→ September 16, 2020
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The Personal History of David Copperfield.

When word came out in mid-2019 that Armando Iannucci (The Death of Stalin, VEEP) was filming an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, I read the book in anticipation of its release, also rectifying a rather large gap in my own reading history. (I’d read five Dickens novels, two in high school and three by choice, but not this one, which Dickens himself called his favourite, and which the Guardian called the third “most Dickensian” of his novels.) The movie came out in the UK last year, but its arrival in the U.S. was delayed by COVID-19, and it just hit theaters earlier this month. It is marvelous, the best 2020 release I’ve seen so far this year, with a mostly faithful script, wonderful casting, and excellent use of the humor in Dickens’ rags-to-riches novel.

If you haven’t read the book, which I had not other than one of those Moby Books’ abridged, illustrated versions back in 1981 or so, it is the life story of its title character, from birth into straitened circumstances, through his widowed mother’s unfortunate choice of a misanthropic, controlling husband, to his indenture at his stepfather’s wine-selling business, and on and on in somewhat picaresque fashion. He encounters a host of eccentric characters, a few of whom, notably the venal Uriah Heep, have gained lasting reputation among the pantheon of literary creations, with several others providing comic relief among David’s series of misfortunes before he finally turns to writing as a vocation and finds success and financial security for the first time.

The first theatrical film version of Dickens’ classic novel in a half-century, The Personal History of David Copperfield might be most notable for the color-blind casting, although I’d argue that this choice is notable for how quickly you’ll stop noticing it. The casting itself is so perfect top to bottom that casting all-white actors couldn’t have produced a comparable result, notably Dev Patel as David himself, handling the pivotal role with aplomb, adapting to David’s changing views of the world and greater understanding of the people around him over the course of the story. Characters who are related by blood don’t share skin tone, and it couldn’t matter any less.

Many of the side characters are superbly cast as well, but none more so than Hugh Laurie as the befuddled Mr. Dick, which sees Laurie at his Woosterian best, and also gives that character a bit more to do than just to serve as comic relief. Mr. Dick’s host, David’s aunt Betsy Trotwood, is played by Tilda Swinton, who can certainly dominate a film in the wrong way when she gets to play a severe character; here, she gives Aunt Betsy more depth than the character has in the novel, making her more sympathetic and thus making it easier to understand why David is so generous to her as her own circumstances decline and he finds their relations reversed. Ben Whishaw delivers an unctuous, loathsome performance as Uriah Heep, complete with bowl-cut and affected speech that Patel later mimics to great comic effect. Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, has a lot of fun with the shifty but good-hearted Mr. Micawber, making him a little less exasperating on the screen than he is on the page.

The movie is brisk at two hours, and spends far more time on the first half of the novel than on the second, with great length given to David’s childhood and early adulthood, including his relationship with Mr. Micawber and time in a boarding school where he meets James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard). That choice gives us rather more prologue than David requires and rushes some of the resolutions, so that David’s marriage to Agnes is treated almost as an afterthought, and the unmasking of Uriah Heep plays out in a far less satisfying manner, because the audience has so much less time and reason to despise him, and also has less time to appreciate Whishaw’s deft portrayal of Heep’s scheming nature. The first half of the novel is important, but the second half is the payoff. The film gives you all of that payoff in the last thirty minutes, and it’s still fun, just condensed.

Iannucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell play the story extremely straight until close to the very end. The compression of the last half of the book requires a large change to the arc with Dora, which the screenwriters handle in a way that also comments on Dickens’ original story, where David marries Dora, realizes it’s unsuitable because she’s dull and needy, so Dickens has her conveniently die after suffering a miscarriage so that David can marry Agnes. Dora here is even sillier than she is in the book, making her a great comic presence, but rather than kill her off, the writers give her the perspicacity to find her own way off the stage. The Ham/Emily/Steerforth subplot, itself rather tangential to David’s own narrative, also has a rather significant change that I would argue is less successful even though Dickens’ own handling of that arc relied too much on coincidence.

I had no trouble following the plot, because I’d read the novel recently, but I do wonder how well viewers could follow the plot, especially the last half hour or so, if they had no exposure to the book or previous adaptations. It’s the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy problem – a novel of 500+ pages is hard to condense into a two-hour film without losing something, and you’d rather lose details or exposition than plot or character development. Perhaps the Emily subplot could have gone instead, as essential as it is on the page, because so much time is spent on David’s childhood visit to the seaside hovel where she lives, to give us more time with Heep and David at the law firm so we better understand their rivalry and why Heep is so odious. (We do see plenty of Mr. Wickfield, played by Benedict Wong, in various stages of inebriation.) Yet The Personal History of David Copperfield is joyous because of what Iannucci and Blackwell retained – Mr. Dick, Dumb Dora, the Micawbers – and how well Dev Patel brings that title character to life.

