Maestro.

Leonard Bernstein lived a long and interesting life, earning his place in the pantheon of American music. It’s hard to believe Maestro couldmake him and his life so utterly boring. (It’s streaming exclusively on Netflix.)

Directed and co-written by Bradley Cooper, Maestro is a formulaic biopic that often seems afraid to truly engage with its subject (played by Cooper) or his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). The film begins with Bernstein at age 25, thrust into the lead conductor role one night at the New York Philharmonic when the guest conductor is unable to go on, a jumbled mess of a scene that foreshadows the movie’s chronic problems with pacing and tempo. Bernstein is in a relationship with the clarinet player David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), but soon afterwards meets Felicia at a cocktail party, pursuing and marrying her, although he was gay and had a series of affairs with men throughout their marriage. His career progresses in the background, with nods here and there to his series of successful endeavors (and no mention of his big flop, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which became his last Broadway musical), while his marriage teeters and he and Felicia separate, briefly, before reuniting because he conducted a great performance in 1973. And then she gets cancer and dies.

Maestro isn’t even bad, or so-bad-it’s-good, but dull. Bernstein was fascinating as a person and a composer, yet the film does neither side of him justice. He wrote the music and score for West Side Story, scored On the Waterfront, and wrote three symphonies and numerous other orchestral and chamber pieces, which you’d barely glean from this film. There’s relatively little of his music, certainly not his most famous pieces, in the movie, yet the script focuses for an eternity on that one 1973 performance, where he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at Ely Cathedral – a show that, in the film, led Felicia to forgive his infidelities, which seems to be a bit of Hollywood nonsense. If you knew nothing of Bernstein before watching Maestro, you would likely leave the film believing he was a conductor and not a composer, or at best a minor composer of lesser-known works.

His relationship with Felicia is supposed to be the heart of the film, but it’s in cardiac arrest; it’s a series of interactions, but few if any are illuminating, and there is zero chemistry of any sort between the two of them, which matters given how much the film wants us to believe that, despite his homosexuality, he both cared for and needed Felicia. It’s as if the two characters barely inhabit the same universe, exacerbated by both actors’ attempts to mimic the accents and intonations of the people they’re portraying, which makes Mulligan sound like she’s in a Julian Fellowes period piece. The drive for verisimilitude in biopics has some clear drawbacks, from the distractions of Cooper’s makeup and voice mimicry to the sense that these two characters aren’t even from the same era.

Nothing sinks Maestro as much as how boring the story is, though. There are certainly several ways to treat a protagonist who’s a philanderer, and struggling with his sexual identity in a time of entrenched discrimination and bigotry, yet is also an icon in his field and was recognized as a genius in his own time. Maestro seems unwilling to engage with the darker side of Bernstein’s character – that, even if Felicia accepted him as who he was and what he was doing, he seemed to be using her as cover and as an emotional support. There’s a bigger question of whether a relationship like this can even work, or be equitable, but the script never comes close to exploring it. I’m mystified by the wide acclaim for the film, but there’s always one major Oscar-nominated film that I just don’t get.

Speaking of which, Maestro was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay; needless to say, I don’t think it should win any of them, with multiple better choices in each category. Greta Lee (Past Lives) should have had Mulligan’s nod, and Leonardo DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon) or Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers) would have been a better choice than Cooper. The one race to watch here would be Best Makeup and Hairstyling, given the controversy over Cooper’s use of a prosthetic nose to better resemble Bernstein, a choice that the composer’s children have publicly supported. I don’t believe there’s a clear favorite in that category, since Barbie was snubbed, while Variety and Indiewire have both tabbed Maestro as the likely winner. I haven’t seen three of the five nominees yet, so I’ll defer any opinion on this.

The House of Silk.

I’ve loved much of the work of Anthony Horowitz, who created Foyle’s War, one of my favorite TV series of all time, and wrote the book Magpie Murders and the authorized James Bond novel Forever and a Day. He’s also written two authorized Sherlock Holmes novels – Moriarty, which was well-written but relied too much on a gimmick; and The House of Silk, which, unlike Moriarty, actually features Holmes as the main character. It’s also well-written, and moves along well, but falls into the trap of so many authorized continuations, where the author is trying so hard to be true to or respectful of the characters/settings that the story itself ends up suffering.

The House of Silk builds slowly to the first of multiple murders that all seem to tie to some mysterious entity by that title, although it’s unclear to whom or what it refers. Holmes enters at the behest of an art dealer whose shipment of paintings was destroyed by Irish gang members and whose client is later found murdered. When Holmes uses his Baker Street Irregulars to look for evidence, one of them ends up murdered himself, spurring the detective to continue his investigations even when others, including his brother Mycroft, warn him away from anything involving the House of Silk. Holmes finds himself framed for murder, and Watson has to find a way to spring him before they can solve the case.

