Two films that offer a pleasing sense of scale, humor, and style: “Pinball: The Man Who Saved The Game” and “Operation Fortune.”
One of the limiting facets of modern American movies is their insistence on their importance. “Saving the world” is a meaningless trope in franchise tentpoles, while political platitudes glut movies looking to win awards. One often wonders where to go to simply encounter a story made with an eye toward entertainment and with common sense. I suspect this void explains the reliable popularity of the horror genre and more character-driven-than-usual sequels like “Creed III.” This week, however, offers two pleasant surprises, two films with a pleasing sense of scale, humor, and style.
“Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game” is technically a biopic, but that word—rich in associations with bloated speeches and overacting—shortchanges the pleasure the film offers. More precisely, it’s a semi-parody of biopics that takes its characters seriously. When a scene is about to lapse into sentimentality, someone will break the fourth wall and call it out and then another more ordinary scene will run in its place. A character suggests the tone for the film be set by playing John Lennon’s “Imagine” on the soundtrack only to be told that that song is too slow and expensive. A little of this meta winking can go a long way, and the sibling writer-directors, Austin and Meredith Bragg, know that. A few jokes of this sort are offered up to keep things bouncy without turning the film smug in the process.
The film’s subject is consciously marginal at first glance, though certain resonances may hit you on the rebound. Roger Sharpe is a pinball fanatic who played a small role, by his own admission, in legalizing the game in New York City in the 1970s. “Pinball” assumes that you probably didn’t know that, yes, this harmless diversion was once outlawed in many major American cities for supposedly being a gateway activity for children’s gambling as well as an income stream for the mob. (This gnarly bit of Americana also figures into Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza.”) This law is absurd, illustrative of politicians’ addiction to causes that are symbolic rather than useful, and Sharpe quickly gathers an expertise in pinball that renders him valuable to its legalization.
Twenty-five-year-old Sharpe is played in the ‘70s timeline by Mike Faist, and an older, modern-day Sharpe is played by Dennis Boutsikaris in faux-docudramatic interviews. Older Sharpe, growing feisty, begins to insert himself into the ‘70s flashbacks to comment on the staged proceedings. Typical of “Pinball,” the actors’ height discrepancy—Faist is taller—is acknowledged in a joke, though the characters are united by a great handlebar moustache that embodies Sharpe’s eccentricities and vulnerability. This is a guy who needs to be liked, and, with his sense of humor and intelligence, is good at achieving that aim. But there’s a weight in each actor’s characterization that prevents Sharpe from becoming an imp. Faist’s, well, sharp performance embodies the man’s youthful energy and urgency and loneliness, while Boutsikaris, a secret weapon on the TV show “Better Call Saul,” is somehow wistfully prickly.
Wanting to be a writer and having no clue how to go about it—with several unfinished novels under his belt— young Sharpe rediscovers a soothing distraction from his college days. In New York City amidst the wreckage of a failed marriage and business, Sharpe drifts into an adult bookstore for the illegal pinball machine. The Braggs don’t overdue the poignancy of these scenes. Amidst feelings of failure and the maddening subjectivity of writing, pinball is tactile. Either you’re good or you’re not, and the Braggs’ script includes evocative specificities as to how the machines work, and crisp, funny dialogue. Applying for a job at Gentlemen’s Quarterly, soon to be known as GQ, Sharpe meets and begins to tentatively romance Ellen (Crystal Reed) and bond with her 10-year-old-ish son, Seth (Christopher Convery). Soon, Sharpe’s interest in pinball leads toward a book that he can finish, and the new project and new domestic life give him direction. It all happens rather quietly, just as how the lucky look back to discover on certain days that, “oh shit, things worked out.”
