OPERATION FINALE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

I bet a written account of Israel's capture and trial of the last remaining Nazi leader in hiding, Adolf Eichmann, would potentially be more compelling than even the best filmmakers could manage to make it. The story of several people in a safe house for ten days with a Nazi war criminal captive isn't the most cinematic on its face.

And here is the curious thing about Operation Finale, the movie that tells this true story, starring Ben Kingsley as Eichmann and Oscar Isaac, the guy who was most instrumental in extracting him. There actually have been books accounting this story. One, published in 1997, was even called Operation Eichmann. But, Operation Finale, the film, gives no credit to any author whose book the film's screenplay is based on. It just gives credit to Matthew Orton for its original screenplay.

And as presented here, the story is compelling enough; I found myself engaged from beginning to end -- but, not to any particularly notable degree. The story as presented here is not long on intrigue. And with an incredible story like this, you would think it would be. Plenty of superior movies about the Holocaust are brimming with tension, which Operation Finale decidedly lacks.

It has solid performances, at least. Ben Kingsley never disappoints, and you never quite know whether his Eichmann is telling Peter Malkin (Isaac) the truth. It's fairly easy to suspect not, but director Chris Weitz never draws a clear line. After Malkin and several other Israeli operatives locate Eichmann in Buenos Aires and capture him, there are many scenes with Malkin and Eichmann alone in the room where Eichmann is being kept. There is great potential for head games, but instead it's little more than mutual appeals for compromise as Eichmann must be convinced to sign a document stating he will come to Israel willingly.

There are many complications with his extraction, you see, and that much you might expect. It gets slightly tedious regarding available resources in the Israeli government, as well as Argentinian government complicity. None of it is given particularly sharp focus.

I did find myself wondering about the extent of artistic license. Were there really this many narrow escapes -- from the local authorities as they finally leave the safe house; even as they fly out of the airport in the end? Just because most of the movie is not that cinematic doesn't mean it escapes the trappings of movie clichés.

Mind you, I have nothing against a movie that is heavy on dialogue and light on action -- if the dialogue is written well enough, it can be just as gripping as any action thriller. Operation Finale exists in a curious sort of happy medium, never boring but also never really exciting. Given the real-world weight of the story, certainly it could have been more exciting.

And that's the harshest criticism I can give this movie: it's fine. It's not a waste of time. Neither is it essential viewing. You'll be into it if you have an abiding interest in stories where justice is served in the end with Nazis. Or, you might just like knowing that such a thing happened, with last of the major organizers of the Holocaust (or the so-called "Final Solution," hence the title), fifteen years after the fact. A fine but ultimately forgettable movie isn't going to be any assistance in the longevity of historical memory.

Drinking with the enemy: Ben Kingsley's Adolf Eichmann tries to reason with his captor (Oscar Isaac).

Overall: B

PUZZLE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

You know what? I would have liked Puzzle a lot more if it didn't insist on turning the relationship between the two co-leads into a romance. Why couldn't Agnes (Kelley Macdonald) become an independent woman in the process of partnering with Robert (Irrfan Khan) in competitive puzzling without the two of them winding up in bed together?

--Oh, right. Spoiler alert! I guess I was supposed to say that before revealing that they sleep together. Rest assured that it hardly matters to the broad point of the story. And that's kind of the problem, really -- this turn of events is not integral to the plot. It's the one thing that feels a bit shoehorned in, as though some studio executive had told the script writers, "This needs a love story!"

And the thing is, it basically already has one: Agnes is a decidedly old-school, Catholic church-going housewife, whose husband Louie (David Denman) is a good guy but basically takes her for granted. She's got two loving teenage sons (Austin Abrams and Bubba Weiler) and a busy but increasingly unfulfilling domestic life.

