→ March 14, 2022
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West Side Story.

StevenSpielberg had wanted to film a new version of the 1957 musical West Side Story, which was first adapted in 1961 in a film that won Best Picture, for several years before filming began in July of 2019. This new version, with a script by Tony Kushner that hews more closely to the original stage play at several points, was delayed by a year due to the pandemic, but came out in time to be eligible for this year’s Oscars, earning seven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana DuBose. It’s better than the 1961 film in some ways, worse in others, making it a perfectly fine film that nobody actually needed.

The framework of the story is the same as that of the first film: Two gangs of street toughs are engaged in a turf war on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the largely Puerto Rican Sharks and the white Jets, led by Bernardo (David Alvarez) and Riff (Mike Faist), respectively. Tony used to be in the Jets before he went to jail, and is trying to go straight now that he’s home, but at a community dance where both gangs arrive with their girls, he meets Bernardo’s sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), and the two fall immediately in love. Tony works at Doc’s, which is managed by Doc’s Puerto Rican widow (Rita Moreno), who advises him against pursuing Maria while helping him learn some Spanish phrases. Bernardo isn’t happy to see his sister with a white guy, and wants her to marry his friend Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera), while Bernardo himself is with Maria’s friend Anita (DuBose). The two gangs decide to hold a “rumble,” a fight that ends up leaving two dead and has disastrous consequences for the star-crossed lovers.

I’ll save the biggest problem for last, but one major flaw in this version of West Side Story is that Ansel Elgort sucks. He wasn’t good in Baby Driver, where he barely had to do anything, but he’s awful here in every way – he’s stiff, uncharismatic, and dull, and his singing is the worst of any major character. Casting him was a poor choice, underscored by how much better Faist is as Riff – he’s a rascal, but has all the charm that Elgort lacks, and he owns every scene the two have together. Zegler is far better as a singer and actor than Elgort is, and unlike most of the cast, looks close to the age of her character. In general, the women in the film outshine the men, and the Jets’ big number, “Officer Krupke,” is one of the songs that’s clearly inferior to that of the original film.

There are some small differences from the 1961 film that do improve the end result, not least of which is employing Latinx actors as the Sharks and their girlfriends. The original had Natalie Wood, the daughter of Russian immigrants, in the lead role as Maria, and George Chakiris, the son of Greek immigrants, as her brother Bernardo. Both used comically bad accents that sounded more like mockery than imitation. Zegler and Elgort do their own singing, which neither of their counterparts did in the 1961 film. The character of Anybodys, a tomboyish Jets wannabe played by Susan Oakes in the original, is now much more fleshed out here, depicted as a trans man and played by iris menas, a nonbinary and trans actor. It’s a win for representation, but also adds substantially to the story, with Anybodys the character who gains the most in depth and screen time between the original and the remake. The audio quality is improved, of course, although sometimes that works against the singers, such as the men in “America,” whose vocals sound tinny, especially in comparison to the women on that song.

West Side Story can’t escape its fundamental, ontological problem: There is no good reason for this film to exist. The story is the same. The songs are all the same. The choreography is the same – perhaps captured more effectively by better camerawork and modern technology, but it’s still the same old song and dance. Elgort is a dud, a poor actor and mediocre singer whose hold on Maria is hard to believe. It’s a nostalgia play for Spielberg, and I’m sure 20th Century/Disney thought it would be a huge moneymaker, although that was foiled by the pandemic. For this film to get seven Oscar nominations while the superior In the Heights got zero – not even one for a song! – is a travesty.

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→ February 17, 2022
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Dune.

Dune could have gone wrong so many ways, but the biggest risk in converting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic to the big screen was always the plot. The novel’s setting is iconic, from the desert planet to the sandworms, yet the complexity of the story around the Christ-like Paul Atreides stood out as the greater challenge, the one aspect of the book that couldn’t be addressed with CG. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune does a remarkable job of distilling the first half of the book into a single, accessible story that simplifies the plot without overdoing it, while also providing the look and feel that have helped make the novel an enduring classic of its genre.

(Disclaimers: I love the original Dune novel, so much that I read all five of Herbert’s increasingly terrible sequels, but have still never seen the David Lynch film adaptation from 1984.)