The Braggs take palpable joy in watching Sharpe accidentally figure out who he is, treating his actualization with uncommon delicacy. Sharpe’s first kiss with Ellen is among the finest I’ve seen in a movie in some time. The Braggs emphasize Sharpe and Ellen touching each other’s cheeks, laughing, experiencing one another—it’s not just a plot point to be gotten over with. The scenes at GQ are defined by vivid comic types, from the no-nonsense editor to the flamboyant style maestro to the quiet young woman who keeps the trains running on time, yet there’s political texture here too, as these “out” types are shrewdly trying to write a prototypically straight magazine in a time of cultural upheaval. Sharpe’s blossoming familial situation with Seth is idealized … but it connects. Seth is not a polished movie kid—his vulnerability and decency are moving, and he has natural rapport with Sharpe. Soon, the family falls into the collaborative rhythms that are the dream of some writers. Sharpe writes, Ellen types, and keeps him tethered to reality, and Seth is a companion and sounding board.
The meta self-consciousness, the story of an underdog finding fringe success, the worn, vibrantly artisanal imagery, the celebration of the joys of unlikely family foundations—all these qualities bring to mind a movie about comic book writer Harvey Pekar, “American Splendor” from 2003. “Pinball” isn’t on the same level of “American Splendor,” which had a hilarious, caustic intensity that felt like a true clearing of the air among yuppie pop cultural bullshit. Try as it might, “Pinball” still verges on the sleight, though that’s part of its appeal. It’s humble.
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The slide that the James Bond movies took into relentless, fashionable, repetitive, dulling misery—Bond, once gloriously coarse and self-serving, must suffer for our newly enlightened, politically correct delectation—left an opening in the pop cultural fabric. That opening has most prominently been filled by the “Mission: Impossible” movies, which have evolved from flavor-of-the-week blockbusters into sleek, wonderfully preposterous stunt-and-travel extravaganzas. Guy Ritchie is occasionally doing his part as well, first with “The Man from U.N.C.LE.” and now with “Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre.”
As time passes, I’m developing a soft spot for Ritchie’s movies. He’s been doing “lads in trouble” crime fests so often for so long that at some point he unexpectedly became a classicist. Ritchie’s last picture before this one, “Wrath of Man,” was a terrific piece of work, a blend of hard-boiled pulp and elaborate action thriller with a sense of texture and propulsion that would shame most contemporary directors, hack and auteur alike. “Operation Fortune” isn’t that good, but it’s an enjoyable piece of malarkey with lush, exotic vistas, obscene displays of wealth, and a variety of skillfully executed rounds of “fight the bad guy” and “hunt the MacGuffin.”
What sets “Operation Fortune” apart from aspiring blockbusters, summer division, is its sense of its own triviality. Not in the hypocritical, get-of-jail-free card way that Marvel employs, but more in the spirit of putting on a knockabout show. This used to be common of blockbusters before multiverse sensibility set in. Think of all the casually insane, disposable, are-what-they-are action movies that littered cinemas in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Ritchie works on large scales these days, but he has not lost his sense of humor, which is pivotal to making “Operation Fortune” work.
The plot is “Mission: Impossible,” and there’s no need to elaborate further. Jason Statham is an un-stoppable Tom Cruise type without Cruise’s need to please. Statham’s laconic vibe—Steve McQueen meets soccer hooligan meets runway model—has always set him apart from everyone else in the modern cinematic stud department, and no one taps it like Ritchie. Casting Aubrey Plaza as a tech dweeb is also smart, as she has an ability to take the piss out of the macho spy genre without turning shrill. Her role here, as the lone and gorgeous woman amongst a variety of male jackals and lunkheads, isn’t utilized self-righteously, and Plaza’s cuckoo line readings mesh rather becomingly with Statham’s authority.
The other reason to see “Operation Fortune” is Hugh Grant. I’m not sure what he’s playing here exactly, but I think he’s mixing a parody of Michael Caine’s cockney accent with his own finely honed sense of self-absorption. Ever since “Bridget Jones’ Diary” and “About a Boy” freed Grant from awkward romantic roles, he has been one of the movies’ funniest cads. Here, he’s a billionaire buying or selling something that could imperil the world, etc., and Grant has the effrontery to make the character likable without soft-pedaling his hunger for wealth and women. He takes a shine to Plaza—who wouldn’t?—allowing the two actors to play tennis with their personas, his old-guard white-collar possessiveness versus her hipster anarchy. I’d call it a draw. This is how to deflate Bond-flavored stereotypes without coming off as a scold or a prude.
“Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game” and “Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre” are both currently available in theaters and on VOD.