Movie Reviews: Indestructible, Reprise, Water Lillies

BLOODLINE Faintly ridiculous but strangely watchable, director Bruce Burgess’ documentary explores the controversial theory that powered Dan Brown’s pulp juggernaut The Da Vinci Code: that the Catholic Church supposedly covered up Jesus Christ’s child with secret wife Mary Magdalene. While other investigative-nonfiction filmmakers pop blood vessels exaggerating the magnitude of their paltry findings, it’s some relief that Burgess, who serves as Bloodline’s onscreen narrator, remains doubtful of the “proof” he uncovers, such as buried bottles in France with treasure-map clues leading to embalmed corpses. But considering that he has previously made films about Area 51 and Bigfoot, it’s hard to take his role as a skeptic that seriously — more likely, he just enjoys milking an audience’s conspiracy-theory fascination without having to worry about producing meaningful results. Despite the fact that several people who claimed to possess evidence about the cover-up have died under mysterious circumstances, Bloodline is less a gripping exposé than a goofy National Treasure–style puzzle film mixed with a sub–Nick Broomfield survey of some admittedly oddball individuals. But when Burgess tries to craft an ambiguous, even ominous ending out of his inconclusive study, it seems painfully ironic that a film questioning other people’s faith would ask us to take a documentary this slipshod at its word. (Culver Plaza; Sunset 5) (Tim Grierson)

HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS SPENT THEIR SUMMER Writer-director Georgina Garcia Riedel’s feature debut is so good for so long that it breaks the heart to watch the film lose its way. Opening with silent, static shots of the characters’ sleepy Arizona community, How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer orients you to the marginal lives of three generations of single Garcia women — widowed grandmother Doña (Lucy Gallardo), divorced mother Lolita (Elizabeth Peña), and virgin daughter Blanca (America Ferrera) — who will soon experience a series of tentative romantic encounters. It’s a testament to Riedel’s talent that their complicated love affairs become an opening to examine small-town poverty, female sexuality and the ways we learn about relationships from our family’s mistakes. But after first resisting the urge to make the Garcias’ misadventures adorable, Riedel turns her naturalistic drama into Sex and the City, coupling the nicely ­nuanced women with caricatured men who are either lovable saints or horny buffoons. The exception is Blanca’s unpredictable roundelay with a dashing but manipulative out-of-towner (Leo Minaya) — indeed, theirs is the only relationship that possesses the random strangeness of real life, sparking hope that Riedel will continue to mine similarly compelling terrain in the future by trying to understand her male characters as deeply as she does their female counterparts. (Burbank Town Center 8; Glendale Exchange; Plant 16; Sunset 5) (Tim Grierson)

GO  INDESTRUCTIBLE At age 31, Ben Byer, an aspiring actor and playwright from Chicago, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the fatal neurodegenerative disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Like most people diagnosed with ALS, Byer was given two to five years to live. The stark urgency of that prognosis spurred him to collaborate with childhood friend and documentarian Roko Belic (Genghis Blues) on Indestructible, in which Byer turns the camera on himself as he confronts the onset of an illness for which there is no certain cause. Though it’s anchored in one young man’s story, the film contains two separate documentaries. The first intends to raise awareness about ALS and a Westernized health-care system unable to adequately treat a disease about which so little is known. We follow Byer from his parents’ home in Wisconsin to Greece, Jamaica and Beijing, where he experiments with alternative medicines, ranging from marijuana to a controversial brain-surgery procedure, and visits with other ALS patients. The second documentary focuses on Byer’s struggle with the emotional and spiritual toll of the disease. He approaches patients, doctors and religious leaders with the same plaintive, unfathomable question: “Why did this happen to me?” Byer’s sincerity is the grounding force in a film that serves as a wrenching reminder that the answers to our most essential questions must come from within. (Grande 4-Plex) (Sam Sweet)

NOISE Tim Robbins should get out and stretch those funny bones more often, if it results in a performance as luggishly nutty as he gives in this likable — if intellectually overstuffed — urban comedy from writer-director Henry Bean. Robbins plays David Owen, an attorney unhinged by street noise in his tony Manhattan neighborhood, whose idea of good citizenship is to take a hammer to the windows of cars with runaway alarm systems. The behavior loses him his job and his marriage to a loving wife (Bridget Moynahan, intelligently wry) and puts him at odds with New York’s blowhard mayor (a wily William Hurt). It also gives him exponentially increasing satisfaction — not to mention popularity among the similarly afflicted — as a local vigilante, the Rectifier. Bean, who’s written many thrillers and brought us Ryan Gosling as a Jewish Nazi in The Believer, has made an action-comedy of ideas, for which I thank him in principle, since action and ideas rarely coincide at the movies. But Noise has too many warring genres on the boil and too many thoughts jockeying for supremacy. I’m still trying to figure out how Hegel got in there, other than to facilitate a surfeit of between-the-sheets discussions about power and responsibility between David and a pneumatic, enigmatic young Russian (Margarita Levieva), whose function in the movie is exactly ... what? (Sunset 5) (Ella Taylor)