Dune follows the familiar template of the ‘chosen one,’ a story arc that stretches back to the Bible and continues now in YA fiction, most notably the Harry Potter series. The messiah here is Paul Atreides, the teenaged son of the Duke Leto Atreides, who rules the planet Caladan, and his concubine Lady Jessica, a member of the cultish spiritual order the Bene Gesserit. Paul exhibits unusual mental abilities from an early age that indicate that he may be the savior foretold by the Bene Gesserit’s prophecy. The story opens when the Emperor orders the Duke to take stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the drug known as spice or mélange, which also happens to be an essential element in interstellar travel. The present rules of Arrakis, House Harkonnen, are not especially keen to lose their powers, leading to armed conflict that puts Paul on the run and in charge of his own destiny.

Villeneuve’s decision with his co-screenwriters to split the book into two films, hoping the first would fare well enough that the studio would greenlight the second, paid off twice – it did do well enough that we will get a sequel, and I would argue that it only did that well because it didn’t try to cram a densely plotted 500-page novel into a 150 minute movie. There’s so much room to breathe here that Timothée Chalamet gets far more screen time to give a little depth to Paul’s character, while Rebecca Ferguson, as Lady Jessica, may be an even bigger beneficiary, as some of that character’s most important scenes would almost certainly have been cut in a single-film adaptation. Paul’s character comes alive more in the second half of the book, once he’s on the run with the Fremen people, which leaves a modest void in a first-half movie for another central character to fill, and Ferguson does so with the film’s best performance.

The cast of Dune is incredible on paper, although the result is more “I can’t believe they got Charlotte Rampling!” than “I can’t believe how great Charlotte Rampling is!” Oscar Isaac is here. So is Javier Bardem. Stephen McKinley Henderson, who you know by sight even if you don’t know him by name. And there is some value in having these very famous people, any of whom can command a scene by themselves, in smaller roles. They don’t get quite enough to do – not even as much as Jason Momoa does in a memorable turn as Duncan Idaho.

The film does look amazing, though. Villeneuve is no amateur at worldbuilding on the screen, and this is the Arrakis of the page, whether in wide shots or close-ups, feeling vast and foreboding and terrifyingly dry. You’ll find yourself craving water watching this film. Many of the special effects are impressive, especially those showing the various flying vehicles on the surface of the planet, but there’s just as much wonder in the sword fights or the scenes showing troops massed in formation when the Atreides arrive on Arrakis to take control.

Dune ended up with ten Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but not Best Director, which surprised me given how much Villeneuve had to put together here even taking the script (which he co-wrote) as a given. I’m not surprised at the lack of acting nominations, given how many people and named characters in the film, and how little depth most of them get even in a film that’s a solid two and a half hours. Ferguson might have had an argument for a supporting nod, but that’s probably it. My guess is Dune wins a bunch of technical awards – ones it may very well deserve – without taking Best Picture or Adapted Screenplay. Of the four BP nominees I’ve seen so far, though, I think it’s my favorite.

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→ January 12, 2022
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The Lost Daughter.

The Lost Daughter is the directorial debut of actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also adapted the screenplay from an early novel by the Italian author known as Elena Ferrante, the mind behind the Neapolitan cycle of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend. Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as the same character in two different eras, the film presents a haunting portrayal of motherhood in a world that prefers mothers to exist in tightly constrained boxes.

Leda, a college professor of comparative literature and mother of two grown daughters, has come to a Greek island on a working vacation, with Colman playing her in the film’s present day. Shortly after her arrival, a boisterous American family arrives to disrupt her idyll, including a young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter, Elena. The girl goes missing on the beach one day, and Leda ends up the one who finds her – but Leda takes Elena’s doll, holding on to it even though the girl is inconsolable. Her subsequent interactions with the family trigger a series of flashbacks to when Leda was a young mother herself (where Buckley plays her), trying to balance her career and her two young daughters, with a husband who is unsupportive, to say the least. Leda’s memories, and the choices she made, invade on her present day, leading to erratic behavior and more questionable decisions.

Much of Ferrante’s work revolves around casual sexism in Italian society (a fair analogue for western society as a whole, but probably even more misogynistic than its peers), from who women marry to what they may do for work to how they’re expected to be mothers. At its most superficial level, The Lost Daughter shows Leda today coping with the weight of memories, and some regrets, over choices she made as a young mother, all because she’s seeing a young mother now whose husband doesn’t appreciate her and who herself may not fully appreciate her own daughter. Leda faced an untenable situation, trying to complete her graduate studies with two young children at home and a husband who believes his work takes priority. An academic conference gets her a brief respite from the dual life at home, and leads her the major inflection point of her life.