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→ September 3, 2020
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The Burnt Orange Heresy.

The Burnt Orange Heresy adapts the best-reviewed book by pulp author Charles Ray Willeford, a short 1971 novel where Willeford took aim at the worlds of art and art criticism inside the framework of a thriller. For about 80 minutes, it’s a great ride, a long con with a handful of actors at the tops of their games … and then it flubs the ending as severely as any film in recent memory, comparable to First Reformed but with so much less to redeem it before the missteps.

James Figueras (Claes Bang) is an art critic giving a talk to American tourists about how important art criticism is when Berenice (Elizabeth Debicki) wanders in towards the end of the talk; the two strike up a flirtatious conversation and quickly end up in bed. She says they’ll never see each other again, but he seems to have other ideas and invites her along for a weekend at the country house of the wealthy art dealer Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger, his first film role in two decades). It turns out that Cassidy wants to involve Figueras, who has some shady dealings in his past, in a scheme to steal one of the last paintings by the reclusive artist Debney (Donald Sutherland), who lives in the guest house on Cassidy’s estate and hasn’t released any paintings in a half century. This plot has unforeseen complications, of course, leading to tragic consequences.

While the film sets up the plot, this film is as tight as any heist movie from recent years – tighter, say, than Widows, a superior film overall that also featured Debicki – and largely gets you on the wavelength of the characters. I’m not totally sold on the chemistry between Bang and Debicki, but the dialogue works and when they disagree, the tension builds slowly from within. (It helps that they are both giants; Bang is 6’4″, Debicki 6’3″, so they’re eye to eye – and it’s funny how they tower over Jagger and Sutherland.) Bang is a very convincing con man; the entire opening sequence, where he delivers his seminar to the happy tourists, is a clinic in grabbing an audience’s attention and holding them rapt. He’s weirdly charming, although I’d say his charm works more when he’s playing the art critic than when he’s wooing Berenice. Jagger, meanwhile, is clearly having the time of his life as Cassidy, hamming it up in a way that might not work for a veteran actor but here, where you can’t exactly forget who he actually is, it works to his advantage.

When this movie hits the final stretch, though, it breaks a leg so gruesomely it should be taken off the track and shot. While it may adhere to the plot of the book, it hinges here on a character doing something so incredibly stupid that it destroys any suspension of disbelief, and then robs us of a fairly critical resolution to a particular arc. That forced decision does get a series of double entendres in an I-know-what-you-did ending, but by that point, I’d thrown in the towel on the plot.

If the novel’s intent was to parody the art world, it comes through in pieces in the film – and, although I’ve seen several reviews that say that aspect of the film is pretentious, I never found it so. It doesn’t expect you to know anything about fine art, and the wry humor of its satirical elements will work even if you don’t follow that world. But for the heist arc, and the way various hints and implications don’t actually pan out in the end, turned this movie from a B+ to a failing grade.

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→ August 10, 2020
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The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

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→ January 13, 2020
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Little Women.

Greta Gerwig’s debut as a writer and director, Lady Bird, was a largely autobiographical story of her own teenage years in Sacramento, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role as Gerwig’s fictional stand-in. Ronan repeats the performance in a way as Jo March in Gerwig’s generally wonderful adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel Little Women, helping with the framing device Gerwig uses to tell the story in a nonlinear way… although Ronan here is completely upstaged by one of her own (fictional) sisters.

Little Women was itself an autobiographical novel of Alcott’s own upbringing in Massachusetts, telling the story of the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, who live with their mother Marmie and housekeeper Hannah while their father is away serving as an army chaplain during the civil war. The book, published here in two parts (and, in something I just learned, still sometimes seen abroad as Little Women and Good Wives), covers a period of about four years that sees the girls through courtships and tragedy, finally ending with three of the girls marrying and – there’s no way you don’t know this – one of the four dying of complications from scarlet fever. It was an immediate commercial success, spawning two further sequels (which I’ve never read), and remains a favorite for young readers today, in part because it’s one of the only novels of its century that truly focuses on its women, both as unique, well-developed characters themselves, and as women in a highly restrictive, patriarchal society.

The framing device Gerwig uses wears out its welcome a little quickly, especially given some of the abrupt transitions between past and present. She splits the time period across the seven years between Beth’s illness and her death, using different lighting and, eventually, a different haircut for one character as ways to distinguish between the periods, but some of the scenes don’t have enough time to develop fully because the next cut yanks you out of that moment and into a different one entirely. The shot of Jo grieving at her sister’s grave ends way too quickly and transitions to a scene of relative mirth that I think robbed the former of some of its power. There’s probably a good way to tell this story in a nonlinear way, still using the motif of Jo writing her great novel about her family as the framing device, that doesn’t make some of the intervening scenes so terse.

