michael shannon

Midnight Special (2016)

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fourhalfstar

“Y’all have no idea what you’re dealing with, do ya?”

Michael Shannon is, without a doubt, my favorite actor working today. There’s an unmatched level of intensity in his screen presence that ranges from hilarious to alarming to terrifying depending on how he wants you to react, but he always gets a reaction. Some directors aren’t entirely sure how to harness this intensity & Shannon is often asked to dial it to eleven in every scene. This is fun to watch, but not necessarily the full extent of what his unique talent can bring to the screen. The madman actor does, however, have one long term collaborator in Jeff Nichols who knows exactly how to put his talent to full use. Jeff Nichols often allows Michael Shannon to play his intensity quietly, providing the actor more room to fully do his thing than any other director I can think of (outside maybe Herzog in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? or the show runners on Boardwalk Empire).

With Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols continues his career pattern of alternating between intimate thrillers & ambitious sci-fi. As far as ambition goes, this marks his riskiest, most far-reaching work to date, drowning out even the widespread mania of his sophomore work (and last sci-fi outing) Take Shelter. Mirroring the best eras of sci-fi cinema giants Steven Spieldberg & John Carpenter, comparison points you wouldn’t want to evoke lightly, Midnight Special is massive enough in its imagination & awe-inspiring mystery to establish Nichols as one of the best young talents in the industry today. Much like folks like Jonathan Glazer & Miranda July, his catalog is modestly small, but each film is a preciously crafted gift well worth waiting for. Nichols & Shannon have been close collaborators on four films in the last decade and Midnight Special easily stands as their most rounded & complete work since their first outing in 2007’s near-perfect Shotgun Stories. It’s also the best example of sci-fi action & supernatural mystery by any filmmaker in recent memory, perhaps going back for years, which is impressive given its pedigree as a mid-budget work from a director who’s still working just outside the Hollywood system.

It’s difficult to speak too extensively on Midnight Special‘s plot without ruining what makes the movie, well, special. For so much of the film’s runtime the audience is left in the dark with only brief flashes of game-changing revelations (literally) illuminating exactly what is going on. Just getting an exact handle on who’s involved in the film’s sci-fi chase plot (kidnappers, parents, cultists, federal agents, etc.) and whether their intent is good or malicious can be a lot to process. One thing in the film is clear: there is an 8 year old boy at the center of the chaos who has a mysterious, perhaps supernatural connection to a world beyond ours. The boy, Alton Meyer, is destined to travel to a specific location for  a specific date, but the purpose of that mission & the source of that intel is largely unclear. As one character puts it, “That’s all we have. This date & place is everything.” As an audience member, you’re better off not knowing any more than that yourself. Like the characters surrounding the young, enigmatic Alton Meyer have faith that the child’s very existence serves some higher purpose, you just have to have faith as an audience that Midnight Special will culminate all of these obfuscated, grandiose elements into a worthwhile whole. I am here to witness to the fact that there is indeed a payoff. I’ve seen the light. I am a true believer.

Midnight Special is like a perfectly calibrated feature-length episode of The X-Files, but without the sex appeal. The only thing I can really fault the movie for is not taking the time to develop the emotional impact of its central relationships the way past Jeff Nichols films have. The air of mystery is so oppressively heavy here that I was far more concerned about what would happen next & what small clues might be lurking in the details than I was with the film’s emotional core. This is kind of surprising for a plot centered around a vulnerable child in worlds of trouble and it may very well be the case that its emotional impact will hit me harder in future viewings now that I know where the plot is going. Honestly, though, these concerns feel downright minuscule in light of what the film accomplishes as a mid-budget sci-fi. Jeff Nichols creates an intimidatingly massive world here with the most basic of tools. Slight visual references to comic book staples like X-Men & Superman and real-life doomsday cults like Heaven’s Gate & Jonestown carry so much significance in terms of storytelling economy that the world’s most expensive CGI team couldn’t muster with a limitless budget & absence of a deadline. Just look to Alton Meyer’s headgear (plastic ear muffs & swimming goggles) to see how otherworldly the film can make even the most basic elements feel.