Leda in the present is a powder keg in search of a spark; the flashbacks show how the keg got its powder. Gyllenhaal gives us scene after scene of Leda struggling with one or both of her girls – at bath time, at meal time, and especially when she’s trying to work and her husband is nowhere in sight. It’s such an atypical and nuanced portrait of motherhood for the movies: Most movie mothers are saints, and if they’re not, they’re monsters. We see Leda losing her patience with her kids, or failing to respond to them as a mother “should” by the norms of the genre, and Gyllenhaal portrays it all without judgment or scorn. It is here that the film becomes whole, and solid, rather than superficial. The greatness of The Lost Daughter lies in how it treats Leda’s motherhood as aggressively normal.

The Lost Daughter loses something, no pun intended, when Leda starts to act bizarrely in the present, none more so than when she keeps the damn doll. The theft itself was plausible, but to continue to keep it when the child is wailing for it and her mother and family are desperate for its return just paints Leda as a terrible person. My interpretation, at least, is that what the world has done to Leda has led her to this point, whether she’s crazy, or delusional, or truly misanthropic, and that serves to undermine the more important theme here, that society is crazy, and misogynistic, and forced Leda into a choice she still can’t reconcile.

In Greek mythology, Leda is a young woman whom Zeus covets, so he takes the form of a swan, rapes her, and impregnates her. She gives birth to a girl, Helen – as in, of Troy – which is the Anglicized version of the name Elena. (Elena was my maternal grandmother’s name. She went by Helen.) Here, Elena isn’t Leda’s daughter, though; she’s the child on whom Leda seems to fixate when thinking about her own daughters, Bianca and Martha. Homer’s version of the myth has Helen abandoning her children to elope with Paris (or, possibly, being abducted), sparking the Trojan War. The Leda myth appears elsewhere in the movie, as Leda the character was a scholar and avid reader of Yeats, who wrote “Leda and the Swan” about the legend, so the allusion is clearly intentional.

Colman has already been nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and won Outstanding Lead Performance (an all-gender category) at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. She’s a lock for an Oscar nod for the same, and deserving. At the same time, Jessie Buckley is just as pivotal to this film’s success, and overdue for this sort of accolade, delivering an outstanding performance in Beast and a similar one in Wild Rose to little fanfare. Buckley has less screen time to fill out the character of Leda the young mother, yet that character provides essential depth to the story; if Buckley can’t convince the viewer of the agony and struggle of Leda as a mother and striving academic, the present-day parts that were already shaky would collapse. Gyllenhaal should be in the running for nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay (likely) and Best Director (unlikely, given the category’s extensive historical bias against women).

This might be the best movie I’ve seen so far from 2021, and if not, it offers the most fodder for consideration after it ended. There’s more here than one blog post, by one writer, who also happens to be a man, could possibly cover.

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→ January 6, 2022
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tick, tick … BOOM!

tick, tick … BOOM! is the ‘other’ Jonathan Larson musical, the one he wrote and performed himself a handful of times before he finished and sold Rent. As you probably know, Larson died of an aortic aneurysm, likely the result of undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, the night before Rent opened. That makes the story of tick, tick … BOOM! even more poignant – and sometimes painful – to watch: It’s about a young would-be playwright who is about to turn 30 and is wondering if he’ll ever get a play produced, or if he has to give up his dream and find a ‘regular’ job like his roommate Michael.

Lin-Manuel Miranda directed this film from Steven Levenson’s adaptation of Larson’s stage musical, splitting the film into two threads: A live performance of the play itself, powered by Andrew Garfield as Larson, and recreations of scenes from Larson’s life to which he refers within the play. At the time that he wrote this play, Larson was working at a diner while trying to get his first play, a dystopian sci-fi musical called Superbia that was loosely based on 1984, produced. His difficulties and his approaching birthday have led him to an existential crisis, and to a breaking point with his girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp), a dancer who gets a big opportunity in western Massachusetts that would force her to move out of New York. Larson’s roommate, Michael (Robin de Jesús), has given up his acting dreams to take a job in advertising, earning a steady income that’s enough to get him a better apartment and a fancy car. The story takes place against the backdrop of late 1980s/early 1990s New York, especially the AIDS crisis, with one of Jonathan’s co-workers dealing with the disease (which became a major subtheme in Rent as well).

Garfield is tremendous here as Larson – he’s brimming with enthusiasm and dry wit when he’s doing the stage part, anxious and frazzled and torn in different directions when he’s in Larson’s regular life. He carries the movie, even with a raft of strong supporting performances, including Shipp, de Jesús, and a surprisingly strong turn from Vanessa Hudgens as his foil in the stage play. It hinges on the lead, though, given how much of the movie is him singing and talking on the stage, and he delivers. I’d be floored if he didn’t join Will Smith among the Best Actor nominees for the Oscars this year.