Horowitz’s Holmes is the one you expect. He repeats his catchphrase “The game is afoot!” which actually comes from Shakespeare’s Henry V and just made me roll my eyes for its obviousness here. He does his parlor trick of glancing at a person and immediately coming up with a lengthy biographical sketch or a rundown of everything that person might have done that day, which has very little to do with the actual mystery here and didn’t happen nearly as often in the original Conan Doyle works because nearly all of them were short stories. He’s actually less disdainful towards Watson and the police in The House of Silk, where authenticity ends up lost to make him a kinder, gentler Holmes, and nobody asked for that. Watson, meanwhile, is even more of a cipher of a character here than he is in the original stories, retreating mostly to observer and chronicler status outside of the scenes while Holmes is in prison.

That’s one of my two main problems with The House of Silk – the characters are just not very interesting, including the man we all know and love. If you enjoy this sort of fiction, you likely have a favorite detective character; I’m a Hercule Poirot fan, and never enjoy the Miss Marple stories as much because she’s just not as interesting to me. Horowitz’s Holmes feels flat on the page, and none of the side characters are anything more than stock figures, some there because the reader might expect them (Lestrade, Mycroft), some there for the new plot, but none memorable at all once they leave the page.

The other is that the resolution to the story here is exceptionally lurid, and thus out of character with any of the original stories. Such things do happen in the real world, and did during the era of the novel, but putting Holmes into such a story is not only a break with the novel’s otherwise overzealous effort to stay authentic to the original material but requires a huge tonal shift for the character that the author can’t manage. It’s jarring in the wrong way, and Horowitz shows he’s a better craftsman than artist, able to frame and write the story but not to give it the panache or appeal of Conan Doyle’s works.

Next up: I’m currently about a third of the way through R.F. Kuang’s Babel, the most recent winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Wish.

Wish, the newest film from Disney Animation, would have been much better if they’d just made a fresh video for the Nine Inch Nails song and called it a day. Instead, it’s a self-congratulatory movie with an adequate story, forgettable music, and almost no humor for anyone over four years old.

The movie takes place on the island of Rosas in the Mediterranean, which seems to draw on Spanish, Italian, and Maltese cultures and architecture, where the population is ruled by a benevolent king named Magnifico. Before creating the kingdom, Magnifico lost his family to an invading tribe and chose to become sorcerer, and in so doing learned how to grant wishes. When Rosas residents turn 18 or emigrants become citizens, they give their greatest wish to Magnifico, who stores it in his castle for safe keeping. Once a month, he grants one wish of his choosing. Enter Asha, whose grandfather Sabino turns 100 the day of one of these wish ceremonies, and who wishes to become Magnifico’s apprentice, only to discover that he’s not the benevolent king he appears to be. Since it’s a Disney movie and you know things will work out in the end, it’s not much of a spoiler to say that Asha will lead the people of Rosas as they work to overthrow the tyrant Magnifico and free their wishes.

The story here has potential, and the ending is one of the better ones among Disney movies, at least incorporating the film’s themes of hope and community into a resolution that’s internally consistent. Getting there, though, is a real drag. Asha (Ariana Dubose) is a mostly one-note character, driven by good intentions without much depth or complexity, and she experiences zero growth or development over the course of the film. She wins by being good, and by being smart, but that’s it. She doesn’t have an arc so much as she has a straight line. Magnifico (Chris Pine) at least changes as the film progresses, and while it’s for the worse, hey, at least it’s an ethos. There’s something to be said for a villain who starts out as just a little bit evil and becomes all the way evil by the film’s conclusion, and who gets there for an entirely mundane reason – he’s corrupted by power. He wants something Asha has, but his story is ultimately one of absolute power corrupting absolutely. There’s more depth to his character than there is to Asha’s, and that’s one of the film’s main flaws.

It has more flaws, though, believe you me. It’s just not funny at all – there are a few decent sight gags, maybe, but the Comic Relief Goat (Alan Tudyk) is just painful because you know he’s supposed to get laughs and he doesn’t. I can’t fathom how this script got through the number of people at Disney who are involved in making movies without anyone pointing out just how devoid of humor it is. The music is also wildly disappointing; I would argue there are two decent songs of the seven originals in the movie, the rousing “Knowing What I Know Now” (which feels like a big Broadway number that might take you into intermission) and “This Wish,” which has some clumsy lyrics but solid music, and plays a key role in the story. Magnifico’s main song is dreadful, and “I’m a Star” feels like a deleted track from a Kidz Bop record.

Then there’s the fact that this movie is a 90-minute celebration of the studio that released it. Rosa’s seven friends map one-to-one to the seven dwarfs, without much embellishment or expansion. (Grumpy/Gabo is probably the best of the bunch.) There are direct and indirect allusions to past Disney films, many of which are just too obvious to be enjoyable – part of the fun of references and Easter eggs is finding them, but most of the allusions here might as well have pop-up bubbles pointing them out. Even the attempt to nod back to the classic Disney films with CG animation that evokes the hand-drawn style fails, because the characters look extremely flat and cartoonish.