At Agnes's birthday party where she's doing all the work as hostess, one of the gifts she's given is a jigsaw puzzle. As director Marc Turtletaub introduces us to Agnes's family at this party, Puzzle eases gently into her increasingly acute interest in puzzles. As she and Louie discuss their concerns about their sons, she's in bed reading a pamphlet on puzzling strategy. Who even knew there was such a thing?

Interested in more, similar puzzles, Agnes finds out from the gift giver where it was purchased, and she takes the train into New York City -- and at the puzzle store in Manhattan, she finds a flyer for someone "desperate" for a puzzling partner eager to get into a national competition. This is how she meets Robert, an independently wealthy divorcée riding on a patent and now with a lot of time on his hands. He's delighted to witness how quickly Agnes can put puzzles together.

Puzzle would have been a better film had the story left it at that: a middle-aged woman discovering a passion that serves as a route to independence and assertiveness. Even how this affects her relationship with her husband could have been just as effectively examined without it involving this other guy falling in love with her. That aspect of the story makes Puzzle way too much like way too many other movies.

At least no other movies are about competitive puzzling. This movie could have used more about how such competitions go down, rather than focusing on romantic confusion and sexual misguidedness.

Such as it is, though, Puzzle remains a pleasantly understated story with a dash of subtle feminism. Most importantly, the cast is as lovely as they can be, and Kelley Macdonald and Irrfan Khan make a pair with surprising chemistry. Even if the story arc itself fundamentally lacks innovation, it's nice just hanging out with them for a couple of hours.

Kelley Macdonald and Irrfan Khan pretend to think outside the box even though they don't really.

Overall: B

CRAZY RICH ASIANS

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

It's astonishing that Crazy Rich Asians is the first American film with an all-Asian principal cast in 25 years. The Joy Luck Club was released in 1993; I was 17 years old, and went to see it with who would later become my sister-in-law, while my brother and his friend saw Dazed and Confused. What's even more jarring is the realization that even having been released that long ago, The Joy Luck Club is a far better film than Crazy Rich Asians.

Of course, even comparing them is unfair: just because they both had all-Asian casts doesn't make any less like comparing apples and oranges. They are two very different movies. Crazy Rich Asians has to carry a weight of cultural context that it neither needs nor desires, but here we are. If we lived in a world where lots of movies by and about people of Asian descent were made, Crazy Rich Asians would just be another throwaway comedy romance, pleasantly enjoyable and easily forgotten.

Instead, it faces acute criticism for the "diversity of Asian experience" lacking in its representation. What the hell do people expect about a movie about crazy rich people, of any ethnicity? Obviously following the stories of the obscenely rich is not going to capture any "diversity of experience." If done right, though, it can still be fun.

Some of the debate, particularly between Asian audiences themselves, can be illuminating. For Americans regularly engaged in conversations about white supremacy, it's a bit of a surprise to hear the phrase "Chinese supremacy," in the context of insisting Crazy Rich Asians is not as progressive as some want to regard it as, even if it is groundbreaking in a lot of ways. I knew nothing about apparent oppression of non-Chinese minorities there, or that South Asians are commonly relegated to service industry work and discriminated against. As someone with a spouse born in India, seeing reference to that caused me to go into this movie looking for that representation in a way I almost certainly wouldn't have otherwise. And? There is one scene in which two friends pull their car up to a huge mansion, and manning the gate are two clearly South Asian men, perhaps Sikh judging by the turbans, and they exist only as a punch line: given no lines, they startle the young women by looking imposingly into their car windows while carrying bayonets. They are, indeed, reduced to caricature.

What a curious thing to notice in a movie featuring not a single white actor with actual lines, the few seen only extras. This is how regarding what it all means that this is a truly rare movie with an all-Asian cast can be misleading. Nevertheless, there is no denying that, of course, representation matters. I felt that watching this movie, just as a gay man: the only thing I have in common with the cousin who refers to himself as "the rainbow sheep of the family" is that we're both gay men, but I still loved his inclusion -- it made me feel, at least on some level, seen.

