Some Odd Casting: Decoded & My Penguin Friend

I don't want to sound entitled or anything, but the Detective Chinatown movies have been operating on a three-year schedule and that's with a pandemic to deal with, so I'm a little disappointed this isn't DC4. I want to know what's going on in London, darn it!

Anyway, this wound up an odd sort of themed weekend because of some casting I didn't necessarily expect. Decoded is one I didn't realize existed until listings started showing up on Monday and I saw John Cusack's name and pulled up short, not necessarily assuming that it was that John Cusack, although also musing that he wasn't as big a get for a Chinese movie as one might have thought; though he never stopped working, the last time I saw him in a new big-screen feature was 2015's Chi-Raq, and he already wasn't really a leading man at that point any more; his last big starring role was probably 2010's Hot Tub Time Machine. There's stuff in between that played theaters which I liked, but that's kind of when he stopped being a star who could open movies, although there weren't really any flops after that. I wonder what changed; did writers stop coming up with scripts that played to his strengths, is he kind of a pain in the neck on set; was there something that made him a bad risk? I dunno. I do know that a friend was surprised that it had been nearly a decade since something he was in played the Boston area.

(Well, maybe Cell did and I missed it. Also, a trailer for Pursuit played in front of the first thing I saw at the Somerville when it reopened in 2022, but it never played there.)

The same friend, when I mentioned Jean Reno starring in My Penguin Friend, asked if Reno was going to eat the penguin. And the thing is, I don't know if Reno has really done a part like that in 15 years - like Ronin co-star Robert De Niro, he's probably done more comic subversions of those parts or just generally more genial roles as he's aged - but, no, he's not exactly the first guy you'd expect for the lead in a family-oriented film. That he's also a French actor playing a Brazilian fisherman in an English-language film makes it a bit more odd.

They're fun to see on the big screen again, though, even if (or perhaps because) it's in unexpected places. And it's kind of a shame that I didn't have time to get to Blink Twice this weekend, which in Geena Davis, Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Kyle MacLachlan, and Haley Joel Osment just has a murderer's row of "I didn't realize it had been so long" casting in the supporting roles.


Jie Mi (Decoded)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 August 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)

I came into Decoded expecting a thriller only to quickly realize I was getting a life story instead, which isn't necessarily bad - I try not to be as dismissive of biopics as some, especially for figures who are new to me anyway - but wasn't what I was looking for. It turns out that this is an adaptation of a spy novel rather than a biography, which makes the way filmmaker Chen Sicheng presents it weirdly frustrating: Maybe he can't quite make the Christopher Nolan movie he's seemingly shooting for, but it's odd that he often falls back to one of the blandest ways to tell a movie, considering how the film is at its best when it's the most weird.

It introduces audiences to mathematical prodigy Rong Jinzhen as a child whose mother, arriving at her husband's family home for the first time alone and pregnant, died during childbirth, leaving Jinzhen to be raised by the household staff and a German friend of that wandering father who taught dream interpretation. He is taken in at age twelve by distant cousin Rong "Lili" Xiaolai (Daneil Wu), principal at a college in Nanjing that accepts Jinzhen early, where he becomes the protege of mathematician Jan Liseiwicz (John Cusack), who became a man without a country when the Nazis invaded Poland. Liseiwicz will lose his adopted nation when he refuses to decode Nationalist telegrams for spymaster Zheng (Chen Daoming), fleeing to America, though Jinzhen (Liu Haoran) does so - and does so well enough that Zheng brings him to "701", an enclave dedicated to codebreaking. Though he meets future wife Mei (Ran Luyao) there, Zheng keeps his mathematicians isolated from the isolated world, particularly by intercepting letters to Jinzhen from Liseiwicz, who develops the two NSA ciphers used to communicate with Taiwan that will occupy Jinzhen's next ten years.

There's the material for a terrific spy epic here, especially when you step back and lay the pieces out: Both Jinzhen and Liseiwicz are taken from their home and imprisoned in some manner, forced into a duel by their respective governments, and while Liseiwicz's dreams of building computers sophisticated enough to house a human mind seem at odds with Jinzhen's more intuitive methods, perhaps the Pole's greatest insight is that his student can be rattled. Original novelist Mai Jia, adapted by Chen and American screenwriter Christopher MacBride, has come up with a story that makes this sort of codebreaking work, at its heart multilayered mechanisms and mathematics, a personal story despite the rivals being at a far remove without diminishing how complex the work is. It should be great!

There's a gulf between what can be and what is, though, and Cheng shows how it's happening in real time, where a nifty dream sequence will be followed by Jinzhen walking up and scribbling in a notebook; the visuals are cool, the trying to get them to serve the narrative is immediately boring. There's a connection to interpreting dreams and cracking codes to be found, but it just doesn't work on-screen, and a big sequence toward the end winds up feeling more silly than anything, in part because it's taken a step too far when the inevitable result of Jinzhen spiraling is played as a specific American plot. It also doesn't help that Chen adds a meta level with him interviewing older versions of the characters as research; it takes what makes a genre movie clever (there's a story about how this sort of work hollows a person out inside the thrilling spy yarn) and makes it the surface text.

Liu Haoran winds up giving his all to what feels like a stock part, the vaguely autistic math prodigy who defies authority out of annoyance but is dedicated in his own way. It often doesn't quite connect with the rest of the cast - it's notable that Liseiwicz and Lili talk a fair amount about what a country and as a result patriotism mean to them but Jinzhen can only parrot it rather than make his own formulation. The supporting cast around him is quite good - Daniel Wu, Yu Feiong, and Chen Yusi are interesting as the foster family, and Chen Daoming's spymaster seems both fond of Jinzhen and aware that he gains little by being a martinet even as he is ruthless in his actions - but Liu gets little chance to show a sharp mind rather than being buffeted.

