Moral Ambiguities

 A couple of missed opportunities ...

A HERO (B+) - No good deed goes unpunished. This is the moral of Asghar Farhadi's brilliantly intricate morality play about an inmate on furlough who comes across a bag of gold coins and eventually decides to give it back.

A second viewing might raise the grade, but as good as this story was, it occasionally crossed the line from meticulously plotted to confusing. The dialogue is quick (and hard to read via subtitles) and there are a lot of characters to keep track of; during the climax, one character returns from early in the film and I frankly couldn't remember exactly what his connection to everything was. 

Farhadi returns to the bumblings of the bureaucratic state in Iran that he explored in his earlier masterpiece, "A Separation," a film that echoes often here. Rahim (Amir Jadidi) plots with his fiancee (Sahar Goldust) when a handbag containing 17 gold coins comes into her possession (I was never sure how that happened). While on a weekend leave from prison -- where he is serving time for failing to pay a business debt -- he meets up with his fiancee to cash out the coins and pay off about half his debt, which would spring him from prison. But he develops second thoughts, and given time, he decides instead to do the right thing and seek out the owner of the handbag. 

Ironically, that's where his problems start. Jadidi is quietly effective in the lead role. Rahim is accused of having a hangdog look, and his sly smile can appear both innocent and mischievous at the same time. His frustration is palpable as his attempt at a simple good deed begins to boomerang and backfire, until he starts to look more like a villain than a hero. To explain more would ruin the intricate nesting that Farhadi relies on here to build momentum toward a damning conclusion. It's difficult to discern whether the writer-director is getting too clever for his own good, or if I wasn't patient enough to let him work his magic. Either way, this is still a thoroughly satisfying movie.

THE LOST DAUGHTER (B) - I'm sure this story of inter-generational feminine warfare means a great deal to Maggie Gyllenhaal, but her debut as a writer-director fails to communicate the gravity of the story clearly and forcefully enough. Throughout its two-hour running time, this slow-burn of a film constantly feels like it is going to break out into full-blown suspense, but it never does.

Three fine actresses show up ready to give it their all, but none of their storylines feels weighty enough to carry the film. Olivia Coleman is Leda, an academic who wants to have a quiet holiday on a Greek island. Dakota Johnson's Nina is part of an extended Greek-American family that big-foots the beach, leading Leda to seek petty revenge against them. Jessie Buckley, showing the most promise here, plays a young version of Leda, struggling to raise two high-energy girls while pursuing her academic future and falling into the clutches of a suave older professor (a bushy-bearded Peter Sarsgaard). 

Leda and Nina connect through their marital/parental ennui. But their stories don't quite click, and the Young Leda backstory competes too much with the present day. So little happens between Leda and Nina (besides the brief disappearance of Nina's daughter and the girl's doll) that Buckley's flashback scenes become more appealing but still elusive. You wonder what a whole movie about Young Leda would be like.

Leda's petty actions on the Greek island are fascinating at first -- what is motivating her, you wonder -- but the repetition can get tedious. The three women are awfully appealing (as is Dagmara Dominczyk as Nina's sister(in-law?)) but too often the story just sits on the screen. Gyllenhaal finds interesting ways to visualize the frustrations and longings of mothers -- those insights, often conveyed with glances and layered with interesting soundtrack choices, are the best part of the movie -- but you just wish that the narrative (based on a novel by Elena Ferrante) could snap out of its own doldrums. 

BONUS TRACK

Leda, driving along the open road as if she doesn't have a care (spoiler alert: she does), sings along to the car stereo to Talking Heads' "People Like Us":