And so it goes with many Asian audiences at Crazy Rich Asians -- more specifically, no doubt, Chinese audiences. This "crazy rich" family consists of Chinese Singaporeans. However flawed the movie is -- and to be certain, it is far from perfect -- certain people being excited by its very existence is not difficult to understand.

I have also seen the complaint that these Asians aren't particularly crazy, which is frankly a dumb observation to make. Perhaps they are not "crazy + rich Asians" so much as "crazy rich + Asians." A strangely pleasing thing about this movie, and perhaps an accomplishment of director Jon M. Chu (working from a script by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim, based on the novel by Kevin Kwan), is how even though Crazy Rich Asians revels in the opulence of its characters, its presentation is never obnoxious or tacky.

It's really just more of a backdrop, for a cast of characters, whose range of dimensions vary widely, as do the performances. Which brings me to one of my own primary issues with the story. The central character is Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), the young woman who has been dating Nick Young (Henry Golding) for a year but has no idea how rich his family is, until they fly first class on their way to a friend's wedding in Singapore. How dumb is this woman? Much later in the story, a Young family elder tells her she's "clearly a very smart woman," and I just thought, Is she? And that is not a criticism of Rachel the person, but rather how she is conjured in the script. She has to be insanely naive in order for this Cinderella story to work.

And that is the story: Rachel is broadsided by Nick's wealth a year into their relationship, and then goes to Singapore to face suspicion and withheld acceptance from Nick's family. Michelle Yeoh is memorable as Eleanor, Nick's mother giving her the cold shoulder. And as much as some might claim the story is so bland it could be switched to any cast of white Americans and be rendered nothing special, that ignores contextualization. There are many details of Chinese culture and tradition, even with a fascinating infusion of Western influences: a lavish wedding party features swing dancing; a scene of trying on high-end dresses features a Chinese version of Madonna's "Material Girl.". There's a lot of blended influences here, resulting in a truly unique point of view. Granted, much of that point of view is being so filthy rich that there's not much sense of the real world, but whatever. Sometimes you take what you can get.

The best anyone can hope for, really, is that Crazy Rich Asians opens some doors, which have all been closed for, insaely, two and a half decades. It's preposterous, and yet largely true, to think such a turn of events depends on the success or failure of this one movie, which is merely a pleasantly diverting romance. It's also occasionally pretty funny, especially any time Awkwafina, who plays Rachel's college roommate and lasting friend, is onscreen. She provides much needed levity amongst the romance and understated if contrived family drama, and the movie would be much worse without her.

So would I recommend it, then? That's the question I struggle with most. Under different circumstances, based on the story alone, I would not regard Crazy Rich Asians as special enough to tell people it needs to be seen. Unfortunately, a lot is riding on this movie, thanks to the predictable shortsightedness of Hollywood dipshits. So: everyone should buy a ticket and see Crazy Rich Asians, so more, better movies featuring underrepresented communities will get made. And after that, I promise I won't ask you to see any more blandly ordinary romances. I mean, unless you're into those. In that case you'll love this movie.

I did find myself having a good time in spite of everything, after all.

Lifestyles of the Crazy Rich: Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding and Constance Wu put on their game faces as the women pit themselves against each other.

Overall: B

THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

There is just no way for me to respond to this film objectively. I usually feel like I have a sense of how other people will respond, but this one is just too personal. How presumably open-minded straight people will react to The Miseducation of Cameron Post is one thing. In my case it's more specific: Cameron Post and I have something in common, in that I was sent to a "Christian counselor" as a teenager to "fix" my sexuality. (The word "fix" was never used, of course, lest the guy come across as too judgmental. This all comes from love, right?)

