→ March 24, 2020
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Uncut Gems.

Uncut Gems was one of the best-reviewed movies of 2019, taking home the Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Actor honors at the Independent Spirit Awards in February, and landing at the top of many critics’ year-end lists, including those of my friends Will Leitch and Tim Grierson. (I count 20 critics who put it on top of their 2019 lists on this Metacritic roundup, which includes Tim’s list but not Will’s.) After finally catching it on demand this week, I can at least add my voice to the chorus – it’s tremendous, maybe not my favorite movie of last year but close to it, and one of the most intense, relentless movie experiences I’ve had in quite a while. (It’s available to rent now on amazon and iTunes.)

Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jeweler in New York’s Diamond District who has a sliiight gambling problem and, as a result, makes one reckless decision after another, including regularly pawning valuable pieces that other people have loaned to him. As the film opens, we see the discovery of a large black opal in an Ethiopian mine, a stone that Ratner has negotiated to obtain so that he can sell it at auction for what he expects to be over a million dollars. He’s harassed by goons from a loan shark, Arno (Eric Bogosian, looking pained at every moment), who is extremely pissed that Howard keeps betting rather than paying him back. And in another early scene, Howard’s assistant Demany (Lakeith Stanfield) manages to get then-Celtics star Kevin Garnett into the shop, where Garnett becomes obsessed with the uncut black opal stone and asks to borrow it because he seems to think it will bring him good luck on the court. Howard is also busy having an affair with an employee while still living with his estranged wife, and appears to owe several other people money, but can’t stop himself from betting or making other really terrible decisions.

Directed and co-written by the Safdie brothers, Uncut Gems grabs you by the throat from the start and never lets up until the closing sequence (a gimmicky shot that mirrors one from the beginning of the film). Everything about this movie will induce anxiety in the viewer, not least the music, which often feels like the soundtrack to a 1980s arcade game, and the frenetic cinematography, which often puts the viewer uncomfortably close to the action. The story itself never gives you a chance to catch your breath: Any time it appears that Howard might have a way out of trouble, something goes wrong, usually something of his own doing. Meeting Garnett turns out to be the worst-best thing to ever happen to him, not least because he’s a bit starstruck and suddenly decides to bet huge amounts on complicated parlays involving Garnett and the Celtics. This four-dimensional balancing act he’s trying to pull is absurd and you know it’s destined to fail and you shouldn’t even want this guy with no apparent redeeming qualities to succeed, but knowing what the consequences will likely be if it doesn’t work will still put you on the edge of your seat and have you rooting for Ratner in spite of yourself.

Sandler’s performance here is remarkable, and it’s a crime he wasn’t nominated for Best Actor here. Gone is the joking, crude comedian persona, replaced by a nervous, obsequious, crude version of himself, with minuscule changes to his appearance that somehow were enough to make him seem like Not Adam Sandler. He is this character, so that everything he does fits with what we know about him; without the performance there’s no way this film would be watchable, let alone good, because everything depends on him being credible. Garnett is the other real revelation here – sure, he’s playing a version of himself, but, as with Sandler/Howard, you have to believe that Garnett really wants that stone, and you have to believe his interactions with Howard are authentic. There’s a lot of stunt casting here – Mike Francesa appears as a bookie/restaurateur, John Amos has a brief cameo (which makes for a good in-joke about the Safdies’ prior film, Good Time), the Weeknd plays himself, Tilda Swinton and Doc Rivers make voice cameos – but Garnett’s is the one that has to be credible for the film to work, and he does it.

I still have two more movies I want to see before posting a very-late ranking of 2019 movies, but this is clearly in my top 5 for last year. I couldn’t put it over Parasite, which was just as gripping, and also quite funny in parts (as is Uncut Gems), but also has a more serious underpinning than this film does. The Uncut Gems script also has a few moments that don’t quite add up, but the ending works, and some of the flourishes that pop up towards the end of the film (Wayne Diamond’s character doesn’t appear until maybe 80% of the way through, but damn is he effective) pay off in more substantial ways than I expected. I’m not that shocked that an indie thriller starring an actor known for lowbrow comedies was snubbed by the Academy, but Uncut Gems deserved more recognition than it got.

