WAR DOGS

TWO NOT SO GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS

            Based on actual people and events, War Dogs tells a most unusual story of two young dopes who more or less fall into the highly profitable international arms trade.  Not surprisingly, the movie provides a salutary lesson in greed, but also shows something of the actual wheeling and dealing in that tricky and often dangerous business.  As both life and the movies teach us, easy  pickings, sure things, and double crossing often lead to disaster, which is what happens when a couple of moral morons involve themselves with guns and find themselves playing with the big boys in a game they don’t fully comprehend. 

            The two friends in War Dogs, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who knew each other in their adolescent years, reconnect when Efraim returns to Florida, partially bankrolled by his uncle (Kevin Pollak), full of ambitions to make a killing in the arms business. He enlists his friend and the two of them embark on their first big deal, attempting to supply an American colonel in Iraq with a truckload of Beretta pistols (why the colonel must acquire the weapons on his own remains a mystery).  The job turns out to be complicated and exceedingly dangerous, involving crossing several borders in the Middle East and surviving an attack from the Taliban.

            As they sink deeper or perhaps rise higher into their new business, the partners accumulate the usual trappings of wealth in today’s America—expensive cars, fancy apartments, a plenitude of drugs.  They also find themselves connected to some heavy hitters, who actually perform a little hitting on Packouz.  Ultimately they land in some difficult territory, partly as a result of diving in over their heads and partly as a result of Efraim’s penchant for double crossing

and back stabbing.  When he stiffs an Albanian partner in a particularly intricate scheme, he and his partner become the target of an FBI investigation.

            In starring Jonah Hill, the director, Todd Phillips capitalizes on some of his work in The Wolf of Wall Street as a crooked, greedy, drug-addled wheeler dealer.  In War Dogs he adds to that image through adding a good deal of plain nastiness and a sort of generalized vulgarity to all his words and actions.  His employs his corpulence, his obnoxious mannerisms, his steady line of profane bluster to good effect, so much so that Miles Teller, though nominally the protagonist and occasional narrator, fades away when they occupy the same scene.  For better or worse, Hill dominates the picture, which generally grows less interesting when he’s absent.  A fascinating story in itself, War Dogs loses much of its appeal in its failure to balance its violence and tension with its sometimes outrageous comedy, summed up perfectly in Jonah Hill’s character.

INDIGNATION

INDIGNATION

          Although he has officially retired from writing—and who could blame him, it’s a tough racket, after all, and he’s had a good run—Philip Roth can still enjoy the lucrative benefits of film adaptation.  The latest Roth novel to make it to the screen, Indignation, actually seems a rather odd choice.  (Frankly, though I consider myself well-read and have read most of Roth’s novels, I have never even heard of this one.)  The new movie uses some material familiar to any reader of his works—Jewish American domestic life, anti-Semitism, the difficulty of assimilation , sexual initiation, and in this case, the fish-out-of-water situation of a Jewish student from New Jersey attending a deeply Protestant college in Ohio.

          The student, Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), the son of a kosher butcher, attends the wonderfully named Winesburg College in Ohio, where he encounters a number of new experiences, all of which turn out badly.  An excellent student and captain of his high school baseball team, Marcus wants only to study and learn, ambitions constantly thwarted by a series of personal and academic obstacles.   He resents the compulsory chapel attendance, the efforts of the Jewish fraternity to pledge him, and his two obnoxious roommates.  Although he captained his high school baseball team, he even refuses to try out for the Winesburgers. 

          When Marcus meets a young woman named Olivia (Sarah Gadon), his troubles and confusions compound.  On their first date, she provides him with the sort of sexual thrill freshmen in the 1950s can only dream about, which causes him to react in some unpredictable ways, and leads to a series of other problems.  His innocence in a way obstructs his understanding of whatever relationship could develop, and he fails to comprehend Olivia’s own difficulties.

          The real meat of the picture, oddly, consists of a series of dialogues between Marcus and the dean of the college (Tracy Letts), a thoroughly obnoxious academic who attempts to discover and correct everything he finds wrong in Marcus’s attitude and behavior.  Dean Caudwell, a kind of compendium of every dean you or I ever encountered in college, constantly badgers Marcus, delving into his background, religious beliefs, dating habits, and even his quite understandable desire to move from his crowded three-student room to a single.  Their dialogues go on for far too long and grow increasingly disturbing, which may account for the film’s otherwise odd and dubious title.

          A picture that starts and ends strangely, Indignation for the most part concentrates on the perfectly interesting subject of its protagonist’s struggles with a new and different situation.  It begins to disintegrate in effect with Marcus’s puzzled reaction to Olivia, his talky meetings with Dean Caudwell, and an attack of appendicitis that brings his mother out to Winesburg; that visit leads to greater disillusionment for Marcus and further problems in his relationship with Olivia.  Ultimately, a movie that proceeds with a certain clarity, simplicity, and reason finally ends, almost shockingly, in madness, despair, and death.