah Lomax) and mother Lynn (Laura Dern). In desperation, he accepts an offer from realtor Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) to help fix up other houses Carver has foreclosed on. Carver is making millions flipping these houses and gradually involves Dennis in his schemes, many of them illegal. 

99 Homes is at its best when showcasing the human tragedies resulting from the foreclosures. Dennis and his family are given only minutes to gather up any personal belongings and vacate their home. With no place to go, they wind up staying in a cheap motel room alongside several other families that lost their homes as well. Director Ramin Bahrani powerfully assembles sequences showing one foreclosure after another, with families reacting in different ways (some with shock and disbelief, others by threatening violence, others by vandalizing their own homes before they leave). But 99 Homes also has elements of classic tragedy, with a solid performance by Garfield and a brilliant one by Shannon, who excels at playing these types of bitter characters. His Rick Carver quickly realized the opportunities to make money as a result of the foreclosures and developed a ready set of rationalizations for his actions. He then recognizes a possibly kindred spirit in Dennis and plays Mephistopheles to Dennis’ Faust, luring him in with a taste of the good life. At the end of 99 Homes, Dennis is thoroughly lost to family and friends, yet neither he nor the audience know for sure just how or where he crossed the line. 99 Homes presents a riveting picture of the various iterations of greed in America and the inevitable consequences.
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Freeheld: Mini-review

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Julianne Moore

Julianne Moore has another fatal disease in Freeheld

BFormer Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill noted that “all politics is local,” an observation that is at the heart of Freeheld. A dying woman wants to ensure that her pension benefits go to the love of her life, but because that lover is also female, a seemingly simple request becomes a focus of the Gay Rights movement.

Freeheld, based on an Oscar-winning 2007 documentary of the same name, is the story of longtime Ocean County, NJ, detective Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore), who kept her sexuality secret from her co-workers even after entering into a domestic partnership with a younger woman, Stacie Andrade (Ellen Page). When Laurel develops terminal cancer, she discovers that Stacie can’t receive the same pension benefits a married spouse could. So, with the help of outside activists, she and Stacie try to persuade the county Board of Freeholders to change their minds.

There is a deeply personal, tragic love story at the heart of Freeheld, featuring an excellent, understated performance by Ellen Page. The movie’s emphasis, however, is not on that love story or on the morality or legality of gay marriage in general, but rather on the political process involved in the decision whether or not to grant Stacie Laurel’s pension. So, as Laurel’s conditions worsens, she and Stacie fade into the background, and the film spends most of its time showing Laurel’s straight partner (Michael Shannon) and a gay activist (Steve Carell) trying to lobby the Freeholders, most notably a conscience-stricken Josh Charles, to change their minds. Director Peter Sollett is never able to make the political story in Freeheld as compelling as the emotional one except at the very end, where, a wheelchair-bound Laurel, just days from death, pleads her case in person. Further, Carell’s in-your-face performance, even if it’s historically accurate, is badly out of step with the rest of the movie. Still, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision of gay marriage, Freehold illustrates the often fascinating story of one of the hundreds of individual local ordinances and court decisions that created the political and moral climate in which the Supreme Court found itself.      
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