Wish seems on pace to be the studio’s third financial flop in its last four, after last year’s Strange World (which I haven’t bothered with) and Raya and the Last Dragon (which opened in March 2021, so the pandemic hurt its box office). I don’t think commercial performance has any bearing on a film’s worth, but Wish seems to serve no purpose beyond making money. It’s a movie about how great Disney movies are, except it’s not great and it isn’t doing well at the box office. With a slew of great animated films this year, including the second Spider-verse movie, Nimona, and the upcoming The Boy and the Heron, Wish probably won’t even land an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, which would mark the first time in sixteen years that two straight Disney Animation films missed the cut. Perhaps that’s as indicative as anything of how far the studio seems to have fallen.

Asteroid City.

I’m not a huge Wes Anderson fan, which I think is a key disclaimer if you’re going to talk about any of his films. I loved both his animated features and felt pretty close to that about Grand Budapest Hotel, but Bottle Rocket annoyed me throughout, and I turned off Rushmore after 20 minutes because I wanted to punch the television. He’s got a style, and clearly actors will go well out of their way to work with him, but you have to get on his wavelength and stay there for the length of a film, which doesn’t always work for me given his stilted dialogue and idiosyncratic ways of framing shots.

Asteroid City might have his most impressive cast ever, with at least three Oscar winners and twice that many more nominees, almost to the point where the value of a star cameo is diminished because you stop being tickled by the time Hong Chau (nominated last year for The Whale) shows up for five minutes. At the same time, the film requires so much of its actors because most of them get relatively little time on screen – and everyone talks so quickly, par for the Anderson course – and because, unfortunately, the story here kind of stinks. (It’s streaming on Peacock or available to rent on Amazon.)

The conceit behind Asteroid City is that we are watching a televised play within the movie, although the play itself shows up on our screens as a movie (rather than taking place on a stage, where we get some interstitial moments instead). The playwright (Ed Norton) and the host of the television series (Bryan Cranston) introduce the setting and, very briefly, some of the main characters, after which we are thrust into Asteroid City, population 78, a desert town in the American Southwest whose only claim to anything is that a very small meteorite hit the town and left a “crater” maybe slightly larger than a divot left by John Daly. In this town, there’s a convention for the Junior Stargazers science competition, and we meet several families, most of whom arrive with one parent and anywhere from one to four children in tow. The convention is hosted by Dr. Hickenlooper (a surprisingly normal Tilda Swinton) and General Griff Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), and after they give out the awards for the best projects, there’s a viewing using pinhole cameras, during which an alien shows up and takes the meteorite. Hilarity ensues. There’s also a group of grade schoolers led by teacher June (Maya Hawke), a weird country band led by Montana (Rupert Friend), and the hotel proprietor and the only resident of Asteroid City we meet (Steve Carell). Outside of the play, we get black-and-white shots of the playwright, the play’s director (Adrien Brody, so underutilized here), an acting teacher (Willem Dafoe), and an actress whose part in the play was cut (Margot Robbie).

Almost all of those folks do the best they can in very limited roles, with Wright and Hawke the real standouts, but the core of the movie is the relationship that forms between Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and the actress Midge (Scarlett Johanssen, made up to look a lot like Annette Bening), and the one that develops between Augie’s son (Jake Ryan) and Midge’s daughter (Grace Edwards). Schwartzman is one of Anderson’s most frequent partners in crime, but he has dialed it way back here in the most likeable performance I’ve ever seen him give, even though Augie himself isn’t all that likeable – it’s Schwartzman giving depth to a father who’s, well, out of his depth on multiple levels. He’s also able to provide a strong foil for Johanssen’s performance as a troubled film star, one that could have overwhelmed a lesser actor in the opposite role. Schwartzman also appears as the actor playing Augie in the play in several black-and-white segments showing us the actor and Norton’s playwright or the actor discussing the play with Robbie’s character.

The script requires a lot of tolerance for Anderson’s stilted dialogue, and he pushes that too far at many points, including most of the interactions among the various prize-winning teens – other than the memory game they play while they’re all quarantined in Asteroid City by the military, which is one of the best scenes in the movie – and some of the dialogue from the side characters. It’s also just overstuffed with ideas, so that quirky bits like Hawke’s nervous, I-didn’t-sign-up-for-this teacher trying to teach astronomy to a bunch of elementary schoolers who just saw an alien, wash over the audience too quickly. It is coherent, but it is not cohesive, and by the time the last tourists pack up and leave Asteroid City, the lack of a real through-line to connect most, let alone all, of the characters overshadowed the many funny or clever bits scattered through the film.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is one of the biggest successes in self-publishing in the last decade or so, as she ran a successful Kickstarter to give her the time to finish the book, which sold well enough that Hachette’s Hodder & Stoughton picked it up and published their edition a year later. The book now has three sequels, winning the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2019, and all of the sequels earned nominations for the Hugo for Best Novel. This book, at least, has “first effort” all over it, though, and it’s kind of clunky and overdone in so many parts, especially the world-building, which detracted somewhat from a fun if very light story about a group of misfits becoming an ersatz family aboard a spaceship.

