Movie of the Week: Twisters

Plus: Charlie Wilson's War and 25th Hour

Twisters

No Barbenheimer, no problem; Joseph Kosinski, already legendary in my book for his work on Top Gun: Maverick, is back with another triumphant story of intrepid, overmatched humans using technology to overcome an unnamed enemy. Kosinski’s Manichean writing is the perfect match for this material. The dark swirling menace of the Twisters meets its match in the white-clad heroine Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her fleet of white Dodge Grand Caravans, plus an assist from outlaw tornado wrangler Tyler Owens (Glenn Powell), whose signature white cowboy hat is rarely askew.

Twister was an ensemble movie, so was Top Gun: Maverick, so it only makes sense that there are some colorful characters on the periphery. It’s Owens who has them in tow. He is a Content Creator; an Ice Poseidon-type who streams his adventures alongside hippie assistant/cinematographer Boone (Brandon Perea), drone operator Lilly (Sasha Lane, wearing her costume from How to Blow Up a Pipeline), plus support staff Dani (Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brien) and Dexter (Tunde Adebimpe[!]). They’re not quite the disheveled, lovable crew from Twister, but they’re close. So deep is Kosinski buried into popular psyche that people audibly groaned in the theater when Owens is introduced as a YouTuber. Mr. Beast can cure blindness in 10,000 more people and still not reverse the public perception of his colleagues.  

Initially Kate is aligned against Tyler. She has cast her lots with scientist Javi (Anthony Ramos), with whom she survived a dangerous tornado which claimed the lives of their three closest friends. Javi is using military technology to create 3D models of tornados, which can be used to study their funnels. Kate believes that tornados can be dissipated instantly by releasing barrels full of diaper polymers inside of them. I must have missed the overlap between their missions because it sounds flimsy on paper. Compounding the problem is that Edgar-Jones has no chemistry with Ramos. Fortunately, Powell’s otherworldly charisma quickly drives a wedge between the two.

What is there to say about Glen Powell other than the blatantly obvious? This guy is a star. He’s singlehandedly, with apologies to the titular character, carrying a British tv star and the 7^th-billed guy from Hamilton to summer glory, equally convincing as a romantic lead and action hero who crawls prone on the ground through gales of wind to save a guy from the wrath of a tornado. His background recalls McConaughey, another brainy guy from U-T whose ripped physique could be weaponized by directors eager to smuggle depth into archetypal characters. The reveal that Tyler Owens, tornado wrangler, studied as a meteorologist is one of the only surprising reveals in Twisters; Powell’s ability to deliver technical lines about the formation of funnel clouds, done in a creative cross-cut scene that overlaps his dialogue with Edgar-Jones’, is perhaps more startling.  

Twisters is a movie that is eager to play to its strengths. That means a whole lot of Powell and a whole lot of tornados. Director Lee Isaac Chung, called up from the indie league, draws on throwback action sequences to keep the tension high. This means hands slipping off ledges, extreme close-ups of bolts gradually coming undone, flying debris landing so close to the protagonists, a man running into the airport to convince the woman he loves to stay with him. At one point, Powell is literally tied to train tracks. The film’s prologue feints at Twisters as a run-of-the-mill ‘recovering from trauma’ movie with precious few thrilling moments. Chung is wise to play the hits, though the overly-literal country music soundtrack could have stayed in the cutting room.

Though it’s hard to distinguish one tornado from another, Chung’s presentation of the threats is innovative. The scariest twister is the unseen one. Taking notes from Jaws, danger at a rodeo is communicated through mobs of people running through a parking lot, sirens wailing, hail pounding the pavement. “9 times out of 10 it’s a false alarm” says a bystander shortly before being sucked away. Though just as likely to show the path of destruction blazed by an F5 as to show the storm itself, Chung still strikes visual gold when a funnel passes over an oil refinery, spitting flames across the screen.

For me, though, a disaster movie will always die by its editing. If characters are imperiled for too long, if the final threat moves too slowly, if the issue is solved too hastily, I’m leaving with a bad taste in my mouth. Terilyn Shropshire, who put together some dynamic action sequences in 2022’s The Woman King, has a knack for showing just enough to ratchet up the tension without overplaying the moment. She moves from crowds to character close-ups to wide shots of flying debris with keen instinct, always keeping the threat in mind without lingering on it for too long. By the end, I was gripping to my chair just as tight as the characters who were sheltering from the winds.

Charlie Wilson’s War

If you are Aaron Sorkin at your best, you are probably going to write enough quality lines to give every one of your principals a chance at an Emmy or an Oscar. If you are Aaron Sorkin at your worst, as you were in your Op-Ed that ran this weekend and advocated for the Democrats to nominate Mitt Romney to replace Joe Biden as the 2024 nominee, you are going to equivocate, offer mealy-mouthed paeans to your ideological opponents, and probably offer up just enough good lines to get somebody nominated for an award. Just as Sorkin was unable to meet the moment in the face of a President resigning, so too did he struggle with the Iraq War, which Charlie Wilson’s War tries and fails to comment upon.

“But Nathan, Charlie Wilson’s War is about the Cold War.” Indeed it is. Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is a hard-partying Representative with no discernible legislative ability. His biggest assets in Washington are his direct line to ultra-wealthy donor Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts, buried under a hideous wig), his seat on the Foreign Operations sub-committee, and his willingness to trade favors for votes. His daily life consists of little more than sexually harassing his interns, one of whom is named “Jailbait,” while drinking scotch from a coffee mug. An unlikely hero, to say the least, especially since he is subject to a drug bust investigation undertaken by one of history’s great losers, Rudolph Giuliani.