Beyond that, however, this film is just great, anchored by so many wonderful performances that it’s hard to identify just who is carrying what. Ronan is very good as Jo, although of course she is far prettier than Jo is ever described on Alcott’s pages, and particularly excels in any scene where she gets to crank up her emotions in any direction – and in her scenes with Laurie, played rakishly by Timothée Chalamet, who might as well have been born to play this young bachelor on the road to roué. But Florence Pugh is the biggest star here as Amy, a character who gets more emotional growth in the movie than she does in the book, going much farther from snotty younger sister to a young woman aware of how little the world might value her, fighting for any agency she can find. Pugh isn’t the lead, but I think she’s more important to this movie than anyone else.

Laura Dern might win Best Supporting Actress for her turn in Marriage Story, but I liked her performance here as Marmie even more – she’s the original supermom, showing the patience of a saint, and delivering one of the best and most memorable lines in the movie when Jo asks why she’s never angry. Bob Odenkirk is only in the film briefly as Mr. March, but he’s wonderful and is fast becoming one of my favorite character actors, even when the role requires little or no humor at all. Chris Cooper is delightful as Laurie’s grandfather; Meryl Streep does quite a lot with Aunt March, even though the character has maybe one and a half notes to her. Even Tracy Letts has a minor role as Jo’s publisher, and he’s the perfect amount of grump for the job.

And then there are the other two sisters, Meg, played by Emma Watson, and Beth, played by Eliza Scanlen. Watson just seems miscast here, speaking with a sort of affected precision that doesn’t line up with Meg, who truly wants the life of domesticity for which she’s destined. Scanlen, though, is just plain weird as Beth, who is also written strangely – made more infantile on the screen than she is on the page, which becomes particularly offputting when Beth is 13 and 14 in the earlier time period and she’s portrayed by an actress who is 21. Meg’s character isn’t that critical to the film, but Beth’s is, and the portrayal here is a bit jarring.

The ending Gerwig cooks up is rather sublime, and a welcome departure from authenticity. Jo is even more Alcott here than she ever could be in the novel, and Gerwig slips in some details from Alcott’s life to spice things up a bit, making her a shrewd negotiator and getting us to the big finish with a metafictional flourish for the ages. It’s not faithful to the source material, but given how problematic Jo’s literary marriage – which Alcott apparently wrote under duress from her publishers – is for the novel and her character, this is a substantial improvement.

We’ll find out the Oscar nominations the same morning I post this, but I’m guessing we’ll get Best Picture, Best Actress (Ronan), Best Supporting Actress (Pugh), Best Costume Design, and Best Adapted Screenplay, with maybe even money on Gerwig getting a Best Director nod. We’ll see if the backlash against the Golden Globes’ all-male director slate helps Gerwig at all; (I’m assuming three slots are locks, for Scorsese, Tarantino, and Mendes, with Boon Jong Ho a good shot at the fourth.) It’s not Best Picture, but it’ll certainly end up in my top 10 once I’ve finished the various candidates from 2019; as long as Pugh gets a nomination, though, I’ll call that a win for the film.

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→ November 20, 2018
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Widows.

Steve McQueen’s new film Widows, his first since his Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave in 2013, is an adaptation of a 1980s British TV series of the same name, a series McQueen says he wanted to adapt for some time. He’s maintained much of the framework of the series’ six-episode first season, which spawned a second season (Widows 2: Electric Boogaloo) and later a sequel series, but added some new elements and rewritten the resolution completely. It’s a dense, layered, frenetic heist film that packs a ton of backstory into the first two-thirds of the film – too much, really – before a tremendous finish worthy of the genre.

Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is the leader of a four-man crew that we see trying to escape from a robbery at the start of the film, only to have them die in a police shootout and explosion, which leaves their four wives as the widows of the film’s title. Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis, who’s going to get an Oscar nomination for this) finds out that Harry stole from would-be city alderman Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who wants his $2 million back and gives her a month to find it any way she can. Harry left behind a notebook with details on his next job, with a potential $5 million prize, so Veronica decides to contact the other widows – whom she’s never met – to assemble a crew and pull off the heist themselves so she can pay off Jamal and set the widows up financially.