I was never sent to an actual camp, at least -- I just had weekly sessions with a counselor when I was fifteen -- but it was the same basic concept. And here's a compelling idea that Cameron Post brings up: the people who run this place, telling all these actually perfectly normal kids that they are being consumed by sinful temptations -- they're all just doing the best they can with what they think is right. Director and co-writer Desiree Akhavan (based on a novel of the same name by Emily M. Danforth) presents them as well-rounded people willing to admit at times when they don't know what the right answer is. For me it begs the question: where was that guy who had been my "counselor" coming from, anyway? What were his struggles, his paths that led him to such a position in his life? It's 25 years later and I never thought to consider that.

And just to clarify, this is not a defense of people in those positions, truly fucking up kids on an emotional level. Teenagers are far more impressionable than they believe themselves to be, and Chloë Graze Moretz, who plays the title character, conveys this beautifully. She's dropped off at "God's Promise" in a state of confusion, and she spends some time actually attempting to tow the line, work the "process" away from her supposed temptation.

Watching all this was very difficult at times, wavering at regular intervals between feeling deep sadness for these kids and palpable fury at the adults purporting to care for them. And it should be stressed that, for the most part -- at least, with one notable exception -- this is not in response to particular melodrama or histrionics. Cameron Post and the friends she makes (particularly Sasha Lane's Jane and Forrest Goodluck's Adam) are all pretty mellow, all things considered. When an inevitable tragedy occurs, it is met with shocked confusion rather than hysterics, which is both unusual in film and a tad more realistic.

There is one scene, in which a fellow "disciple" as they gratingly get called, has a bit of a meltdown in a group therapy meeting. The young actor Owen Campbell does great with the material he's given, but the scene itself, in which he collapses in tears after reading a passage of scripture he says was favored by his deeply homophobic father, is a bit much.

That said, the performances all around are great. There's something vaguely insidious in air of serenity put on my Lydia March (Jennifer Ehle), who runs the camp with her "changed" brother, Reverend Rick (John Gallagher, Jr). Rick, for his part, only barely looks like he's convinced himself he's comfortable with himself.

For some of us, a line like Cameron saying "I'm tired of feeling disgusted with myself" really hits home -- a vivid memory of teen life. Only an adult can see the value of what Jane says back to that, though: "Maybe teenagers are just supposed to be disgusted with themselves."

It must be said that there is real delicacy in the presentation of this story. It's all the better for being directed by a woman, as the several scenes depicting sex are devoid of a male gaze. It's an impressive feat when the sex in a movie is never graphic but still manages to be frank. And when Cameron's boyfriend is shown catching her in the act of going at it with a female friend, it made me so uncomfortable I wanted to crawl inside my seat.

Ultimately, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a coming of age story. It's one with unusual specificity, though, and one in which that coming of age process is gradual and organic. The script occasionally presses at the seams of credibility, but for the most part, as someone who went through something similar, I can tell you the emotional stakes ring true. The key difference is that these are kids who realized at a much earlier age than some of us that adults don't necessarily have any idea what they're doing. One can only hope that results in this movie being illuminating to people.

Headed for a different brand of education.

Overall: B+

BlacKkKlansman

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

It can be somewhat frustrating when the tone of a movie trailer doesn't exactly match the tone of the movie. The trailer for BlacKkKlansman makes it look a lot more fun than it actually is. The film certainly has a healthy sprinkling of humor and levity, but the trailer condenses them in a way that sort of makes you expect something a lot more light-hearted, if still very serious in its satirical value.

The unique mystery with this film in particular is whether that was a choice simply made by the movie studios that financed it, as is pretty typical with more straightforward attempts at comedies that don't necessarily work -- or, if director Spike Lee was himself pointedly intentional about it. This is a man who has made a career out of pressing audience's faces against essential issues, and this is one way to get people into seats.

To say that there is a lot more going on in that vein with BlacKkKlansman would be an understatement. There is a tonal shift at the very end that forces you to think, Oh . . . shit. And then you walk out of the theatre a daze, having had to watch something you knew was coming, did not want to see, but knew it had to be seen. One could also argue that the way I just put that oversells it as a bait-and-switch. But it's really going to depend on who you are, and what your ancestral relationship is to America.