The Wayfarer is that ship, and as the series opens, Rosemary is heading for the Wayfarer to serve as its clerk, handling all of the paperwork the ship needs to move through space, across civilizations and, often, punching holes in the fabric of space to create shortcuts across great distances. These artificial wormholes are the Wayfarer’s main source of income, and they do it with a truly motley crew of specialists drawn from multiple species. Each crew member gets their own moment in the spotlight here, so rather than a single plot we get a series of episodes that allow the focus to move across everyone on the ship, from Corbin, the stubborn, meticulous biologist who grows the algae that helps power the ship; to Dr. Chef, the mechanic and, yes, chef, from a dying species who also serves as the ship’s counselor; to Jenks, the engineer who is – slight spoiler – in love with the ship’s AI. Really. (Needless to say I found that one a bit hard to take.)

I think the real problem I had with Long Way was the extensive exposition as Chambers builds out her universe, with giant civilizations of many species, endless rules, fictional technologies, and at least seven characters who need some sort of back stories. It’s a trap many first-time writers seem unable to avoid, and I at least attribute it to the benign desire to get all of these thoughts – the whole universe they’ve built up in their heads – out on to the page, as well as to prevent too much confusion on the part of readers. It also drives me up the wall, because 1) we can learn about this stuff as the story goes along and 2) if I really, really need to understand the technical details of how interstellar travel works in your books, or get a full description of every species’ cultural norms, that’s a bigger problem than just giving us a few pages of extrapolation can solve. Since Long Way visits a lot of planets and has such a diverse crew, we get a lot of that cultural stuff, and the book ends up spinning its wheels for pages and pages while Chambers describes trivial points about handshakes or mating customs.

The book does tackle some larger social themes, although it does so in a cursory way because there are so many smaller stories in the novel’s 438 pages. There’s a bit about cloning, a part about LGBT relationships, some stuff about war and the ethics of supplying one side (pretty timely right about now) when you’re not involved, and more, but none of tit gets more than superficial treatment.

The Long Way has to stand on the strength of its characters, since the plot is modest and the prose more akin to YA fiction, and there Chambers has some more success, although it’s a mixed bag. Rosemary is fine as the closest character we have to a protagonist, as her wide-eyed views and relative inexperience outside of her home planet make her a sensible lens for the reader to view most of the action. Some of the non-human characters are a little overdrawn, notably the navigator, Ohan, so again we get bogged down in details rather than seeing the characters develop. The more I write, the more I realize I just didn’t care for this book at all, other than that it was light and easy to read. It’s not The Calculating Stars bad, but I hope the remainder of the series spends more time developing the characters than explaining its fictional universe.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 done with Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go.

Trust.

Hernan Diaz shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Trust, after his debut novel In the Distance was one of the runners-up for the same honor in 2018. In the Distance was a surprise honoree, as Diaz was an unknown author at the time and the book was published by a minor house. Trust comes from a Penguin imprint and had much higher expectations coming in, and while it did win the big honor, it reads far more as a literary exercise than a compelling narrative or a coherent novel.

Trust comprises four parts, each of which tells part of the story of a very wealthy New York City couple between the two wars, the husband a financial wizard who profits handsomely from the 1929 crash, the wife a woman of taste who gets them involved in the arts and philanthropic works until illness overtakes her. Part one is a 1937 novella about the couple called Bonds, a metafictional account of their lives that depicts her illness as a mental one and his demeanor as unfeeling and robotic. Part two is the half-finished memoir of the actual financier, his intended rebuttal to the best-selling novel that upended his life. Part three tells the story of Ida Partenza, the writer he hires to ghost-write that memoir. Part four is the diary of the wife, all fragments and contradictions. In each succeeding section, Diaz undoes what he did in the previous one(s), so that by the end it’s unclear what’s actually true, and the whole work feels like that aforementioned exercise, a way of undermining the reader by demonstrating the imprecision of memory.

Part of the problem here is that the main character is the financier, and he’s unsympathetic but also boring. He’s not an anti-hero. He’s not misunderstood, or tragic (even his widowhood fails to rise to that level). He’s just kind of a jerk, and his wife’s attempts to make him more of a human don’t really pan out. Even finding out how much the novel may have wronged him doesn’t make him a more interesting central character, and certainly the descriptions of the story from the ghostwriter’s point of view paint him in a worse, if different, light. (I was all set to rip Diaz’s bombastic insufferable prose when I reached the second section and realized that that was the prose of his fictional novelist.)