Nichols & Shannon have quietly built a concise little catalog of small, intimate stories with massive emotional impact in their collaborations. Midnight Special may be the director’s most ambitious work to date in terms of scale, but he’s smart to keep the individual parts that carry the hefty, supernatural mystery of the narrative just as small & intimate as he has in past familial dramas like Mud & Shotgun Stories. Shannon is similarly subdued & bare bones in his performance, which is a nice change from the long line of explosive roles that ask him to go larger than life with every breath. Together, they’ve delivered an incredible work with a near-limitless scope, but it’s one built an intricately detailed foundation of grounded, believable worldbuilding & old fashioned character work. Midnight Special may allow its ideas to outweigh its emotion in a general sense, but you never lose sight that these are real people struggling with an unreal situation. Honestly, the most difficult thing to believe in this wildly imaginative film is that there are working payphones in rural Texas in 2016. It might not be my favorite collaboration of theirs to date (that’s a bit of a close call), but it’s easily recognizable as their most ambitious & it really ups the ante for where their work is headed & what they could achieve with the right resources.

-Brandon Ledet

99 Homes (2015)

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fourstar

You’d be forgiven for assuming that an indie drama about forcible evictions during the 2007-2009 U.S. Subprime Morgage Crisis would be a thoroughly bleak affair. And even if you didn’t assume that about 99 Homes, the film sets its pessimistic tone early by opening with the fallout of a suicide. There is a wild card at play here, however, and its name is Michael Shannon. Shannon is notoriously deft at playing hilariously terrifying monsters & his turn as a money-obsessed real estate broker in 99 Homes is certainly not relatable or even remotely likeable, but it is, at times, riotously funny. Shannon is such a darkly amusing joy to watch in 99 Homes that his performance often threatens to turn the film into a black comedy. It’s whenever he’s offscreen, leaving Andrew Garfield’s much-suffering construction worker & single father to pick up the pieces of a broken life left in the evil broker’s wake, that Shannon’s antagonist stops being darkly amusing & just simply feels dark.

The story of 99 Homes is fairly straightforward. Michael Shannon’s real estate broker makes most of his money by evicting people from their homes on behalf of the bank. When Shannon’s monster broker evicts Andrew Garfield’s out-of-work construction dad from his family home, Garfield’s desperate blue collar everyman ends up working for the less-than-legal brute. He works his way up from literally shovelling shit to making ludicrous piles of cash as the evil broker’s right hand man. This, of course, leads to Garfield’s sad dad performing the very same heartless eviction practices that ruined his life in the first place & hiding his newfound source of income from his suspicious mother, played by the always-welcome Laura Dern. There’s a devastating amount of empathetic pain in Garfield’s eyes as he explains to people that their homes are now owned by the bank & that they are trespassing on bank property that makes the film at times bleakly arresting. For the most part, though, there aren’t too many surprises in the film’s indie drama formula & it plays out exactly as you’d expect.

It really is Michael Shannon’s performance that makes 99 Homes a memorably visceral experience. Although there is a unignorable consistency to his work as an actor, Shannon brings a terrifying authenticity to the role, something that truly makes you feel bad for laughing, seeing as how this was a real thing that happened to real people very recently. Shannon’s heartless real estate broker is a pitch perfect update to the wicked bankers with the cigar-chomping switched out for e-cigs. (Our next generation of irredeemable villains are vapers. There’s no way around that.) Cop’s call Shannon’s evil broker “boss”. He golfs with politicians in one scene & makes backroom deals to rip off the government with higher-ups at the bank in the next. He brags about how he “made more money during the crash than before” & talks cynically about America as “a nation of the winners by the winners for the winners.” I also particularly liked a moment where he describes houses as boxes that you shouldn’t get emotional about. Instead of saying what matters is what you fill the boxes with, he says it matters how many boxes you have, which is a perfectly succinct summation of his monstrously greedy soul. As with a lot of Shannon’s work, the real estate broker at the center of 99 Homes‘ true-to-life nightmare is deliciously over-the-top in his villainy. Andrew Garfield & Laura Dern are talented actors who hold their own when needed, but Shannon devours so much scenery that there isn’t much left room for them left to stand on. He’s a sight to behold.

-Brandon Ledet