John Cusack, meanwhile, is mostly called upon to be John Cusack, especially in the first half, sad and hangdog about the state of the world but capable of motormouth enthusiasm when it comes to math and computing, and the ruthlessness in the second half is familiar, too; being able to surface that harsh edge is what made the likes of Grosse Pointe Blank and War Inc. work. I'm not sure I entirely buy the heel turn, and wonder if the novel spent more time on his side of the story, but the film wasn't going to be able to put together an English-speaking cast to make that viable: Scenes with other English speakers are telling, in that Cusack maybe playing a familiar persona, but the other guy is bad in the way Western actors in Asian movies are always bad, minor talents who either can't quite communicate the right mood or can't convince their director that this sounds off.

It's subversive in a certain way - Chinese filmmakers seem to have figured out that there's no end to how much they can have people suffer and die for the good of the nation and the censor board will pass it so long as there's a victory over Nationalists or the West in there, not realizing the message is "what a cruel waste!' - but that's kind of a feature of Chinese bios now too. The movie is pretty good when Chen gets to play with dreams - there are two or three sequences in here where the dream-staging is terrific (the Beatles can be downright terrifying for someone not equipped to approach their psychedelic imagery), and it might have been a stronger movie if Chen were able to represent the math in a similarly flashy way to invite connections. That's a thing Christopher Nolan does well that doesn't get a lot of comment, and Chen is clearly trying to work in the same mold.

The film fell somewhat flat for me on this first viewing, but I must admit that I'm curious how it will play on a second watch, now that what Chen is going for is a bit more clear. I also suspect that, like a lot of big-budget Chinese films, it's making an effort to target an international audience with its American co-writer and co-star (plural, though Daniel Wu is likely a bigger star in China than his native U.S.), but has a hard time threading the needle between what can play at home and what will work abroad.


My Penguin Friend

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 August 2024 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, laser DCP)

Here's the thing about Jean Reno: Even if you've only seen him as the cool guy in hard-edged thrillers, it's absolutely no surprise to discover he's got a family movie about a kind but sad man rescuing a lost penguin in him. There are some guys a viewer is happy to see when they show up in a movie even if their characters aren't likable, because they've formed a connection with the audience. You know he's got the range even if you haven't seen it.

Reno is not in the film's opening, which has a young Brazilian boy named Miguel (Juan José Garnica) excited about his upcoming birthday and hoping his fisherman father João (Pedro Urizzi) will take him out on the sea rather than make him go to school, which João does, though rightfully nervous about the gathering storm clouds. Twenty-five or thirty years later, João (now played by Reno) is withdrawn; he and wife Maria (Adriana Barraza) don't fight, but they aren't like they were. Meanwhile, five thousand miles away in the Patagonia region of Argentina, a curious penguin begins his annual migration, only to be thrown off course by a storm and covered with oil from a leaking tanker. He's in bad shape when he washes up on the beach, and João takes him in, planning to put him back out to sea when his feathers have regrown. But the day that happens, a local girl gives him the name "Dindin" and the little guy decides to stay.

Though seemingly cast against type, Reno is great, exactly what you want out of this character in this movie, a rumpled good heart and embarrassed dignity in situations other films might play for slapstick. It's nothing surprising, really, but he can certainly set a mood with just his body language, from the old-man waddle that suggests he and the little guy will be great friends to his first hesitant time going to town with Dindin. He and Adriana Barraza are old pros in how they navigate the path back to the pair being a couple rather than little more than housemates, such that they can put across the way that Dindin is filling a whole in their lives without writers Kristen Lazarian & Paulina Lagudi Ulrich or director David Schurmann having to either position the penguin as a replacement for their son or backing off the idea. And while Reno and Pedro Urizzi don't particularly resemble each other, they capture the essence of this man at different points in their lives that repeated lines and actions connect.

Around Reno, it's a charmingly old-fashioned family film, with relatively few scenes using digital penguins compared to documentary and stock footage or just having a bird on set, and I suspect that even a small separation between what a penguin does and what filmmakers imagine penguins doing can be a big deal. It's not afraid of having a protagonist in his 60s despite kids being a great deal of the audience, and isn't shy about folks learning a few things. The script is wobbly at points, but generally in a way that falls forward rather than back, and does well to switch from João's perspective to that of Dindin or a trio of Argentine scientists to balance the mood.

It's a bit surprising that the scientists played by Alexia Moyano, Nicolás Francella, and Rocío Hernández never seem to make any direct contact with João, especially toward the end when it would seem to make sense even if it would reduce the suspense. They're a good enough trio to always be welcome even if they're pulling away from the main story and shouldering the educational duties; it's not hard to imagine the movie made primarily from their point of view. There's some care put into making their dynamic interesting rather than just obligatory.

If the film has an issue, it's that the opening is a bit long and heavy-handed; older folks in the audience can see exactly what's being set up (and might find the young Brazilian actors being obviously dubbed into English distracting), but might play well with the younger folks. That's the sort of thing that puts this movie right on the line between a movie that a person might say is surprisingly good and one which that person actively recommends, although it's easy to push it into the latter category with the cute penguin and a famous tough guy playing effortlessly against type.