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Family, corporate menaces and violence

Enron(PG-13)

If there were ever a corporation that made Wal-Mart look positively saintly, it is Enron.

Filmmaker Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room shows how Enron became such a successful corporation and how its top executives garnered as much of the profit that came from that success as possible. The film is a brilliant, enraging chronicle of the rise and fall of the corporation. Gibney's portrayal of Enron is easy to follow, full of satirical knockout punches and engrossing anecdotes.

In the film, executives Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andy Fastow (Lay and Skilling are currently on trial) pull every kind of economic trick known to man in order to deceive the public and drive up stock prices. It works brilliantly, as Enron stock rises to over $90 a share and the company gains national attention with a doomed business plan.

Even Enron's employees refuse to look into how the company is doing business. In fact, they seem to emulate their executives' ethics. In one memorable scene, two Enron traders observe, with greedy delight, raging fires in the California desert, knowing that these natural disasters will ultimately pad their back pockets. ("Burn, baby burn!" one says in a phone conversation.) They buy into their employer's shoddy morals and work toward an even shoddier result: thousands of unemployed workers, left with stock options worth nothing and non-existent retirement plans.

Don't worry though. Lay, Skilling and Fastow all got out of the stock market in plenty of time to save their families. Feel better?

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is more than just that typical Wednesday night forum documentary. It's not just another film expounding upon the evils of corporations. It'll leave many Grinnellians enraged, educated and vindicated in their distrust of capitalism.

-reviewed by Mark Japinga

A History of Violence (R)

Many of us have passed a car wreck and caught ourselves slowing down to survey the damage. In an attempt to describe this primal fascination, director David Cronenberg would show us A History of Violence and all its dark depictions of brutality and carnage.

The film explores the relationship between people and violence. The story follows Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), a man whose dark past is revealed to his unsuspecting family after a freak incident. The effect this violence has on the family is massive, and director David Cronenberg, known for dark films such as Crash, Naked Lunch and eXistenZ, does what he does best, crafting the film into a hypnotically dark masterpiece.

Less extravagant than most of Cronenberg's previous films, A History of Violence is a blunt and brutal piece. In an early scene of violence, a man is shot in the face (no, not by Dick Cheney). With any other director, the violence would be hinted at but never shown, but since this is a Cronenberg film, we are subjected to the image of a man shot through the mouth, pathetically trying to breath in a pool of his own blood. The scene is a classic example of Cronenberg's perverse style.

The film's dichotomy of before the violence and after the violence is probably best exemplified in the film's two sex scenes. The first scene is a playful role-playing encounter between Tom and his wife Edie (Maria Bello) in which she has dressed in her high school cheerleader uniform and whispers in her husband's ear, "Quiet or you'll wake my parents." But in Tom and Edie's second sex scene, it is apparent that the emergence of violence has had an effect on their relationship. Gone is the tenderness of a quiet room, a bed and a cheerleader outfit. The scene erupts in pure, brutal passion and animal lust on a wooden staircase. The bruises that we see later on Bello's back are the actual bruises that she got from filming this scene. (Someone get the lady an award or something, at least an ice pack!)

Too risky to receive nominations for any Academy Awards other than for adapted screenplay, this movie has been overlooked by the Hollywood award system. Industry be damned, this film is easily better than two of the films nominated for best picture, and Cronenberg really deserved credit for his excellent direction. For a film that emulates the perverse feeling of witnessing a scene of destruction, A History of Violence is right on target and should be viewed by all who are not disturbed by the subject matter.

-reviewed by Tony DalPra

Junebug (R)

Junebug is reality's answer to Hollywood's take on the family drama. This film, about North meeting South and family meeting family, manages to grasp the richly textured and often messy nature of true familial relationships without having to resort to overwrought melodrama.

Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) is a cosmopolitan art gallery owner who, after a whirlwind romance, marries George (Alessandro Nivola), a transplanted Southerner. She deals in "outsider" folk art and is interested in representing an eccentric artist named David Ward (Frank Hoyt Taylor). Coincidentally, George's family lives only a half-hour away from David's home in North Carolina, so six months after their wedding, Madeleine and George head to the South for three days in order to secure David's art and meet George's family for the first time.

George's decidedly middle-class family consists of Peg (Celia Weston), the skeptical matriarch; Eugene (Scott Wilson), his reserved but kindly father; his brother Johnny (Benjamin McKenzie, even more silent and brooding than his famous character on The O.C.) and his pregnant sister-in-law Ashley (Amy Adams, in an Oscar-nominated performance). Each member deals with the tension caused by Madeleine's urban sophistication and her new place in the family, and it is these relationships that provide substance to the film.

To describe any more of the plot would do the film an injustice because, with the exception of one traumatic event, little happens. Nonetheless, this is still a great film. Junebug's beauty lies not in its complexity or narrative force, but rather in its ability to subtlety explore emotional dynamics. First-time director Phil Morrison ably provides the authenticity this exploration requires by utilizing the mundane. Morrison largely avoids overly dramatic moments and instead focuses on everyday interaction. In his hands even a screwdriver can be a conduit for understanding. This style requires patience. Like life, Junebug is rarely explicit.

Although occasionally Junebug borders on the edge of tedium, its authentic feel and emotional resonance results in a film far greater than the sum of its parts.

-reviewed by David Coombs

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