The effort by the widows to become a team and pull off this heist is the main plot in the film, but there’s so much more layered on top of it that many scenes end too quickly, so the tension doesn’t always build enough and we don’t always get enough exposition on the characters. Jamal is running against Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), who’s trying to win the seat long held by his father (Robert Duvall as a pretty obvious Trump surrogate), but it turns out that Jack has a connection to Harry, and also ends up with other connections to the widows. Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), another of the widows, was abused by her husband and by her mother (Jacki Weaver, underutilized here), and ends up trying to be a high-end escort to make ends meet, but really comes into her own by working with these other women and taking care of herself for the first time. The third widow in the crew, Melinda (Michelle Rodriguez), is the least interesting character by far, with the most cursory backstory, a role that certainly does the actress playing it no favors and ultimately ends up overshadowed by the other members of the group, including the woman they bring on as the driver, Belle (Cynthia Erivo).

There is a lot of extra material in this movie, which feels at least like McQueen might have tried to pack in all the backstories from the TV series into one two-hour film. There’s a strand around Veronica’s son, deceased before the movie begins, that has no relevance to anything else in the movie and feels like it’s been tacked on to make a political point (a valid one, but not germane to this film). The political campaign is overstuffed for a subplot, and includes its own threads that never get resolved – the black preacher whose support is with the white candidate gives us a dynamic sermon and then seems to serve no other purpose in the film. Jamal’s story is vague – possibly by design – and his arc has no real ending. The salon is where we first meet Belle, but nothing else about the salon is interesting; it reappears later in another scene that tries to make a political point, this one less effective than the one about Veronica’s son. Even Frumpy Carrie Coon is just a prop here, which is a waste of a terrific (and beautiful) actress.
The real strength of Widows isn’t its story, but its cast, which looks like someone drafted a fantasy team of actors in a league with only four players. Davis is excellent, as she always is, although I think her character doesn’t become three-dimensional enough until the film is well underway. Erivo doesn’t even arrive until halfway through but she is an immediate force, with an epic scene when Belle first meets Veronica. Debicki – who towers over the other women, even though her character starts as a shrinking violet with no strength to defend herself – has the strongest arc of the women in the crew and delivers an outstanding performance to make that character growth credible, discovering that she’s capable of doing more than she imagined while also learning to stand up for herself. (Her character’s scenes as an escort, with a very short-looking and oddly coiffed Lukas “The Pin” Haas, give the film its best side quest.) Daniel Kaluuya plays Jamal’s brother and is utterly terrifying as a sociopathic killer. Farrell’s role could easily have been a caricature of a crooked Chicago political scion, but he turns on the Farrell charm – not to mention a passable Chicago accent – and gives the character some emotional depth and enough different faces to avoid that trap.

There’s a pervasive sense in Widows that McQueen is telling the story of women pushed into bad situations by the men they trusted, then finding their own power and agency in the wake of the botched heist, only to have even more men threaten them, push them around, or just ignore them. We can see Alice develop that sense of confidence and empowerment explicitly, like when she asks Melinda for the building plans and manages to figure out where the target is (with one convenient little coincidence). Belle hustles to make money to support her daughter, but is held back by a lack of economic opportunity or a reliable support structure. Veronica had the strongest career prior to their husbands’ deaths, but is also pushed into unexplored territory, the extent of which isn’t clear until the final scene of the film.

Where McQueen goes astray is in piling so much other thematic material on top of this. There’s a statement about politics, how so many of the people who want to represent us offer both good and bad sides, that issues are frequently not as clearcut as we’d like … and then there’s Tom Mulligan speaking like President Trump about minorities and immigrants. There’s a subplot about white police shooting unarmed black citizens that has nothing to do with the rest of the story – and much of the content here that touches on issues of race just doesn’t work, even as it sits alongside discussions of gender that do. Economic inequality pops up. All of these are themes worth covering, but the total puts a weight on Widows that no two-hour film that is also busy telling a ripping heist story could support.

There is far too much good in Widows for all of these quibbles to bring the film down too far; it’s still a lot of fun and very sharp, never talking down to the audience except for the police brutality thread, and with some details in the heist sequence itself that aren’t properly resolved. There’s a ton to unpack from this movie, and five performances that are at least worthy of consideration for awards – Davis seems like a lock for a Best Actress nomination, while Debicki, Erivo, Kaluuya, and Farrell are each outstanding in supporting roles. If you can hang with all the prologue and the terse editing, the payoff here is enormous.

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→ October 26, 2018
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Disobedience.

Sebastián Lelio directed 2017’s A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this spring and was one of my top five films of last year. His follow-up, Disobedience (available free on amazon prime), is his first English-language movie, but continues the theme of focusing on people who are and feel marginalized by their communities, in this case looking at two gay women who have taken different paths since their sexuality was uncovered by the Orthodox Jewish community where they lived. It’s based on the 2006 novel by Naomi Alderman, who later won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Power.