It was hard not to think of the similarly titled book Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, which explored similar thematic ground in a much more straightforward and readable fashion. (I was also reminded of it when I went to save this file on my laptop and the review for the earlier book popped up.) Choi’s book delved into the unreliability of memory and the way other people can remember the same event in different ways because of memory discrepancies, perspectives, and prior lived experiences, and it did so in a way that also made you care about or at least invested in some of the characters. I haven’t even named the main characters in Trust because they don’t matter enough. I didn’t give a hoot about the husband, the wife, or really even the ghostwriter, because Diaz didn’t give me reason to care.

The Pulitzer committee never reveals much about its thinking, but its one sentence on Trust referred toits “linked narratives rendered in different literary styles,” and that tells me this was writers responding to a feat of writing craft – which is, to be clear, a good reason to give a book a literary award. They likely weighed that more than the novel’s lack of direction or what I at least found to be kind of a boring plot with poorly drawn characters. It’s nowhere near the novel that its co-winner, Demon Copperhead, is, perhaps choosing a higher level of difficulty – although Barbara Kingsolver didn’t go easy on herself – without that other novel’s compelling lead character or well-paced, intriguing plot. I’d put it more towards the middle of the Pulitzer pack, certainly ahead of 2022’s awful choice The Netanyahus or a good chunk of early winners that haven’t aged well, but nowhere near the best that the Pulitzers have honored in recent years.

The Whale.

I don’t know what The Whale was like on stage, but Darren Aronovsky’s adaptation, which took two Oscars home last month, is excruciating on so many levels that even a strong performance from Brendan Fraser can’t salvage it. When the main character’s daughter screams at her father “Just fucking die already!” she could be speaking for all of us, because at that point there’s still nearly 40 minutes of misery porn to go. It’s manipulative, sermonizing claptrap, and I can’t believe no one saw this film before its release and saw how bad and offensive it was.

Fraser plays Charlie, a morbidly obese man who lives by teaching English and writing classes online while keeping his camera off. His eating disorder is his reaction to the trauma of the death of someone close to him, the details of which are revealed in bits over the course of the movie. The entire film takes place in or just outside of his apartment, where he’s visited by a young missionary named Thomas; Charlie’s nurse and friend Liz; Charlie’s estranged daughter Ellie, whom he hasn’t seen in nine years; and Charlie’s ex-wife Mary. As you might expect from a movie adapted from a play, the dialogue between all of these characters exposes their back stories and gives Charlie some modest depth. We discover why that particular death has sent Charlie into what is essentially suicide by binge-eating, why he and Ellie haven’t seen each other in so long, why his friendship with Liz is both profound and complicated, and some inspirational-poster advice about writing honestly.

What we don’t get, unfortunately, is any real insight into Charlie, or what it means to be capital-f Fat. Charlie’s obesity is handwaved away as the product of trauma, which is facile enough but could work in the service of a better story. Instead, the movie spends too much time pushing that angle while tying it to religion, homophobia, and a fairly naïve interpretation of both grief and eating disorders. This isn’t new, and it isn’t interesting, and if you don’t have either I’m not sure why you make this movie.

Charlie is the only remotely interesting character in the movie, which is important since he’s in almost every minute of it. (I think there are two conversations that do not involve him and take place in a different space.) Even so, there’s little exploration of who he is other than that he’s very sorry. The film isn’t laughing at Charlie, or inviting us to do so; it’s telling us to gawk at him, condescend to him, and maybe, if we’re feeling charitable, pity him. He’s pathetic, a mess, a slob, apologizing to everyone for merely existing. He’s not a bad person because he’s fat; he’s not a bad person, but he’s fat, and that is supposed to make us think less of him. Rather than spend more of the dialogue showing us who he is under all that excess weight, it embarrasses us by embarrassing him: Liz saying “beep beep” when he’s backing up, when he chokes doing routine things like eating or nearly dies laughing or masturbating (a scene the movie really, really did not need), it’s all just fat-shaming of a different sort. You can extrapolate from what we learn to see Charlie is probably an interesting person, an intellectual who loves words, whether in prose or poetry, and who has a lot more empathy for other people than they do for him. I wouldn’t mind getting to know him. The Whale won’t let us.

The ending is a huge tearjerker, ruining one of the very few real emotional moments in the entire movie with an excess of gimmickry and artifice. It got me, even though I know better, because it’s just so manipulative, especially given everything that came before. The Whale hasn’t earned the right to make the audience feel this way.