I didn’t see Rent during its 12-year run on Broadway, or any of its tours; I’ve only seen the recording of the last date of that initial run, and have listened to the soundtrack. I know the music well enough now to know that it’s much better than the music in tick, tick … BOOM! This musical doesn’t have anywhere near the memorable numbers of Larson’s magnum opus – a tautological argument, since that’s why Rent is his magnum opus in the first place – but this film feels like the double A version of Rent‘s big leagues. These songs sound like they come from Larson in both music and lyrics, but they lack the strong hooks of “Seasons of Love,” “Take Me or Leave Me,” “Light My Candle,” or “La Vie Bohème.” The best song here might be the finale, “Louder Than Words,” which is the song that would sound most at home in Rent. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge this musical against a critically acclaimed juggernaut, but that’s the inevitable result of a compelling story that adheres so closely to Larson’s real life.

That might imply that tick, tick … BOOM! isn’t worth watching – it is. Being less than Rent is hardly an insult. The plays differ primarily in how the stories differ: This is autofiction, where Rent is a broad study of a set of characters, a time, and a place. It’s more than a historical artifact, not just of interest only because Rent became a Broadway classic, but my honest response was that it was fun and enjoyable but the music didn’t hit me like I want a musical’s soundtrack to.

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→ November 15, 2021
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Passing.

Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing had, somehow, never been adapted for the screen until this year, despite decades of acclaim – Penguin included it in their Classics series, and LitHub named it one of the 50 best short novels published before 1970 – and themes of race and identity that have lost nothing in relevance since the novel’s publication. Rebecca Hall, star of 2018’s Christine, took on the task of both writing the screenplay and directing the film, producing a highly faithful version of Larsen’s original story that preserves the original’s ambiguity and incisive eye on its main characters.

The novel and film focus on two Black women, Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), who were friends in childhood but drifted apart at some point afterwards, only to stumble upon each other in Manhattan one day – in a tea room where both women are “passing” as white. Irene learns that Clare has been passing for years, to the point of marrying a white man who has no idea of her racial background, and that as part of the ruse, Clare puts on a show of hating all Black people – even more so than her husband does. Irene has married a successful doctor (Andre Holland), living in Harlem with their two boys, and is very involved in the Negro Women’s League – a cause to which Clare seems to attach herself, at least as far as attending the social events where she can slide back and forth between her two identities. When Clare becomes closer to Irene’s husband, who is happy to pay her some attention, Irene starts to doubt her friend’s motives, and a coincidental meeting puts them all on the inevitable collision course with the truth.

Hall’s script hews almost completely to Larsen’s original story, down to the characters and settings, a sensible choice given the strength of the original material – especially the characterization of Clare, who might have less screen time than Irene but is the most interesting character by far, as she dances with danger by trying to live in both worlds at the same time. Negga has to be headed for awards nominations with this performance, where she takes the heedless Clare of the book and makes her more subtle, daring with the chances she takes but more sympathetic as she hints at the ways in which she’s trapped herself by passing to this extent. Is she flirting with Irene’s husband, or does she just enjoy the attention of men other than the husband she secretly loathes? (Is he flirting back, or just being chivalrous?) The two women both appear to envy what the other has; Clare is the life of the party, and has access to a whole world that is closed to Irene, while Irene never has the stress of passing, and does not have to deny her identity, or give up her family and friends to have material wealth. Both actresses portray this exquisitely, through tone and expression as well as Hall’s dialogue. Negga in particular could strip paint off the walls just through a change in how she looks at another character, while Thompson’s portrayal of Irene is understated because of the way that character keeps her mistrust and rage bottled up.

Hall shot the film in black and white, which certainly helps evoke the 1920s (pre-Crash) setting, but also creates additional ambiguity around the varying skin tones of the main characters. If you had never seen Thompson or Negga before Passing, you might not immediately know either woman was Black. (Negga is part Ethiopian and part Irish, and has been vocal about her identification with and interest in Black history.) Negga’s hair is dyed blonde, further developing her racial ambiguity and making it easier to see how she might slide back and forth between the white world of midtown Manhattan – and her racist husband – and Irene’s world of Harlem. It is as un-showy a directorial effort as you might find, especially for someone’s debut in that chair, but that makes it all the more remarkable, and one I hope is fully recognized by critics and awards shows.

