The Square
It would be nice to say we need another movie about a small group of working class types all gritty and overflowing with vernacular realism as they get involved in a crime that gets the better of them. "The Square" tries to use this common situation and lift it into something we want to watch, and it has the odds against them from the get-go.
Put another way--a movie along these lines that does really rise above the expected and penetrate the personalities and the facts might be the movie of the year. Why not? It's not that the material is doomed, but that the things that really matter in a movie--like the writing, the acting, the filming--all have to be spot on and special to make it click. That simply doesn't happen here. As much as you want it to work, you see little plot tricks, small (or large) problems with the script, and decent but routine camera-work and editing bring it crashing down. And the story, because it is so "usual" in movie terms, doesn't rescue thing.
That's an analysis that avoids the plot, which is about two concurrent money scams. One is apparently very criminal and dangerous, probably drug related, and a bag of money is hidden in the attic. The other is a kickback on a construction job. They connect because the wife of the bag-o-money guy is having an affair with the kickback construction supervisor. After lots of dramatics, some of it nicely done but poorly integrated (I like the picnic scene, which is sixty seconds of good shooting and smart editing), the key protagonists have one final showdown. And a stray bullet makes a mockery of the realism of the rest of it (smack in the forehead).
Maybe there is no protagonist. Can you have a movie with three antagonists? It's hard to quite identify with anyone, even the main man running the construction project. This is partly acting and writing, but it's partly just the slightly clunky gluing together of all the parts. The milieu is interesting, the problem dramatic (if a little too obviously sensational), and the intentions sterling. It just doesn't pull together all around. I wish.
It would be nice to say we need another movie about a small group of working class types all gritty and overflowing with vernacular realism as they get involved in a crime that gets the better of them. "The Square" tries to use this common situation and lift it into something we want to watch, and it has the odds against them from the get-go.
Put another way--a movie along these lines that does really rise above the expected and penetrate the personalities and the facts might be the movie of the year. Why not? It's not that the material is doomed, but that the things that really matter in a movie--like the writing, the acting, the filming--all have to be spot on and special to make it click. That simply doesn't happen here. As much as you want it to work, you see little plot tricks, small (or large) problems with the script, and decent but routine camera-work and editing bring it crashing down. And the story, because it is so "usual" in movie terms, doesn't rescue thing.
That's an analysis that avoids the plot, which is about two concurrent money scams. One is apparently very criminal and dangerous, probably drug related, and a bag of money is hidden in the attic. The other is a kickback on a construction job. They connect because the wife of the bag-o-money guy is having an affair with the kickback construction supervisor. After lots of dramatics, some of it nicely done but poorly integrated (I like the picnic scene, which is sixty seconds of good shooting and smart editing), the key protagonists have one final showdown. And a stray bullet makes a mockery of the realism of the rest of it (smack in the forehead).
Maybe there is no protagonist. Can you have a movie with three antagonists? It's hard to quite identify with anyone, even the main man running the construction project. This is partly acting and writing, but it's partly just the slightly clunky gluing together of all the parts. The milieu is interesting, the problem dramatic (if a little too obviously sensational), and the intentions sterling. It just doesn't pull together all around. I wish.