Ronit (Rachel Weisz) has returned to the community from exile upon learning that her father, Rav Krushka (Anton Lesser), has died, but it’s clear from her arrival at her childhood friend Dovid’s (Alessandro Nivola) house that she is an outcast. She’s also surprised to see that her other close friend from childhood, Esti (Rachel McAdams), has married Dovid in the interim, and that no one even tried to contact her to tell her of the wedding. Dovid invites Ronit to stay in their guest room, to the chagrin of the more conservative members of the community, and the film slowly reveals the history between the two women – that they had some kind of affair as teenagers, and were discovered by the Rav, which led to Ronit’s hegira to New York, but also led the Rav to push Esti to marry Dovid. The two women find their attraction to each other hasn’t dimmed, but as the flame is rekindled, the inevitable consequences ensue, and Esti and Dovid both find themselves facing difficult choices between the constraints of their insular community and the exercise of the free will that the Rav himself discussed in his final sermon.

Where A Fantastic Woman was dramatic and brisk, moving the lead character from one crisis to the next, Disobedience is subtle and measured, relying on words far more than actions to advance the plot. Esti is the real heart of the film, because she chose to stay when Ronit left, and is now facing the same emotional conflict a second time – but now has the obligations of marriage as well as the understanding of an adult. The script emphasizes the lack of agency for women in such a community, which could just as easily apply to strict Muslim or fundamentalist Christian communities, even before we consider the taboos of homosexuality in such religions. Ronit’s life in New York is defined solely by her career as a photographer; there is no mention of friends or lovers, except when she confesses to Esti that she hasn’t been with another woman since their liaison ended, so while there’s an implication that Ronit is happy because she fled, there’s also a void where the information surrounding someone’s life would be. Yet if Esti has friends, we don’t really see them either; her role is the devoted wife of the presumed heir to the Rav’s place as leader of the congregation, but there is no definition to her independent of that.

The film is anchored by three very strong performances, McAdams’ in particular, as Esti has the central struggle in the film – deciding whether to even give in to her feelings, and then, since she does (in the movie’s one truly intense scene of action rather than dialogue), coping with the consequences and the choices she must make in the wake of those. You could diagram the film’s story as one where the troika’s friendship has devolved to the point that Esti is now pulled equally by one friend on each side – Ronit on the side of freedom, Dovid on the side of tradition or family or obligation. Nivola’s accent is utterly convincing; the American-born actor’s grandmother was a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in the 1930s, but he also studied Hebrew to be able to recite many of the lines in the film and the accuracy of the accent helps establish his character’s hidebound nature. When the denouement arrives, Dovid has as much to do with it as Esti does, with the film’s themes of agency and free will returning after the late Rav’s speech introduced them in the opening scenes. The ending might be a little too pat, making the next steps that come after the big decisions seem easier than they would certainly be, but the path that these characters take from Ronit’s arrival until that moment is a journey to appreciate.

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→ September 13, 2018
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On Chesil Beach.

I read Ian McEwan’s Atonement back in 2007 but strongly disliked how manipulative the narrative turned out to be, so I skipped the highly acclaimed film adaptation that came shortly after, with a then-unknown 13-year-old actress named Saoirse Ronan playing one of the pivotal roles in the movie. Ronan is now, of course, a three-time Academy Award nominee, including one nod for Atonement, and returned to McEwan’s milieu as the star of this year’s adaptation of his novella On Chesil Beach (amazon • iTunes), which covers familiar thematic territory but does so without the trickery of the earlier work, and builds slowly to a crescendo finish that ends with an gut-punch conclusion that speaks volumes with very little dialogue to punctuate it.

On Chesil Beach is an ostensible love story between upper-class Florence (Ronan) and working-class Edward (Billy Howle), told mostly via flashbacks on their wedding night as the two approach their first time in bed. A sweet, awkward romance emerges in scenes from their courtship, including stories of her frigid mother and angry, distant father, as well as images of his difficult childhood with a mother who suffered brain damage in an accident and has trouble with memories and with some basic social graces (including, as it turns out, wearing clothes when required). It eventually comes out that Florence’s wedding-night jitters are more than just tremors of anticipation, but that there is something extremely wrong beyond mere ignorance of the mechanics of sex. When Edward makes his first, clumsy attempt, the flashbacks turn darker – apparently the reason for her terror is clearer in the movie than the book – and the tone of the film turns abruptly into one of regret and shame for Edward as he details his life after the wedding night.

As with Atonement, one character’s rash decision in youth affects multiple lives, but here there is no pretense or deception on McEwan’s part – we know what happened in the ‘real time’ of the script, and there’s no sleight of hand to mislead us. For me, at least, that made the final half hour, from the wedding night, the revelation (to us, but not to Edward) of Florence’s past trauma, and the jumps forward to Edward’s future without Florence gutting to watch, as he realizes what his reactions in the heat of the moment – both out of anger and shame – have cost him over the remainder of his life.