Fraser is the only saving grace in the film, and while he wouldn’t have been my pick (Colin Farrell and Paul Mescal were slightly ahead for me), he’s worthy of the various Best Actor accolades he received. If he hadn’t been good this might have been the worst movie of 2022. He manages to get somut e range of emotions into the character, and when he’s hurt, ashamed, embarrassed, and so very often sorry, you feel it, probably the only honest emotions that come out of this film. Hong Chau was also nominated for an Oscar, as Best Supporting Actress, but she’s very flat in this movie and often comes across as whiny; she was better in The Menu with a character who was only slightly more multi-dimensional. Sadie Sink gives the second-best performance as Ellie, but it’s an extremely one-note character who might as well be from Flatland. (Fun note: In a flashback scene, Sink’s sister Jacey plays a younger Ellie.) Adrien Morot, Judy Chin, and Annemarie Bradley won the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and I think they were the most deserving of the nominees, although I can see the argument that this was all about a single character rather than an entire cast. The transformation of Fraser into a 600-pound man is completely believable.

Lindy West (of Shrill) eviscerated this movie and its ridiculous view of fat people better than I ever could. I’ll just leave it that this movie was awful, and while I’m very happy for Fraser and love the stories of actors who go from acting in bad mainstream movies to turning in Oscar- or Emmy-worthy performances (Michael Keaton being the best example), he’s not reason enough to suffer through The Whale. I’m too much of a completist to skip it, but you should feel no compulsion to join me.

Blonde.

Blonde isn’t just the worst movie I’ve seen from 2022, by a long shot; it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a patched-together collection of scenes that barely connect to each other, jumping through aspect ratios and shutter speeds and even from color to black and white with neither rhyme nor reason, like a teenaged filmmaker’s limited understanding of what it means to be experimental. It also fails at its most important task – giving the audience an interesting, three-dimensional portrait of its lead character, Marilyn Monroe.

The film tries to do a cradle-to-grave story, although the script, based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name, isn’t going for any sort of accuracy – most of what’s in this film is made up, often leaning towards the lurid, which you could probably guess quickly by how much time Monroe (Ana de Armas) spends topless for no apparent reason. We see her abusive childhood with a mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson, giving maybe the only decent performance in the movie). When she’s removed from her mother’s care to an orphanage, the film jumps forward to her pin-up years, then to a meeting with a studio head who rapes her almost the minute she’s done reading, then through a meandering story that sideswipes the films she made while spending far more time on her tabloid romances, one of her miscarriages, and an abortion that apparently never happened. She meets and marries Joe DiMaggio (played by some actor doing a bad Bobby Cannavale impression), then meets and marries Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), with no chemistry between her and either of these men, and in the case of Miller, no explanation at all of why they ended up together. An ongoing subplot where Monroe receives letters from a man purporting to be her father, whose identity she never knew, ends ridiculously, leading Monroe to take her own life with barbituates.

There is no defending this movie. It’s badly shot, looks bad, poorly acted, and incredibly poorly written, from character to dialogue to pacing. The opening story with Monroe and her mother, which recalls a better-done scene involving Mitzi in The Fabelmans, is disjointed, dark, and features her mother using stilted, bizarre vocabulary that wouldn’t make sense for an adult talking to another adult, let alone a parent talking to a preteen child. The flips between color and black-and-white photography happen without reason, and add nothing to the film. Monroe’s character jokingly asks if she’s just “a piece of meat,” but that is exactly how this movie treats her – she’s a bag of flesh and bones to be passed around or discussed or ogled, but she has no agency, no depth, no explanation beyond these idiotic Freudian notions that she has daddy issues or desperately needs to be a mother. Even the idea that she wanted to be taken more seriously as an actor is only brought up in passing, where the script just sort of waves to the notion as is drifts on by. Marilyn Monroe in Blonde is nothing but a victim of the world. I can’t think of a less generous interpretation of her life.

There are two rape scenes in Blonde, the second of which is unspeakably gross and degrading, even beyond what a complete fabrication that particular scene is. The camera focuses its male gaze on de Armas’s face while she is performing oral sex and trying not to gag, and stays there for something like two minutes. It has no artistic intent or merit; it exists to shock. I guess it worked, but it also underscored just how terrible this movie is from conception to execution. I doubt I would ever defend the existence of an on-camera rape scene in any film, but this film’s version is the worst of the worst.

De Armas does a dutiful impersonation of Monroe, although she can’t entirely lose her Cuban accent (and she’s a lot smaller than Monroe was, which seems a very odd choice given all the efforts to otherwise make people in this movie look like their real-life counterparts). It’s just a dead character, and she isn’t capable of infusing any life into it. Her brief role in No Time to Die highlighted how ebullient and energetic she can be on screen; Blonde shows that a bad script can leave her a walking doe-eyed corpse. You could argue this isn’t her fault, but giving this performance an Oscar nomination for Best Actress is more an acknowledgement of the fact that she had to suffer through this awful film – as did everyone who voted for her – than a measure of actual quality. Giving de Armas a nod over Tilda Swinton (The Eternal Daughter) is a giant farce, and should have garnered way more controversy than the Andrea Riseborough one did. I can think of at least five other lead performances by actresses that would have been more worthy, and I’ve only seen about 36 films from the 2022 Oscar cycle.

