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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
AUGUST When the dot-com bubble swelled and burst in the late 1990s, it left in its wake a trail of stunned, short-lived multi-millionaires, and one hell of a story. Look at any of the young, charismatic, and sometimes devilishly sexy entrepreneurs who made and lost hundreds of millions in as little as a few months and you’ll wonder why their five minutes of fame haven’t been immortalized on screen. That’s where August comes in. Directed by Austin Chick, this zeitgeisty film brings to life the astronomically steep rise and fall of Tom Sterling (Josh Hartnett), a hipster version of a wunderkind who flew too close to the sun. Tom and his brother Josh (Adam Scott) are the founders of Landshark, an ambiguous e-company that attracts drooling investors upon its NASDAQ debut. Josh is the brains behind the Internet enterprise (what it sells remains an intentional mystery), but cock-of-the-walk Tom is the face, deal-maker, and CEO. As he struts around his cyber-chic, Ikea-laden office or a downtown New York nightclub in tight pants and modishly short blazers, an ever-climaxing soundtrack of electronica ratchets up the tension and alerts us to trouble ahead. The trouble is that, like a lot of their competitors, Landshark’s highly anticipated product is dangerously overvalued. While the performances are strong and psychologically credible, on the whole the film often feels forced and uneven. Constant cuts to real newsreels from the summer of 2001, still in our rearview mirror, are presented as isolated nostalgic interludes with no tie-in to the plot. Tom’s relationship with an ex-girlfriend (Naomie Harris) is similarly disjointed. Exclusively dedicated to highlighting the hotshot’s sensitive side as well as his inability to commit, her role falls flat and lends no inherent value to the story. Weaker still is the choppy script, which sometimes tries desperately to capture the natural awkwardness of conversation (leaving Hartnett mumbling and sighing through most of the film) and then suddenly slips into farce.
In what is hopefully a deliberate attempt at self-ridicule, the most
discordant moment is a strange cameo by David Bowie. Glowering with
different colored eyes, he plays Ogilvie, an evil financier who wants to
strip Tom of his flailing company just because he doesn’t like the young
man’s swagger. Though vaguely amusing, it’s a shame Chick felt the need
to provide a wacky villain, when the natural flow
of the saturated economy was the only true and truly interesting foe.
Yana Litovsky
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