Music is a recurrent theme in On Chesil Beach as well, including the use of classical music (Florence’s passion, as she plays in a string quartet) and early rock and roll (Edward especially loves Chuck Berry) to further distinguish the two main characters’ class differences. There’s also a scene about adding a fifth member to the group where we see a totally different side of Florence, a stronger, almost domineering presence at the head of the quartet, in full contrast to the timid woman shown in intimate scenes with Edward, as if to make clear that she’s not a nervous or weak person, but is repressed in a specific situation for a specific reason.

Ronan is superb, as always, although there are certainly scenes here where she’s reduced a bit by stilted dialogue to standing around in cute dresses; her character is by far the more pivotal of the two, and requires more restraint than the role of Edward, whom Howle plays as emotionally messy and underdeveloped, himself probably as unprepared for the institution of marriage and the responsibilities one has to a partner as Florence was for sex. The movie’s first hour or so is fairly slow going, I think by design, and some of the side characters are very thin, including Florence’s mother (played by Emily Watson), whose role in all of this could have used more explanation and whose attitude towards her daughters is itself hard to fathom.

At the 80 minute mark, I was sure I’d be calling On Chesil Beach a trifle, or even a bit dull, but the turnaround towards the end was so powerful that it forced me to reassess everything that came in the first 2/3 of the film. Nothing prepared me for how the story would wrap up, or how McEwan’s screenplay would shift the focus to make it clear that the blame isn’t on Florence, and that we’ve seen too much of the story through Edward’s eyes to understand how wrong he was to react as he did. The result is a potent, wrenching portrait of regret that also serves as a plea for understanding when someone we love needs it most.

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→ August 30, 2018
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BlacKkKlansman.

Spike Lee’s return to directing with BlacKkKlansman has been met with wide critical acclaim and a positive commercial response, with the film earning back its reported budget in its first week of release. The film is based on the true story of African-American cop Ron Stallworth, who infiltrated a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan while working in the Colorado Springs Police Department, surrounded by white officers, detailed in Stallworth’s memoir Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime.) Stallworth paired with a white partner who was his stand-in at KKK meetings, and eventually managed to speak to and meet David Duke, while revealing that there were members of the chapter who worked in law enforcement, the military, and, in two cases, NORAD. (Those last two were allegedly reassigned to Greenland or somewhere else in the Arctic.) Lee invents a few details and then intersperses the story with vignettes that are far more clearly targeted at the modern audience, closing with footage from the neo-Nazi rally and the eventual murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last year. It’s a powerful story that offers no pretense about its ideals or what viewers should think and do in this era of New Racism, and is by turns terrifically funny and intense. It’s also a total mess of a film that reeks of the director’s self-indulgence and eventually works to undermine some of its most important messages.

BlacKkKlansman is at its best when Lee focuses the story on the investigation as it was led by two men, Stallworth (John David Washington) and Phillip “Flip” Zimmerman (Adam Driver). After about 30 minutes of prologue that gives some backdrop to the racial animus in the country at the time and gets Stallworth into the police department under its minority hiring initiative – and exiles him to the records room – he makes the fateful phone call in response to an ad in a local paper, looking for new members, from the local chapter of the Klan. Stallworth calls, tells the man on the phone how much he hates black people and every other group the Klan was known for targeting, and is invited to a meeting that Friday night, which is a problem given the color of his skin. He recruits Zimmerman to go in his stead, under his name, wearing a wire, which begins the investigation that, in reality, lasted nine months and uncovered those members’ identities. (The film creates a fictional, planned bombing that never happened, but that does allow for an intense climatic scene that drowns in its own bathos as the overwritten script piles clichés on top of a pivotal moment.)

Lee appears to have been given a free hand with the project, which was produced by Jordan Peele (who was set to direct it but gave it to Lee to work on other films), and I wonder if Peele felt unable or unwilling to confront one of the most important figures in black American cinema over some of the film’s many bombastic or incoherent sequences. There are gimmicks galore here, such as the isolated head shots of black audience members listening to Kwame Ture and the hallway scene near the film’s conclusion, that are nothing more than directorbation, the film equivalent of an umpshow, where Lee has to remind us that he’s at the wheel and we are watching an artist at work. One of the film’s many interludes from the Stallworth narrative itself is the Klan initiation rite, where Stallworth’s partner attends in his stead and David Duke presides, showing the racist 1916 film Birth of a Nation to whip the members (and their wives) into a frenzy. Lee intersperses that with scenes from a black student union meeting at the local college – I think it’s University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, but wasn’t sure if it was named as such – where a man, played by Harry Belafonte, tells the story of the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, in 1917. Belafonte’s character was a close friend of Washington’s, but the character and the meeting appear to be fabricated for the film, although the grotesque torture-murder of Washington was very real, attended by thousands of whites as if the castration, mutilation, and slow immolation of a black teenager were merely the day’s entertainment.