In any case, this is Spike Lee's best film in years; maybe even his most vital work since 1989's predictably divisive Do the Right Thing. Lee has had a bit of a whirlwind career since then in terms of quality, from going pretty low (Bamboozled) to surprisingly palatable mainstream (Inside Man) and back again, to exposing the breaking seams of American culture. That's what's going on in BlacKkKlansman.

And how many people even knew the true story this was based on? I certainly didn't. In 1979, the first black detective in the Colorado Springs police department infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. His name was Ron Stallworth (here played by John David Washington), and as he talks to the KKK over the phone, he enlists white cop Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to pose as him at actual meetings.

Spike Lee makes many interesting choices in the telling of this story, with varying levels of effectiveness. After the marketing leads you to expect a highly stylized comedy, the story begins at a surprisingly slow pace, following along with Stallworth as he's hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department and initially positioning him in the records department. It would be easy to assume Stallworth faced plenty of hostility from the rest of the department, but Lee focuses on just one blatantly racist cop making things difficult for him, likely both for the sake of economy in storytelling and at least some level of deference to white fragility.

There's a lot of story to tell here, after all, and at 135 minutes, BlacKkKlansman is fairly long. Lee even goes out of his way to make it feel not just like this was set in 1979, but like you're watching a movie made in 1979, with specific choices of cinematography (shot by Chayse Irvin, who also shot Beyoncé: Lemonade) and especially musical score (Terence Blanchard). It all feels very "1979 movie." This seems to be a bit of a thing this year; Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot used similar techniques, albeit in a wildly different context.

And relatively early on, just as you're beginning to wonder if the whole movie will be this slow, something interesting happens. There's a scene with a man who "may or may not be a former Black Panther" giving a speech to a local black audience about black pride, black power, and possible black revolution. It crackles with energy, and Lee takes several moments to cut back and forth from the speaker (Straight Outta Compton's Corey Hawkins, making such excellent use of his single scene that he must be noted) and random audience members' faces, imposed upon a black background, rapt with attention. It's an artistic marker of a turning point in a community.

Although I have some mixed feelings about BlacKkKlansman's effectiveness as a movie, there's no denying the many similar ways in which Lee interweaves different thematic elements with subtle artistic finesse. David Duke (Topher Grace, well restrained) is disarmingly polite, even when speaking directly to the black people he openly despises. And much is made of the Jewishness Flip Zimmerman barely acknowledges even to himself, hammering home that black Americans are hardly the only people here with, as Stallworth puts it, "skin in the game." (This would include myself: as Zimmerman poses as a bigot and makes liberal use of epithets, "faggot" is used as much as any other.)

I'm tempted to say Adam Driver gives the best performance in the movie, but hesitate due to how potentially problematic it is for a white critic to praise the one white star in a movie about black oppression. Who knows what conditioned biases I have that I don't even realize are there? There's nothing wrong with John David Washington's performance -- I just didn't find it as affecting. To be fair, it's also curious that Lee presents Stallworth with a cocky confidence, and Zimmerman as the man who does any true soul searching when confronted with a hatred of his kind never personally experienced.

Another thing I can't decide: is Spike Lee's presentation of Colorado redneck bigots caricature? There's the local KKK chapter president's idiot brother (Paul Walter Hauser, previously seen in I, Tonya, evidently getting typecast as dim-witted fat dipshits). And then there's the wife of the KKK chapter's most suspicious member, Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), who is a bizarrely even mix of bubbly homemaker and hateful bigot. She happily goes along with being tasked to place explosives in an attack on Black Student Union President Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier, luminescent), eager to please. By extension, I can't decide if their being rendered caricatures even matters. Or maybe it's deliberate, which would be subtly provocative in its own right. God knows non-white people (hell, anyone not white, male, and straight) have been presented as caricature since the dawn of popular entertainment.