Compromised by his pending arrest and poor reputation, Wilson has little choice but to take marching orders from Herring, whose money is the only thing keeping him in power. Her objective: fund a proxy war in Afghanistan on behalf of all Christian people to defeat the Godless Communists, who have recently invaded the area and are mowing people down indiscriminately with their armored helicopters. Wilson, with his plum committee seat, has the authority to do exactly that. With the assistance of CIA asset Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Wilson enlists Israel, Pakistan and his buddy Doc Long to unite and fight the evil Communists.

There aren’t enough good lines in this movie for Sorkin to spread around, but he does have the good sense to give all of them to Hoffman. Delivered mostly in a droll monotone, Hoffman underplays Sorkin’s patter, stretching out his words, moving at his own pace while the world races around him. In the scene where Gust meets Wilson, Hanks is a bundle of nerves, running back and forth across the room, yelling, whispering, while Hoffman is the very definition of blasé, rushing through punchlines without moving a muscle.

But this is not the only weapon in his arsenal. He gets to use some of his physical menace that remains from his days as a youth wrestler to break a window in his introduction scene and to intimidate Wilson after the operation balloons out of control. In both cases, Hoffman is able to bend the movie around him; his center of gravity pulls even the camera, which is active except when recording his scenes, into his orbit. It is Hoffman’s physicality, not the disclaimer, that makes me believe that this true story went off without a hitch.

For most of its runtime, Charlie Wilson’s War could be mistaken for a breezy comedy. Sorkin mines all sorts of unlikely scenarios—including but not limited to an arms deal-- for laughs and Hanks, playing against type, is happy to play along. Only after the budget for operations in Afghanistan balloons to a billion dollars do affairs turn serious. Hoffman intones gravely the dangers of withdrawing money without sticking around to rebuild the destruction that has been wrought. He invokes a proverb about the butterfly effect, warning about the unforeseen consequences of their actions: “We’ll see…” becomes the winking catchphrase of the third act.

Of course we have the benefit of hindsight—the Mujahadeen armed by Charlie Wilson eventually became the Taliban who attacked America which led to yet another dramatic increase in defense spending. At the time, the US government was deciding how to force democracy on another country which didn’t wish for intervention. Sorkin all-but appears on screen to wink at us; don’t you see the connection? It would be hard not to.

Unfortunately, recognizing the similarities doesn’t give Sorkin any better sense of the costs of it all. He ends the film by showing a quote from Wilson: “They were glorious and they changed the world, then we fucked up the end game.” To Sorkin, the ends would have justified the means if the government had just stuck around to repair infrastructure. How someone can study the history of the region, analyze the motivation of Herring and walk away with that conclusion explains why Charlie Wilson’s War is so unsatisfying. In its quest to invent a Great American out of thin air, it only inadvertently reveals our shortcomings.

25th Hour

I don’t remember 9/11. I was young, so young I had never heard of the Twin Towers. Nor could I understand why, a couple days later, we stood silently holding hands in a field while my teacher rang a bell. My sister says she remembers the day clearly, even though she was just five years old, much too young for our parents to let her watch the footage. I mention this because most of 25^th Hour is based on a mood, a unique malaise and fatalistic one that hung in the air while debris was still being scraped from Ground Zero. I cannot access that feeling, but watching 25^th Hour gave me phantom pangs, a nagging feeling that I had experienced the tragedy in an intangible way, the same ones my sister must feel.

However, this itch only nagged at me intermittently, as the script, from future Game of Thrones scribe David Benioff, is borderline ineffective. There’s a lot to chew on here, with Ed Norton, whose character Monty Brogan is about to serve seven years for drug possession, competing for screen time with his girlfriend who might have reported him to the cops (Rosario Dawson) a hotshot Wall Street trader (Barry Pepper, who runs away with the movie), a teacher harboring an illicit crush (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and his father (Brian Cox), a bar owner in Staten Island. But, like a well-done steak, there’s not a lot of flavor, no matter how many bites you take.  

Try as he might, Benioff can’t quite weave these disparate threads together. Monty’s conversations with each of his acquaintances reveal a lot about their lives without providing any momentum for the film. There’s a countdown element to the film which never gives it much urgency, no matter how often Monty mentions his plight. Norton moves with the disgruntled gait of a Sunday shopper, unwilling to suggest that he’s bothered by his pending trip up the river. A flashback to Monty’s arrest in his apartment using a subtle match cut further disrupts the film’s rhythm. Not to mention, aside from the inaugural appearance of Wendell Pierce’s signature “Sheeeiiiit” intonation, it’s boilerplate procedural stuff.

Spike Lee does his best with what he’s handed. For my money, there’s not a director in the world who can make New York City looks as good as he does. From the sunrise over the East River to the fluorescent blue lamps that illuminate the club after dark, Lee catches the City in its best light. The film’s centerpiece monologue, in which Monty rants about each of the Five Boroughs, lets Lee show off pristine Staten Island lawns and grimy uptown basketball courts with golden hour light passing through the chain link fence. At a time when surely the city felt duller, Rodrigo Prieto’s photography is a thrilling reminder of the vitality of the streets.

Prieto does just as well when pulled away from New York. In the film’s affecting finale, Cox fantasizes about Monty’s life if he went on the lam. They could take a road trip together, find him a job that pays cash in a desert town because “everyone should see the desert before they die.” I’ll be damned if Lee and Prieto don’t make the scrubby desert sand look just as nice as the images of Manhattan which flash by in montage while Cox lets his mind wander. The merit of this movie can be distilled to this scene. The perfectly selected stills, the spin on the ‘American family,’ the weariness of Cox’s voice, all made possible by Benioff’s thorny script. 25^th Hour is the City: it’s not always pretty, there are bad times to weather, but sometimes, when you catch it the right way, it’s beautiful.