The unexpected star of the film isn’t Washington – yes, that’s Denzel’s son – but Driver, who delivers a nuanced, two-sided performance as a cop who finds his stolid attitude that any case is just part of the job affected by his exposure to such inveterate hate, while also posing as a very convincing racist, anti-Semitic zealot. (Zimmerman’s character is a non-observant Jew, but the real undercover officer, known only as “Chuck” in Stallworth’s memoir, was not.) He’s so magnetic in the role that the film lags when he’s out of the dialogue, which I’d say is the opposite of the effect he has as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise. Washington is fine, but isn’t charismatic enough to be the center of the film, and he’s often overshadowed by others on screen including Driver; Topher Grace as a dead ringer for David Duke; and Laura Harrier as Patrice, Stallworth’s (fictional) love interest and President of the Black Students’ Union in the film. Corey Hawkins has a small part earlier in the film as Ture that is a clinic in delivering a rhetorical speech, although it’s again blunted by those camera tricks Lee employs to remind us he’s in charge.

For a film with a deadly serious subject, BlacKkKlansman doesn’t skimp on the humor. There’s a Wire reference near the start of the film that had me laughing very loudly – and I was the only one in the theater who did so – although I was disappointed not to hear Paul Walter Hauser drop an “incorrect” somewhere to nod to his scene-stealing performance in last year’s I, Tonya. The allusions to our modern era of ‘very fine people’ can go too far – Stallworth telling his white sergeant that Americans would never put an openly racist person in the White House is a bit too on the nose – but work well when Lee steps back and lets the dialogue and/or action show us how little has actually changed. An early scene when Patrice and Ture are stopped for driving while black and then threatened and assaulted by the officers, while also fictional, is extremely effective for how it just tells a story and lets the audience connect the dots. The telling of the Washington lynching might have been more effective as a straight scene, rather than one cut back and forth to the frothing Klan members watching and cheering on Birth of a Nation. The film just needed less of these trappings and more of the basics. The scenery, the clothes, and the hairstyles all set the scene incredibly well; even little touches like background colors in offices or the weaker lighting in some of the scenes in Klan members’ houses (so the film looks like movies or TV shows from the time period) contribute to the atmosphere. The one gimmick that really works, the transition to Charlottesville footage, with a clip of Trump referring to violent neo-Nazis as “very fine people” just in case anyone still wondered where his sympathies lie, is a masterstroke – but it’s the only gimmick BlacKkKlansman needed. Instead we get a half-dozen on top of that, so by the time you get to the end of the film, you’re exhausted from trying to figure out where any of this is going.

Note: The Slate piece discussing what’s real and what’s fictional in this film was essential in writing this review.

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→ July 1, 2018
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Annihilation.

Paramount made some curious decisions earlier this year with the release of the film Annihiliation (amazon • iTunes), loosely based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name (which I have not read yet), including an off-period release date in the U.S. and the sale of the film directly to Netflix for most of the world (other than the U.S., Canada, and China). Marketing of the film wasn’t great either; I saw the trailer before its theatrical run, and the trailer doesn’t represent the film well at all, overselling the horror elements and underselling the story. The result is that the movie didn’t fare that well at the box office despite positive reviews, undercut somewhat by Paramount’s machinations and I think the failure to push this film as a smart sci-fi flick that overcomes some modest flaws with a big finish.

The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) in medical isolation, being interrogated by a British scientist (Benedict Wong) about what happened to her on a mission that went wrong and from which she is the only survivor. She’s somewhat vague on details, after which we flash back to before the mission and see that she’s a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School and that her husband, a special forces Sergeant (Oscar Isaac), has been missing for a year and is presumed dead. He shows up at the house one day, but is totally vacant and almost immediately begins hemorrhaging, which eventually leads to Lena volunteering to lead a mission of five women soldiers and researchers into a mysterious, growing region called the Shimmer, into which the military has sent many missions but from which only Lena’s husband has ever returned. The women find a seemingly impossible environment where animals and plants are swapping DNA, with increasingly horrifying results the longer the team stays within its boundaries.

Annihilation has two main conceits in its story: the ongoing mystery of what the Shimmer is and what it’s doing, and the fact that previous teams have all disappeared and are likely dead, a Lovecraftian mystery trending towards horror since we know from the start that Lena is the only survivor. (The Wikipedia entry on the movie notes the script’s similarity to a Lovecraft short story, “The Colour of Space.”) The former is revealed gradually at first, but proceeds in fits and starts in accordance with discoveries the team makes and with Lena’s examinations of blood and other cells under her microscope. The latter builds as the story progresses and the team moves through the Shimmer with increasing disorientation; they encounter animals that loosely resemble familiar creatures but that have evolved at impossible speeds. Eventually Lena reaches the lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer and discovers something more of the nature of the anomaly in a gorgeous special-effects sequence right before her final battle to escape.