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→ March 18, 2020
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Wild Rose.

Jessie Buckley’s first film role was in the highly underrated, barely-seen independent thriller Beast back in 2017, a star turn by the young Irish actress just four years who had previously only worked in theater and on British television. She had a minor role in last year’s Judy, which was probably Americans’ first exposure to her work, but once again starred in an independent film, this time the musical comedy-drama Wild Rose, which plays with the standard formula of such smalltown-girl-makes-good movies and shows off Buckley’s impressive vocal and acting range. It’s free on Hulu and available to rent on amazon and iTunes.

Buckley is Rose-Lynn Harlan, who is just getting out of jail as the film opens and heads home to her two children and her mother (Dame Julie Walters), who has been taking care of them for a year while Rose-Lynn served out her sentence for a minor drug charge (revealed a bit later in the film). She’s never without her white cowgirl boots, and her only goal in life is to get to Nashville and become a country-music star, even if it means neglecting her kids or spurning the few people in her life willing to help her, including her mother and the woman whose house Rose-Lynn cleans for work. Susannah (Sophie Okonedo, who does not age) hears Rose-Lynn singing and tries everything to help her get to Nashville, but Rose-Lynn simply can’t get out of her own way.

Wild Rose is half formulaic, but manages to zig and zag enough times to get away from most of the clichés of the genre – notably the way such films generally rely on extraordinary good fortune to push their protagonists along the path to stardom. Rose-Lynn could have that, maybe, but every time she has such an opportunity, reality intercedes, often in the form of her own irresponsibility. She had her two children quite young and still hasn’t accepted the obligations of parenthood, nor does she seem to recognize the burden she places on her mother through her behavior. Yet she’s also spirited and driven and a talented singer and you’ll probably find yourself rooting for her in spite of her actions, even when she has gone past deserving our support. There are some moments that made me cringe, but that is what most helps this script avoid the saccharine elements of typical up-from-nowhere music films.

Nearly all of the songs Rose-Lynn sings in the film, and the majority of the songs on the soundtrack, are covers, many of them well-known country songs (John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” is a particular standout), along with a cover of Primal Scream’s “Country Girl” and a few originals. The closing song “Glasgow (No Place by Home),” co-written by Mary Steenburgen, is one of the two best songs in the film along with “Angel” and deserved one of the five Best Original Song nominations, at least over the Diane Warren song and I’d argue over the Elton John/Bernie Taupin track that won.

Buckley is an absolute star, though – she’s magnetic on screen and, it turns out, quite a singer too. (She finished second on a British reality-TV singing competition show at age 19, which led her to drama school and eventually to this career on screen and stage.) I’m not sure what it’ll take for her to land a  role in a major film that gets the attention of American audiences, but after three films, two in which she was the star, she’s reached the “I’ll watch anything she’s in” status for me. She earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress along with four nominees for the Oscar for the same award, taking the nod that Cynthia Erivo received here. She makes this movie work, even when it’s a bit uneven, and carries off the star-is-almost-born role to make every aspect of it credible, even when the plot seems a little farfetched (the Susannah bits). The resolution here is just perfect as well, avoiding the sentimental or the maudlin for a conclusion that’s just atypical enough to be satisfying.

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→ February 11, 2020
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Ford v. Ferrari.

Ford v. Ferrari is a love letter to testosterone, and to boys playing with cars and getting mad at other boys who don’t want to let them play with their cars the way they want to play with those cars. It gets lazy in key places, with an antagonist who could have been written by a 10-year-old, played in an uncomfortably simpering manner throughout the film. It’s also kind of fun, if you want to dial back your brain for a few hours without turning it off completely, thanks in large part to the outstanding camera work that puts you right on the track in each of the film’s racing scenes. It just became available to rent via amazon and iTunes this morning.