I’ve only seen two movies that are awards contenders for 2021, this and In the Heights, so saying this is one of the best things I’ve seen all year seems rather disingenuous, but I feel confident I won’t see five better movies than Passing in this cycle. It’s so well-written and well-acted, and it is the type of movie I especially enjoy. Passing has a leisurely rhythm that contrasts the seriousness of its subject matter in such a way that the conclusion packs the maximum possible punch, and even though I knew what was coming, I still felt the full impact because Hall and her two leads set it up so well.

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→ April 21, 2021
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The Father.

Nominated for six Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture, The Father gives a devastating portrait of dementia from the perspective of the sufferer, recasting the experience as a psychological mystery – but one without the promise of a neat ending. It brings together an incredibly clever screenplay and a BAFTA-winning performance from Anthony Hopkins, while making superb use of the limited space of a film set almost entirely in one flat. (It’s available to rent now as a premium/early access option for $19.99 through amazon and other VOD sites.)

Adapted from the stage version by the playwright Florian Zeller, The Father starts out simply enough: Anthony (Hopkins) is arguing with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman, also nominated for an Oscar) because he has scared off his most recent carer. He says it’s because she stole his watch, and rants about his other daughter, Lucy, whose name seems to bring the film to a screeching halt whenever Anthony broaches the topic. In the following scene, Anthony finds a strange man (Mark Gatiss) in his living room, and the man says he’s Paul, Anne’s partner, whom Anthony doesn’t recognize – and when Anne returns, she’s played by a different actress (Olivia Williams) and Anthony doesn’t recognize her either. Is this just his memory failing, or is something more sinister at play?

The Father utilizes those tricks and more – details of the flat change as well, part of the nonlinear nature of time in this film – to express Anthony’s disorientation to the viewer beyond having him show his confusion. His flat and his daughter’s share a structure, but things like light fixtures, furniture, and wall colors differ slightly, just enough to throw Anthony and the viewer off as we try to figure out not just where we are, but when. Hopkins is truly incredible here, still showing a plus fastball here at age 81 (when it was filmed), delivering the sort of performance the film requires and that you’d expect to see in a stage production. His confusion is palpable, his attempts to mask it through word and action realistic, and his rapid mood shifts – one of the scariest aspects of dementia for family members – are just a series of hard line drives, impressive because they’re subtle and yet impossible to ignore. The script avoids the obvious, such as having Anthony become violent, or scream obscenities, or other possible behaviors of someone with his condition, and instead lets Hopkins deliver the smaller but no less devastating changes in a way that hammers them home to the viewer.

This film is as replete with symbolism as any I can remember watching, perhaps a reflection of its stage origins, although in this sense it felt just as much like a classic novel. The color blue is everywhere in this film – walls, backsplashes, furniture, clothes – which seems like an obvious nod to the sadness and depression suffered by both a patient developing dementia and their loved ones, while the color also appears in a new setting at the end of the film that makes the connection more explicit. Anthony’s obsession with his watch, which can be a common behavior in patients with memory loss, may also represent his slipping grasp of time; in one scene, the time jumps from early morning to evening without a cut, leaving Anthony, still in his pajamas, even more confused than usual. There could be more – the shattered tea cup, the painting above the fireplace, the trees – but I will assume the chicken is, in this case, just a chicken.

The one quibble I have with The Father is the ending, which may be completely realistic but does take away some of the mystery that Zeller built up in the preceding 100 or so minutes with a resolution that, again, is probably accurate to such stories, but took some air out of the dramatic balloon. We spent much of the movie trying to come up with possible explanations for everything that was happening – for example, are Gatiss and Williams some sort of confidence artists? – but the story is much simpler than that.

Hopkins is just incredible here, my favorite lead actor performance of the year, although I don’t think there’s any chance he wins the award over Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (and I’m not sure I would want to see the reaction if he did). Colman is superb as well, my favorite of the three nominees I’ve seen, although it appears the favorite is one I haven’t seen, Youn Yuh-jung for Minari. It’s also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, which could be its best chance for a win on Sunday. As for the film itself, I would still lean towards Nomadland for Best Picture, but this sits at #2 on my ranking of movies from the 2020-early 2021 awards cycle, with just a couple of candidates left to see, and one more that made my top 5 still left to review.

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→ February 5, 2021
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The White Tiger (film).

Aravind Aviga’s first novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker Prize in 2008 for its grim, satirical look at the pernicious effects of caste and economic discrimination in India, just as the country was working to change its global image to that of a more modern society. (As if modern societies were somehow free of this sort of discrimination.) It seemed perfectly suited to an adaptation for the screen but it took over ten years for filming to begin, and the movie finally saw the light of day this winter, appearing on Netflix in January. I loved the book, and the film, which is very faithful to the original text, is also great, with some reservations.