The script does waste too much time on irrelevant details outside of the mission, including Lena’s affair with a colleague while her husband is missing, a subplot that is neither germane to the main story nor resolved in any satisfactory manner during the film. And while screenwriter/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) tries to give the team members some identities as individuals, none but Lena comes across as much more than a redshirt, not even ostensible team leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), so none of their losses is particularly tangible to the viewer. One team member cracks under the stress after the first death and another attack, which is foreshadowed in earlier dialogue but really not well explained by her character at all. Lena’s decision not to reveal to other team members that her husband was on an earlier mission is played up as a major issue, but without justifying why that’s a big deal or why the team member who cracks is so angry about the omission.

There are two scenes of gore in Annihiliation, more than enough to earn its R rating but not so much that I’d call this a straight horror film. There’s more of an intellectual undercurrent to the script than the trailer gave it credit for having; the way the Shimmer evolves, and then affects the members of the team, poses real questions about what it means to be human or even conscious, ones the film doesn’t try to answer even as characters directly ask what the Shimmer “wants.” Maybe it was just too hard to market on its own merits, but Annihilation is intense and smart enough to deserve to find an audience now that it’s more widely available.

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→ February 25, 2018
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The Girl Without Hands.

When the Oscar nominations were announced a few weeks ago, I tweeted an image showing all of the eligible films for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and showed that Boss Baby, which scored one of the nominations, wasn’t close to a top five film in the group in the estimation of critics. At that point, though, I hadn’t seen any of the films ranked above it (using Rotten Tomatoes scores, a crude measure but useful for our purposes here). I can now say I have seen one film that was eligible for the award, and was #BetterThanBossBaby: The Girl Without Hands (La jeune fille sans mains), a stunningly animated version of the Grimm Brothers folk tale about a girl … um, with no hands. It’s available to rent on iTunes and amazon.

The girl, never named, suffers for her father’s avarice; when the film starts, the impoverished miller strikes a deal with the devil to give him “what’s behind his mill” in exchange for wealth, not realizing that his daughter was in the apple tree behind the mill at that moment. Eventually, the man’s refusal to give up the river of gold that is now running his mill costs him everything, including his daughter, whose hands he lops off at the devil’s insistence. She flees, eventually finding a prince who marries her, only to have the devil reappear and try once again to claim her for his part of the original bargain.

This adaptation, first released in France in 2016, was entirely written, directed, and animated by Sébastien Laudenbach, marking his first feature film. The animation style is like nothing I’ve seen before in an animated feature – the outlines of characters and objects are rough, and the colored portions inside those lines don’t always move in sync with the outlines, which is obviously by design and gives the entire film a ghostly atmosphere. The colors are bold and vibrant, with less shading than we expect now from animated films that try to look three-dimensional. The film is mostly faithful to the original tale, which has many supernatural elements, and Laudenbach’s non-realistic approach fits it perfectly.

The Grimms’ story is a rather blunt, grotesque fable about the corrupting power of greed, with just one character of any import, the girl, voiced beautifully by French actress Anaïs Demoustier. Her faith in her father is not rewarded, and her strength in the face of the tragedy is part of the story’s moral (which sort of pounds you over the head). Laudenbach and Demoustier at least manage to humanize her, even though his fidelity to the story limits how much depth the character can get on screen, and he altered the ending slightly to tie the restoration of her hands to something more specific than the Grimms offered. She’s an obvious object for pity; Laudenbach and Demoustier make her more than just pathetic.

It’s the imagery that makes this movie, though; Laudenbach gives the film a tactile look, like we’re watching images flicker on canvas or paper. He plays little visual games with his characters as well, having them move as if they’re aware that their outlines and their flesh aren’t quite together, such as having a character hide in what looks like its own shadow at one moment. It’s just such a feast for the eyes, in a way that’s completely novel in the era of hyper realistic CG animation, and it’s thoroughly refreshing.

As for why this was overlooked by the Academy … I have no idea. It ran at Cannes in the ACID program, a simultaneous screening during that city’s film festival, in 2016. It won the grand prize in the Tokyo Anime Awards last year. It’s at 100% fresh with 19 reviews, all of which were written in 2017. I can’t believe voters saw this and still went with Boss Baby; hell, The Red Turtle got a nomination last year and was just as obscure. Watch The Girl Without Hands and I think you’ll agree its omission is a mistake.

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