Here's an interesting question: what happens when a screenwriter best known for big, dumb, loud, effects-laden genre films gets the chance to make the movie he really wants to make? That's exactly what happened to Alex Kurtzman; the co-writer of Transformers, Star Trek and Cowboys and Aliens is now the writer (with Robert Orci and Joey Lambert) and director of People Like Us, an intimate and beautiful film that is the exact polar opposite of the work for which he is best known.
The film, which is rated PG-13 for language and theme (young kids would be bored to tears by it anyway; the mature themes would fly right over their heads, but teens would get a lot out of it), is a character study of the sort that Hollywood used to make all the time back in the '70s; it feels very much like a film of that period, such as Ordinary People or Save the Tiger, Cinderella Liberty, or even Midnight Cowboy; we're going to spend a couple of hours with flawed and damaged people and see how they relate to each other. There are no explosions, no chases, no special effects (other than making Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Olivia Wilde look like ordinary average women), but the result is fascinating. The story is a bit more upbeat and hopeful than some of the predecessors I mentioned, and there is more humanity in any five minutes of it than in the entirety of several genre franchises.
Chris Pine plays Sam, a fast-talking wheeler-dealer of the sort played by Tom Cruise in Rain Man, but unlike that guy, Pine's character seems like a genuinely decent person; you believe that he is really sincere about the stuff he's selling. He's brash and cocky, but not looking to take advantage of anyone, so when a deal goes wrong and he finds himself on the business end of an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, you feel bad for him, especially when his boss offers to happily throw him under the bus if he can't arrange a bribe-by-barter to make the case go away. With all that hanging over his head, Sam has to go back to Los Angeles for his father's funeral, an event that he tries to get out of, creating a conflict with his girlfriend (Olivia Wilde, displaying some acting chops of her own). An icy reception from his grieving mother (Michelle Pfeiffer, amazing as always) is just the start of his miserable homecoming.
As if he didn't have enough on his plate, Sam's father has left some instructions with his lawyer; there is a bag containing $150,000 in cash, which Sam is to deliver to somebody named Josh at a certain address. Sam really needs that money, but his curiosity and basic decency win over and he investigates. He learns that Josh is the 11-year-old son of his previously-unknown half-sister, Frankie; it seems dad kept a woman on the side for a while, and now they all get to clean up the mess. Frankie (Elizabeth Banks, about as far removed from 30 Rock's Avery Jessup as it's possible to get) is a recovering alcoholic struggling to support her son and stay sober, a smart, funny, determined and resourceful woman who nonetheless has a lot of demons to contend with, not least of which is that her father was cut out of her life when she was very young. Sam and Frankie meet, Sam becomes a mentor to Josh, and the three come to terms with what it means to be part of a family.
That's all the plot you need to know; from there on out it's not about what happens, but how it happens and how they react to it. The cast is uniformly brilliant; I have absolutely no doubt that Banks and Pfeiffer will receive Academy Award nominations for their performances, and they are well-deserved. Banks is incredible; there is one little moment, for example, that is among the finest examples of nuanced acting I've ever seen; Frankie learns something unexpected, and a rush of emotions passes over her; we see everything she's feeling in that moment, and it all feels real and immediate and it nearly overwhelms her. It was an hour after the movie ended that I realized what a bravura performance those two seconds were. Michelle Pfeiffer turns in a similarly textured turn as the grieving widow who is resentful of her son's long absence, more resentful of her late husband's prolonged betrayal and more prolonged illness, and somehow makes us understand her point of view despite some very alienating confrontations. She's a courageous actress, not worried about being likeable and not worried about looking good; she plays the role looking the way a woman in her fifties would look after nursing a terminal cancer patient for over a year; she wears no makeup, and her careless wardrobe of sweatpants and frumpy cardigans tells the story of her recent past. Thank God she has had the good sense not to ruin her expressive face with Botox, collagen and scalpels. She looks good, but more importantly, she looks real.
Michael Hall D'Addario, the kid who plays Josh, does a great job as well; the role calls for the kind of smart-mouth genius that Hollywood loves, but he injects genuine good humor, a little wry fatalism and an underlying general frustration into the part, giving us a kid who, again, seems real. This is a defining note in the movie; apart from one fairly obvious plot contrivance that drags on for too long, everything feels real. All the cheats and shortcuts that lesser movies use to avoid confronting reality are absent here; there is no magic solution to anyone's problems, no instant fix to let everyone off the hook, no sudden epiphany that causes a dramatic transformation in the hero or villain; in fact, there's no hero or villain, just people. People like us. These messed-up people are stuck having to deal with each other and their pasts and futures. And we're left hoping they can make it all work out.
One of the reasons People Like Us seems real is that it's based on reality. Alex Kurtzman had the experience of having a woman walk up to him at a party and introduce herself by saying "I'm your sister." He knew that his father had been married before, but years and geography prevented him from ever meeting his half-sister until he was an adult. When he told this story to his writing partner, Robert Orci, Orci responded by telling Kurtzman about an acquaintance who one day discovered that her father had a second secret family. They combined these two stories into one and set to work on the script. They brought in their friend Jody Lambert as co-writer; Lambert's father, Dennis Lambert, had been a very prominent songwriter and producer in the music industry before he quit to devote himself to his family, becoming a real estate agent in Florida. He contributed an inside view of the music business to the script, and all of the memorabilia and photos seen in the movie came from his collection, lending authenticity to those scenes.
My wife and I spent over an hour discussing the movie afterwards, and not in the usual "but why did he..." kind of plot-dissection that usually occurs; our discussion alternated between the ways that people's short-sighted and fearful choices come back to bite them and their families, the way people cope with (or don't) the shopping bag full of crazy that their messed-up families hand them, and the details of the actors' spectacular performances. Everyone, from Jon Favreau as the shady boss to Mark Duplass as Frankie's doofy neighbor, is at the top of their game, with Chris Pine showing a range that nobody watching his Captain Kirk could ever have guessed at. He has the makings of a movie star, but more importantly, he could in time be one of his generation's great actors.
There are times when, as a parent of grown children, I winced at some of what was said and done; there were other times when as the son of a flawed and damaged alcoholic father, I really felt for what Sam and Frankie were handed to deal with; other times, I found myself nodding with Josh, remembering how difficult life and school could be as an unpopular and bullied 11-year-old who insists on facing life on his own terms. I highly recommend People Like Us, and I hope it makes so much money that Kurtzman, Orci and Lambert can continue making movies that matter. I like giant robots and spaceships and laser guns as much as any geek, but there are plenty of people who can make those movies. What Kurtzman, Orci and Lambert have done is Art, Truth and Beauty, and that needs to be encouraged.