The White Tiger tells the story of Balram, a poor child in the state of Rajasthan, who realizes early on that there’s no escape from the underclass if you’re not out for yourself, and the promise of upward mobility is a fiction for people like him. He manipulates his way into a job as a chauffeur for Ashok, the son of the village’s wealthy landlord, known just as “The Stork.” He gets the job, and tries to ensure his job security, by being obsequious to his bosses no matter the insults or abuse they throw at him, until one night, Ashok’s wife, Pinky, has an accident while driving, and they make Balram take responsibility. After that, the gloves are off, and Balram’s loyalty to himself takes priority over his loyalty to his employers. Yet Balram is no saint, and rationalizes away some of his own worst behaviors even before the accident, arguing that this is India and it’s every man for himself.

Balram is played by Adarsh Gourav in his first film role, and he’s spectacular. Balram narrates the book and the movie, and the film just wouldn’t work without the right actor in that role. The character has show many faces in the story – among them simpering, wounded, and righteously angry – and make it credible that they’d all come from the same human. He’s at his best in the moments when Ashok and his family turn on him and he realizes they view him as somewhere between hired help and farm animal.  Priyanka Chopra helped the film become reality and served as executive producer; she also appears as Pinky, playing her as an Indian woman who grew up in the United States and has more worldly values, including viewing Balram as, at least, an actual person, in contrast to her husband or, worse, her father-in-law. Her character probably has the most depth after Balram’s, but I’ve never found Chopra that convincing as an actress (in English language works, though), and she’s pretty stiff in this role.

The framing device for the film feels somewhat extraneous. As the film opens, we see Balram, grown up, at the head of his own business, as he writes a letter to then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, bragging about his life story, praising the Chinese economy, and asking for a meeting. It’s mostly just padding, and it spoils a few plot points if you’re watching carefully. I also would have preferred not to see the successful Balram until he reached that point in the story.

Gourav really does drive the film. Balram is a great character, an antihero inhabiting a story that usually provides us with a simple, easy to cheer for protagonist, like some sort of modern Horatio Alger tale. Instead, Aviga’s story reveals layers of cunning and venality in Balram as a way of indicting the hollowness of India’s economic miracle, and exposing how income inequality might replace the caste system as an obstacle to upward mobility in class or just personal wealth. I suppose that actually makes it a lot like the United States, just not in the way they intended.

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→ January 30, 2021
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One Night in Miami.

One Night in Miami marks the directorial debut of Oscar-winning actress Regina King, and seems set to earn a passel of nominations, including one for King and one for Leslie Odom, Jr., the current favorite to win Best Supporting Actor. It’s originally a play by Kemp Powers, but King expands the zone here to avoid the often claustrophobic sense we can get when scripts move from stage to screen, the result gives the four lead actors room not just to breathe but to fill out their roles as four towering figures in Black history. (It’s available on Amazon Prime.)

The night in question is February 25th, 1964, when Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston at the Hampton House in Miami, a significant upset at the time that was followed ten days later by Clay’s announcement that he had joined the Nation of Islam and would thenceforth be known as Muhammad Ali. The script brings together Clay/Ali (Eli Goree), Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), singer-songwriter Sam Cooke (Odom Jr.), and NFL star Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), who had just rushed for a record 1863 yards and would later lead the Browns to the NFL championship that December. The four men engage in a wide-ranging and often contentious conversation about the civil rights struggle, their roles in it, and what responsibilities they might have given their platforms.

The script is talky, like most plays, but with four lead characters and multiple side characters appearing (two played by actors from The Wire), it doesn’t feel so much like you’re watching a play on screen, and King’s direction – particularly the shifting camera angles – gives the audience more the sense of being in the room while the characters are talking. The dialogue is quick, alternating between banter and more serious philosophical commentary (as well as some insults), so the pace only lags when we get one of the four men away from the others. And all four of these men deliver performances that would be strong enough to lead the film if there weren’t three other guys doing the same thing.

Odom, Jr., is masterful as Sam Cooke, the least militant man in the room by a mile, who comes under fire from the other men for their perception that he’s selling out, as an artist and as a Black man, for money and fame, although he has a rejoinder to the argument and the debate circles onward. All four men get their fair share of dialogue, but Malcolm X is probably the next most important character to the plot, and Ben-Adir is just as good as Odom Jr. – perhaps aided by the makeup, hair, and glasses that make him a reasonable likeness for the man he’s portraying, but also because his character might have the most emotional range of the four. Ben-Adir has to give us Malcolm X the confident firebrand, and Malcolm X the ordinary human, with large ambitions and deep self-doubts. And his character is the straw that stirs the drink of this particular conversation (which did really happen, although we don’t know what was discussed).