(In no order: Emma Thompson from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande; Jennifer Lawrence from Causeway; Ruth Wilson from True Things; Florence Pugh from The Wonder; and Frankie Corio from Aftersun.)

No one else fares much better, although there’s a mercy in how many characters we see in that none of them is on screen for very long. The two actors playing Cass Chaplin and Eddy Robinson are the most cringe-inducing, as they’re both doing some kind of impersonation of Skeet Ulrich’s character from Scream, right down to the hair (wrong decade, guys), in yet another complete fabrication that in this case informs the movie’s incredibly ill-conceived climax.

Blonde barely qualifies as a movie. It’s an absolute mess. I admit that having not read the book, I may have been unprepared for how far it diverges from history. If I set that aside, however, this movie is still garbage. Norma Jean deserved so much better.

Fleishman is in Trouble.

Fleishman is in Trouble, streaming now on Hulu, is an adaptation of the 2019 novel of that name, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the title character and Claire Danes as his ex-wife. It’s bad. In fact, it’s bad in a lot of different ways, but none more so than the fact that it doesn’t even seem to understand who the most interesting character in the series is.

Dr. Toby Fleishman (Eisenberg) is a successful hepatologist at a New York City hospital who is somewhat recently divorced from talent agent Rachel (Danes) when, after a weekend when he has their two kids, she fails to come pick them up at her assigned time – and the next day, she’s not only still AWOL, she’s unreachable. This becomes the catalyst to explore the history of their now-defunct marriage, Toby’s experiences as a single guy, and his friendships with Libby (Lizzie Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody), whom he’s known since they all spent a semester in Israel during college.

Libby is the narrator, and the stand-in for the author, and we also get a fair amount of her story as well. She’s married to a safe, boring lawyer (Josh Radnor), with whom she has two kids and shares a nice house in the Jersey suburbs. She was working as a writer, but quit about two years before the events of the show to become a stay-at-home mom. With Toby getting a divorce and living it up as a single guy, while she finds the other stay-at-home moms to be incapable of having a modestly intellectual conversation, she falls into an existential crisis of her own.

The way the series unfurls, we get mostly Toby’s perspective for the first six episodes. Rachel is derisive towards him, even in front of friends; consumed by her work; and diffident towards her kids. In his telling, she’s all of the problems, and he comes to believe she was also unfaithful to him with a mutual friend. Only some of this is accurate, although when we get more of her side of the story, the result is we realize he’s also kind of an ass. Blame may not be shared equally, but neither of these two is free from it. By the time the final episode began, I hated them both, with Eisenberg more or less doing the Mark Zuckerberg character from The Social Network and Danes hitting one very loud note over and over.

Toby, it turns out, is high on his own supply, probably exacerbated by the success he’s having on dating apps. (Jesse Eisenberg is listed at 5’7”. He would not be doing that well on the apps in real life.) He and Rachel have differing memories of pivotal events in their marriage, including a traumatic scene around the birth of their daughter, and when Rachel develops post-partum depression with psychotic elements, Toby, a medical doctor, recommends … a support group. Not a psychiatrist, or anyone who could prescribe something. It’s hard to fathom, but it also may be a sign he really doesn’t take his wife seriously at all. She, meanwhile, is a very thinly drawn stereotype, the embodiment of the myth that you can’t be a successful working woman and a good mother together, which is especially odd in a series that depicts the alternative, stay-at-home moms, as vapid robots who walk around with an unearned sense of superiority and refer to a certain style of interior decoration as “mid-cench.”

Which brings us back to Libby, who should have been the star of the series (and, I presume, the book). Caplan gives the one truly good performance of anyone here, and it’s partly to her credit and partly because Libby is the only three-dimensional character. The winter of her discontent should have been enough to carry the movie, without the pointless mystery of Rachel’s disappearance (which gets an answer, but in a very unsatisfactory way). Libby is 41, with two kids who are approaching the point where they don’t need her like they did probably two or three years prior, and no longer has an active career. It’s the age and the point in life where feelings of regret over past choices you can’t unmake and the closing of future possibilities just due to age and circumstance are common. It’s a midlife crisis. It shouldn’t bother you, but it does. And Libby is aware of this, on some level – she knows her life is, if not great, solidly okay, and privileged, and even that she has unusual agency to make things better for herself. She even has the agency to choose to leave it through divorce, if she wants. The series isn’t interested enough in going deeper with her character, instead spending time with some of the worst sex scenes you will ever see as we follow Toby’s adventures in dating. There are some good parts of the Libby story, with one episode that’s primarily dedicated to her, but for every bit that’s telling (the freezer) there’s one that’s absurd (the pancakes).