Based on the outline of a true story, Ford v. Ferrari tracks two men, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who find themselves recruited by the Ford Motor Company to build a race car capable of beating Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. Ford executive Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) pitches this idea to Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) as a way to change the company’s image, and sells the scion on the plan to go out and find the best people to build that car and race under the Ford name. They run into opposition from the ambitious sycophant Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), who tries repeatedly to take control of the project or stymie it any way he can, but ultimately the Shelby/Miles duo do make that car and race it at Le Mans in 1966.

There’s so much wrong with this movie on a fundamental level, but that really wasn’t enough to stop me from enjoying just about all of it. Ford v. Ferrari is just fun. We caught it in a theater, so the sound and visuals of the races were very effective at putting us right on the track with Miles, whether it’s on various test tracks as they try to build the car or the actual races at Daytona and Le Mans when they do get out there. The three screenwriters punch up the race scenes with drama on and off the tracks, including decisions on how far to push Ford’s new GT engines (7000 rpm is pitched from the opening scene as a critical threshold) and disagreements between Shelby and Beebe on how to handle each race. There’s a fair amount of time between races in the script, from more internal drama to conversations about how best to build the car or handle the heavy wear on the brakes during a 24-hour race, but the scenes are generally short to keep the nearly 150-minute movie from flagging. For a movie of its length, it hums along without too much interruption … and have I mentioned how thrilling the race scenes are? I don’t even like car racing of any sort, but the sounds during the race sequences are so well done, which I suppose explains why Donald Sylvester won the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing for this film.

However, there’s a lot wrong under the hood here, starting with the portrayal of Beebe, a real person who did make the controversial decision to have the three Ford cars cross the finish line very close to each other (not simultaneously, as shown in the film) in 1966, a decision he long defended as borne of safety concerns rather than a photo op. (A friend of Beebe’s defended his legacy in this 2016 post, which has some details relevant to this film as well.) Beebe is the most one-dimensional, disposable antagonist you could conceive for the good ol’ boy Shelby and the English rebel Miles, and Lucas plays Beebe with an over-the-top, effeminate manner that contrasts poorly with all of the very masculine men who are just trying to build a better race car, gosh dang it. When Beebe isn’t sucking up to Ford II – and the very talented Letts is rather wasted in that role – he’s scheming to overthrow the project, or trying to pull one over on Shelby, who responds with frat-boy trickery to win the day.

There’s also one named female character in the entire film, Miles’ wife Mollie, whose name I had to look up just now because she’s not that significant in the story itself. Played by Caitriona Balfe, Mollie is there to alternately support and argue with Ken, to worry a lot while he’s racing, to get mad over unpaid bills, and to wear sundresses. I’m not all about the Bechdel test, but whoa boy, does Ford v. Ferrari flunk that.

The film was nominated for Best Picture, which feels like a stretch to me – it’s an extremely enjoyable movie, but I’d have a hard time thinking of it as ‘great’ in the Best Picture sense. Its other nominations were all easier to understand – Sound Editing, for which It won; Sound Mixing, and Film Editing. It didn’t get a screenplay nod, and director James Mangold wasn’t nominated. Neither lead actor was nominated either, although Bale is excellent as Miles and would have been more deserving of a Supporting Actor nod than Anthony Hopkins. If it wasn’t good enough to get screenplay, directing, or acting nominations, what is the probability that it was one of the nine best movies of the year? Give that spot to The Farewell, or Knives Out, or any of several foreign films nominated, and let Ford v. Ferrari be what it is: a much smarter than normal action film/buddy movie with some truly thrilling car-racing scenes.

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→ February 3, 2020
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Jojo Rabbit.