The four men are certainly more complicated than the script allows, and in some ways it makes Cooke and Brown seem more heroic than they were or are. Cooke had multiple issues with women and was killed in highly dubious circumstances. Brown’s history of violence against women and men was well-documented thirty-plus years ago, before the cultural awareness of domestic violence was a fraction of what it is today. If you knew nothing of Brown before watching One Night in Miami, you’d think he was a pretty cool cat, but this is a decidedly one-sided view of a man with a long history of domestic violence allegations.

King has done something quite marvelous here by making a stage play feel less like a stage play than just about any recent film I’ve seen that made the same shift to the big screen. The film hums along, and there’s so much good dialogue here that I’d like to watch it again to see if I missed anything – and I say that as someone who almost never re-watches films, and certainly not twice in quick succession. Much of the praise for Onie Night in Miami might be because the film and its subject are important and timely, but don’t lose sight of the fact that this is a good story, well-acted and well-told, regardless of the moment in which it appears.

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→ December 29, 2020
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The Prom.

The thing with musicals is that, even if the plot is good, shouldn’t you remember at least one of the songs after you’ve watched it?

I actually liked The Prom, which has received some scathing reviews and mixed marks overall, even with some obvious flaws, from a hackneyed plot to the choice to cast a straight actor as a gay character at the center of the film, but the biggest problem with the movie is that the music just isn’t any good. I couldn’t sing or hum a single tune from the movie within a few hours after we turned it off. No musical can work like that, even when the feel-good story feels good, the lead actress is a star in the making, and some great actors are quite game for a script that doesn’t always serve them well.

The premise of The Prom, which was a Broadway musical before coming to Netflix and may have seemed fresher or more current when it debuted, is familiar: A high school in Indiana cancels its prom rather than let a student bring their same-sex partner as a date to the event. The student, Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), is out, but her girlfriend isn’t. Her principal (Keegan Michael-Key) is supportive, and sees this as a civil rights issue, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) heads the opposition, spouting some typical bromides about family values, life choices, and ‘won’t somebody please think of the children.’ (I found it interesting that they cast a Black actor in that role, perhaps to avoid bringing race into a story about defending  LGBTQ rights.) Four Broadway actors, two of whom have just learned their brand new show has received such savage reviews that it’s likely to close after just one night, get wind of this story and decide to head to Indiana to rally behind Emma – and give their own careers a boost of good publicity. Needless to say, this isn’t how things go once they arrive.

The four actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells, all of whom throw themselves completely into their rather absurd characters. Streep plays the diva, Corden her flamboyantly gay co-star, and both profess to be rather unaware of how the hoi polloi might live (although we later learn that’s a put-on). Kidman is a permanent understudy who never got her big break, and Rannells is “between gigs” and happens to be tending bar at the afterparty for Streep and Corden’s show. Kidman is, unsurprisingly if you’ve seen much of her work (like To Die For), the film’s secret weapon, sporting a convincing New York accent and giving her slim character her all, especially in her one big song, “Zazz,” a gentle satire of Chicago’s “All That Jazz” that unfortunately lacks the dancing part that would seal the homage. Rannells has even less to do, but does it well, especially in the song that sends up the show that made him a star, The Book of Mormon, where he responds to the argument that the Bible forbids homosexuality with a song that points out that it also forbids tattoos and the wearing of hats.

The story doesn’t really work if you squint at it, although that’s true of a lot of musicals, and many of the classics have plots that are little more than afterthoughts in service of the music. The resolution relies on a rather substantial plot contrivance, something the viewer knows for most of the movie, that is just too convenient. Some of the subplots actually work better – Key’s principal being a huge fan both of Streep and of Broadway in general, James Corden’s estrangement from his parents – but the script strains too hard to make the main storyline, which itself feels a few years out of date, work.

It succeeds in spite of itself, in large part because of Pellman, who makes her film debut in The Prom and looks every bit a star in the making. With her girlfriend still closeted, Emma carries most of the weight of the kids’ part of the storyline – her girlfriend is the only other teenaged character with any depth here – and Pellman is more than able to carry her share even in scenes with Streep and Kidman, two great actors who can be dominant on-screen, and when she finally gets a scene of her own, singing “Unruly Heart” as her character starts a Youtube channel and takes charge of her own side of the publicity battle.