The cinematography in Fleishman is a disaster too; the series relies way too much on a spinning camera gimmick that wasn’t just overused, but was nauseating, and that added nothing whatsoever to the story. It becomes the series’ crutch any time it needs to speed up time, or try to show a character’s confusion, rather than just doing so via dialogue or narration. I’ve seen action and sci-fi films/shows that were less reliant on camera movements, and can’t remember feeling like I had to turn away multiple times to avoid getting disoriented myself. This is supposed to be a realistic story, and all this gimmick does is detract from that.

The ultimate failure of Fleishman, though, comes down to where it rests its eye. The story puts us in a tiny niche of society – a very narrow subset of upper-class Manhattanites, where almost everyone around Toby and Rachel is a social climber obsessed with status and money, getting their kids into the Right Schools and using the right decorators and so on. (I was glad to see Ashley Austin Morris, who played Francine on the Electric Company reboot, appear as a side character; she doesn’t have a lot to do, but she does it well.) The script substitutes character quirks, like having Toby on some sort of weird keto or paleo diet for his entire adult life, for real depth, to the point where we don’t get to know any of the principals, let alone empathize with them beyond Libby. Caplan gives by far the best performance of anyone in the series, which makes it even more galling that the story doesn’t center her character outside of one episode, and even at that it’s never quite explained why Libby puts up with Toby when he’s consistently horrible to her. Libby is in Turmoil would have been a much better series, and then she could have just introduced Toby and Seth as her jerk friends.

Elvis.

Elvis Presley was anything but boring, as a person or as an entertainer, which makes it all the more criminal that Baz Luhrman’s biopic Elvis is such a dull, overlong mess. Even a game performance by Austin Butler, who’s doing the sort of impersonation that Oscar voters seem to love, can’t salvage this thing, which could have been 45 minutes shorter yet somehow misses some of the most interesting parts of the singer’s life story. (It’s free for HBO Max subscribers, or you can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Elvis tries to be a cradle-to-grave story, or at least an early childhood to death one, starting out with Elvis as a very young boy who moves with his family to a house in the white part of a Black neighborhood, where he was introduced to the gospel and blues music that he later used (or appropriated) in his own sound. The narrative then winds its way through his rise to stardom, marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu, stint in the army, the comeback special, and so on, until he gets addicted to drugs and dies, in connect-the-dots storytelling that might still have worked if Lurhman had any interest at all in telling the whole of Elvis’s story. Instead, we get a nonsense framing device of Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who is both the narrator and whose perspective is supposed to be our lens on the story, as Parker keeps trying to tell the viewers that he’s not that bad of a guy, and Elvis wouldn’t have been anything without him. It’s a pointless distraction and shifts the focus to a character nobody really cares about – or, if they did, maybe the film could have been called Parker and just put Elvis in the background. (Please, nobody do this.)be an

Presley’s actual life was far messier than the one we see in Elvis, not least of which is that he had several affairs while married to Priscilla, something the film glosses over almost entirely until the point where she announces that she’s leaving him and taking their daughter Lisa Marie with her. Among other sins of the script, such as the superficial treatment of his substance abuse issues or scant discussion of his appropriation of Black music or how his success may have allowed Black artists to follow in his wake, this amounts to a sort of hagiography that paints Elvis as a victim. Col. Parker did take advantage of Elvis financially and probably did so emotionally as well, but the story is so weirdly one-sided – even though Parker is the narrator – that the singer comes off as a pathetic man-child, and often not responsible for his own actions. I doubt this is accurate, and it’s certainly not interesting to watch.

Luhrman also plays loose with some key facts, which I suppose is par for the course in these music biopics, but his depiction of a race riot at an Elvis concert at Memphis’s Russwood Park is almost pure fiction. It plays into Lurhman’s ham-fisted attempts to tie Elvis’s career to the civil rights movement, which comes up again when Luhrman moves the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in time so that it happens during the taping of the comeback special, rather than some weeks before it, so that there can be a Big Moment backstage where Elvis and the producer decide the singer has to make a statement during the show and change the closing number. (There’s some good comedy in that whole sequence, though, as Parker sold the show as a Christmas special, and keeps insisting that Elvis close with a Christmas song and wear an ugly sweater.) A screenwriter can alter some timelines or small facts in service of the story, but here, Luhrman does the opposite – it holds the story back, makes the film longer, and adds no real interest. Even the comeback special, which was the most-watched TV program of its year and has entered music history for its impact on the culture and the way it opened up the second act of his career, is kind of boring in Elvis. I’d much rather watch that special three times, which would match the running time of this mess, than watch Elvis again.

Butler is a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor – Drama, with Colin Farrell in a separate category because The Banshees of Inisherin counts as a Musical or Comedy. And Butler is good, even if he looks more like Miley Cyrus than Elvis when he’s in his stage makeup. The oddsmakers favor Elvis getting a Best Picture nod, which would be a real travesty, both on its face (this movie sucks) and because it’s going to push out something far more worthy. It’s just a waste of a lot of time and money, and the only film I’ve seen this year that I’d rank below it is Amsterdam, which would also fit that same description.