This is all to say that BlacKkKlansman is not a perfect film, but it's that rare kind of film whose status as essential viewing is far from dependent on perfection. It's ripe for discussion and intellectual debate. Whether it's for its entertainment value or for facing hard truths -- both of which come in equal measure -- this is something people need to see.

Two guys with "skin in the game": The Stallworth Brothers.

Overall: B+

CHRISTOPHER ROBIN

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Special Effects: A-

I wonder what the crossover audience is between one movie and the other that clearly inspired it, from 27 years before? How many people watching Christopher Robin had the experience I had, where it consistently reminded me of Spielberg's 1991 blockbuster Hook? In that movie, the question was, "What if Peter Pan grew up?" In this one, it was "What happened when Christopher Robin grew up?"

What happens is arguably a mixed bag, but I opened up to it, and allowed myself to be charmed. Christopher Robin is getting very mixed reviews, and if you look at it with even a moderately critical eye, it's easy to see why. But here is a movie in which paying attention to such things misses the point. Audience scores are far higher than critical reviews, and if we're being totally honest, that's a far better barometer of what the likelihood is that you'll enjoy it.

Do you love Winnie the Pooh? The old books, the old Disney cartoons? Christopher Robin won't equal them, and I don't think any Pooh fan will say that it does. But pretty much any Pooh fan will still be endeared by it.

I certainly was. Granted, I am also a Ewan McGregor fan, and he plays the grown up Christopher Robin. Directed by Mike Forster, who also gave us 2004's Finding Neverland -- another Peter Pan connection -- Christopher Robin has an odd through line of wistfulness, bordering on melancholy, even as it has a clear message of appreciating the simple pleasures of childhood.

The broad beats of the story are very familiar. Christopher Robin works for a luggage company in post-World War II London and is so consumed by his workaholism that he neglects his wife Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and his daughter Madeline (Bronte Carmichael). It's slightly anachronistic that this child of the forties should be a young girl, being groomed by her father to emphasize the value of career. The choice not to make her a little boy feels less organic than focused grouped to appeal to 21st century audiences. Christopher's workplace is also surprisingly racially integrated, but, I suppose, so what? This is clearly a fantasy, after all.

And: it works. It did for me, anyway, in spite of the fact that in this stage of Christopher Robin's life, he's not the only person who can see and hear his walking and talking stuffed animals. Wherever Pooh and his friends go, which includes two different trips into the hustle and bustle of London, their personalities are not just a product of Christopher's imagination. Everyone can see and hear them, and they are at one point taught to "play nap time" just to keep people from freaking out.

In any case, a lot of Christopher Robin is . . . odd. What truly rises above it all is the cuddly, pure of heart personality of Winnie the Pooh (voiced by Jim Cummings, who also voices Tigger, in both cases having also done so for the cartoons since the late eighties). Pooh gets occasionally confused, but never hurt or angry. He takes nothing personally. He goes with the flow, and is thus a font of simple wisdom. He finds joy in a red balloon.

He reappears in Christopher Robin's life after thirty years, literally out of thin air outside his London flat, evidently just to snap him out of the distracted state of being a grown-up. When he converses with Christopher, even in this complex adult world, he is only capable of processing it in the simplest terms, often to hilarious effect. I laughed pretty hard several times. The same can be said of Tigger and Piglet (Nick Mohammed) and especially Eeyore (Brad Garrett, fantastic), and the rest of the gang. But Pooh is the heart of this movie, as is to be expected.

There is something slightly jarring about this being a live action film rather than animation, the stuffed animals all CGI effects as opposed to drawings. They look very much like real stuffed animals, in ways the cartoons and drawings we're all used to never quite did. But still they move and talk, and have unique personalities with which we've long been familiar.

