Topaz (1969)
After the successful premiere of the first James Bond film, many people wanted Alfred Hitchcock to direct an entry in the series. He had a history in the spy genre with films like Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), he had a dark and subtle sense of humor, and his film’s reliance on elaborate Macguffins seemed perfect for a series of films which value character and atmosphere more than plot.
While the dream of a Hitchcock directed Bond film would never materialize, Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) were clear attempts to capitalize on the popularity of the genre.
Echoing the Cuban missile crisis, this film features Soviets shipping nuclear warheads to Cuba. Several scenes take place in Cuba and archival footage of Fidel Castro is used for authenticity.
John Vernon, best known as the mayor in Dirty Harry (1979) and Dean Vormer, is Rico Parra, the Cuban emissary to the United States. Of interest to me, his daughter, Kate Vernon was Ellen Tigh in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.
John Forsythe is Michael Nordstrom, the CIA agent responsible for handling KGB defections.
The movie is a mess and would have benefited from a tighter, more focused script. It begins with a defecting KGB agent, then there are missiles in Cuba and Cuban dissidents, then suddenly it’s about a French spy ring, and there’s a misguided attempt to stay relevant in the integrated world of 1969 with an elaborate sequence in Harlem with Roscoe Lee Browne (who I remember fondly from his later appearances on The Cosby Show) as an undercover florist. There’s a good movie about Cuban counterrevolutionaries somewhere in this film, but it’s buried under a lot of unnecessary stuff.
August: Osage County (2013)
Based on Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, this is a claustrophobic movie about small-minded people in a small-minded family in a small-minded town.
Meryl Streep is Violet Weston, the dying, evil matriarch of the most dysfunctional family, who hoards information to manipulate and injure everyone around her.
Julia Roberts is her daughter, Barbara Weston-Fordham, a horrible mother who seems destined to become the latest in a long line of miserable women.
Margo Matindale is Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae Aiken who puts a happy face on her misery and meanness to become a socially acceptable version of evil.
Chris Cooper is Charles Aiken, Mattie Fae’s husband who is cruel to his vegetarian niece, but his sins are slight compared to the myriad evils surrounding him.
Abigail Breslin showed more range in her debut as the awkward Olive in Little Miss Sunshine (2006). Her Jean Fordham is a stereotypical rebellious teenager.
Juliette Lewis is Karen Weston, another one of Violet’s daughters, who’s so dense and willfully ignorant it borders on parody.
2013 was a very busy year for Benedict Cumberbatch. In addition to starring as Little Charles, son of Mattie Fae, he was in the immensely popular television program Sherlock, Star Trek into Darkness (2013), The Fifth Estate (2013), and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013). He doesn’t do much here besides be pathetic. His mom is mean to him and it’s stunted his emotional development.
An uncomfortable movie which revels in the discomfort it causes. The characters are one-dimensional and the film exists solely to remind us whatever our family situation, it could be worse. It’s tough to watch, but it makes you appreciate how minor your own family’s foibles truly are.