Corden has come in for a fair amount of criticism for the fact that he’s a straight man playing a gay character, and for doing so with some effeminate flourishes that lean a little bit into stereotype. I can’t argue the point, but from a straight performance perspective, Corden was fine. He’ll never not be Smithy to me, but he was more than adequate here, and was enough of a presence to counterbalance Streep, who is the good kind of hammy for most of the film, even though the script really lets her down in several ways.

But all of this comes with the basic problem I had with The Prom: There isn’t a single song in it that I could still recall a few hours after we finished the film. I enjoyed the experience of watching it, but a musical without good music is a rather empty shell, with barely enough plot to fill a short film. The Happiest Season, a holiday film on Hulu starring Kristen Stewart, had a rather similar plot at the core of its story, and handled it more deftly and with bigger laughs, even though it relies on some hackneyed tropes in its story. So while I liked The Prom just enough, there’s no staying power to it, and, unlike with most musicals, I have no real interest in watching it again.

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→ October 2, 2020
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Enola Holmes.

Enola Holmes is utter dreck, a mediocre mystery wrapped in the cloak of a superior writer’s creation and some quality set design, wasting two solid actresses on a script desperate to tell you how clever it is. There have been worthwhile adaptations and continuations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work and iconic character, but this is just plain boring.

Enola Holmes, you see, is Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister, a fabrication by the author Nancy Springer for a series of books that posit that this 14-year-old girl, unmentioned by Doyle, was as quick-witted as her older brothers, with a special talent for cryptography. When her brothers try to send her off to finishing school, she absconds to London and starts a detective agency of her own, specializing in missing persons cases (as, I presume, murder was a bit much for the young adult literature market).

This Netflix adaptation of the series’ first book, The Case of the Missing Marquess, starts with Enola (Millie Bobby Brown, so critical as El on Stranger Things) at home with her mother (Helena Bonham Carter), but when the latter vanishes, Enola’s brothers show up to decide her fate. Mycroft is especially disdainful of her most unladylike ways and thus the stronger advocate of sending her off to a finishing school run by a Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw, also wasted in a minor role), while Sherlock (Henry Cavill, decidedly un-super here) equivocates and shows a soft spot for his younger sister. Enola takes off and encounters another fugitive, Lord Tewksbury, and the two pair up while on the run, separating in London before circumstances throw them together again – while both are pursued by a mysterious, creepy man named Linthorn who looks too much like a young Willem Dafoe. Enola tries to secure her freedom while figuring out the mystery around Tewksbury’s flight and avoiding her brothers and the interference of Inspector Lestrade.

The story is a convoluted mess, overly reliant on coincidence and failing to give Enola enough of a reason to solve the Tewksbury tangle. Enola’s character is just Sherlock as a teenaged girl, transmuting his disregard for rules and cold manner into a mischievous pixie who breaks the fourth wall with irritating frequency. (And of course she has to say “the game is afoot,” a hackneyedphrase Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes said exactly one time in all of the stories.) She takes off for London with a pile of money her mother presciently left hidden for her in a location she’s disguised with a cipher that Enola cracks, and has little trouble tracking her mother’s movements through the London underground – that’s another preposterous subplot that I won’t spoil because it’s just so stupid. While there, she just bumps into Tewksbury again, because the story needs them to run into each other.

The Sherlock character is a softer and kinder version of the one present in most of the stories and in film versions, which has made the film the subject of a peculiar lawsuit by the Doyle estate. (The character of Sherlock is in the public domain because most of the works that include him have lost their copyright protection; the estate claims that this film uses a later version of Sherlock where he shows emotion, and thus isn’t in the public domain.) This poses two problems: It’s not the Sherlock most of us know from canon or from depictions like Benedict Cumberbatch’s, and it also makes Sherlock really, really boring. There are no pithy observations, no witty ripostes, and none of the charm of watching his brain at work, which is a huge part of the appeal of Doyle’s writing – the same as it is for Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Wimsey.

This feels more than anything like an attempt to profit from someone else’s creation, because it’s devoid of anything original or interesting. Brown might play the single most important character in Stranger Things‘ ever-growing ensemble, although I think there are times the script pushes her to overact. She never inhabits this character, however, and the reason is probably that the character itself is two-dimensional and cartoonish. For a movie that’s been heavily hyped and received positive reviews, Enola Holmes is a shocking dud. If you’re a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, you’d do well to stay away.

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