The lesson, as always, is the importance of play, and how gloomy life becomes when deprived of it. None of this is new. But I was taken by the fish-out-of-water story of Pooh and his stuffed buddies navigating the big city with a little girl eager to please her father. The script remains the weakest link in Christopher Robin, which is unfortunate given that's the most important part, but here the performances make up for a lot. The charms offered by these stuffed animal characters are plentiful enough to render the wildly overdone plot inessential. Spending a couple of hours just hanging out with these guys is enough.

Hey Pooh, I think I'm tripping.

Overall: B

DON'T WORRY, HE WON'T GET FAR ON FOOT

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

How is it I have never heard of cartoonist John Callahan? Thanks to director Gus Van Sant, and Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Callahan in Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, I now must seek out his published works.

Incidentally, he was a wheelchair user. He was also a massive alcoholic. These two things are very related. Don't Worry is quasi-narrated by Callahan, as the editing shifts between him telling the story at both an AA group meeting and as a guest speaker in a lecture hall. Van Sant takes a bit of time with this, to build up to the accident, which itself is actually never seen onscreen. Instead, there's a fleeting glimpse of its aftermath at one point in the story; a brief description at another.

Both insanely drunk, Callahan and his friend Dexter (Jack Black, always underrated) ran their car into a light post at 90 mph. Dexter, who was driving, walked away with a few scratches. Callahan didn't walk away at all, but rather found himself to be quadriplegic. This happened to him at the age of 21, although Van Sant never makes much effort to make that clear. No one visibly ages in this movie, not that it matters so much.

There's a lot that sets Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot apart from other movies. We could start with the title itself. It's a little cumbersome. It's also the caption for one of his best known cartoons. It is thus also appropriate as the title to his story, with its irreverence toward his own disability. Callahan's work drew many complaints from newspaper readers, but many disabled people related to his contempt for being condescended to or pitied.

Much of the story takes place in the early eighties, and Gus Van Sant doesn't just give this film a look and feel appropriate to the era. He adds a tone for good measure, even filmmaking techniques, which make it feel like a movie that was actually made at the time. Don't Worry thus exists slightly outside of time, with a perfectly cast group of supporting actors who don't look like anything out of Hollywood at all, but like real, regular people, in a variety of sizes and colors, even sexualities. A gay black man in Callahan's AA group fancies himself an "American poet" and shares one of his many pieces appreciating the penis.

Jonah Hill plays Donnie, AA sponsor to Callahan as well as all the others in the aforementioned group -- he calls them his "piglets" -- and it might be Hill's most impressive performance I've ever seen. The character being a gay man with HIV is almost incidental. Hill has lost some weight, here sports a beard and long blond hair, and Donnie is about as laid back as they come -- in virtually every expect, the opposite of what you tend to expect from Jonah Hill. And yet it feels totally natural, and Hill disappears in the part.

Evidently a lot of people like working with Gus Van Sant, who also wrote this screenplay, based on Callahan's memoir of the same name. Rooney Mara plays Annu, the volunteer who helps Callahan with his rehabilitation and eventually has a relationship of sorts with him. Amongst the AA group we find both Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth and Udo Kier, who some might recognize as the wedding planner from Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Portlandia's Carrie Brownstein shows up as Callahan's contact with the company that provides him disability benefits.

Most of the story in Don't Worry is simply that of an alcoholic struggling and quite often failing to stay sober, going through the 12 steps in the process. This honestly gets a little heavy handed at times, and there was at least one moment where a character breaking down in tears, I thought, strained credibility. That's no reflection on the performances, however, which are excellent all around, but especially those of Joaquin Phoenix and Jonah Hill.

This movie is most definitely a drama, not a comedy, but once Callahan starts getting interested in drawing cartoons, it provided a couple moments of big laughs. Gus Van Sant has an ability to create a tone that's difficult to pinpoint in some movies, and is comparatively straightforward in others. This movie falls into the former group, but on the whole, it works well.

John Callahan takes a break from zooming down sidewalks like a bat out of hell.

Overall: B+