Jojo Rabbit won the People’s Choice award at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, a rather significant honor given that the previous year’s winner was the dreadful Green Book … which ended up winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. Jojo is nominated for the latter honor, although there doesn’t seem to be much sentiment that it’ll win, which is a marginal improvement; it’s a lot better than Green Book, but it’s a really uneven film that seems unable to decide whether it’s a comedy and ends up with too many jokes that don’t quite land.

Based on a book by Christine Leunens called Caging Skies, Jojo Rabbit takes place late in World War II andfollows the title character, a a ten-year-old Hitler Youth member who has become a true believer to the point that his imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi, who directed and wrote the screenplay). Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) lives with his mother (Scarlett Johansson); his sister has just died of influenza, and his father is gone, presumably fighting at the front. After injuring himself while training with the Hitler Youth, Jojo ends up doing menial tasks around town and spending more time at home, which leads him to discover that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie). The two embark on an entertaining dialogue where he starts out spouting the anti-Semitic nonsense he’s been taught by the Nazi regime, while she taunts him to try to keep him from saying anything about her presence, even to his mother; over time, of course, his prejudices break down and the two form a friendship that is tested by outside events.

Satire has a point, while farce exists just to send up its target. Jojo Rabbit doesn’t work as satire, but it’s moderately successful as farce. The targets here are the Nazis, and their adherents; Jojo is indoctrinated by the adults and older kids around him, never questioning what he’s told, even though his own mother tries to undermine their messages of hate and aggression. Waititi has made them largely ridiculous, from his own performance as Hitler to Sam Rockwell’s one-eyed Nazi Captain to Stephen Merchant’s Gestapo officer to Alfie Allen’s dimwitted officer, which is amusing but doesn’t really get us anywhere in the end. The Nazis weren’t objects of comedy, and the film spends more time showing them being absurd or stupid than it does showing them doing the horrible things they actually did. To be effective as a film, it either needed a stronger theme, or to be consistently funny; Jojo Rabbit lacks the former, and it’s only inconsistent at the latter. There are some laugh-out-loud moments, but it’s more a series of jokes that make you chuckle along with some that just don’t work, which makes the tonal shifts to the film’s few extremely serious moments even harder to absorb. (The posters that make this look like a screwball comedy don’t do the film any favors either.)

By far, the funniest character in the film is Jojo’s best friend Yorki, played by Archie Yates, who my daughter pointed out is a dead ringer for Russell in Up. He gets the best lines, he has the film’s best visual gag, and his delivery and affect are consistently hilarious. Merchant probably does more to strike the right balance between comedy and satire than anyone else in the film, with Waititi making him appear even more ridiculous with camera shots from low enough that Merchant appears to be about eight feet tall (he’s 6’7″). Rebel Wilson has a side role that she clearly relishes but that is just the same gag repeated over and over, funny just because she’s so absurdly enthusiastic about it. Most disappointing, however, is Waititi himself, who is surprisingly unfunny in the caricature of the imaginary Hitler; he’s kind of doing Viago again, with a sort of German-adjacent accent, and most of the jokes seem to revolve about how dumb he is, or around Waititi moving his arms and legs in a silly manner.

Scarlett Johansson earned one of her two Oscar nominations this year for her role as Jojo’s mother, and she is quite good, although I could make an argument that Thomasin McKenzie’s role and performance are ultimately more important to the film as a whole. (She also appears in the upcoming film adaptation of the Booker-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang with George MacKay of 1917 and Russell Crowe.) Johansson is charming, but the character is a bit one-note, while McKenzie has to explore a much wider range of emotions, and Jojo Rabbit couldn’t work without her. That the film works at all, and ends up a solid-average watch overall, is as much a credit to her performance as Elsa as anything else. There’s just no way I’d support this for Best Picture, given what else is nominated.

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→ January 31, 2020
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Pain and Glory.

Antonio Banderas landed one of the five nominations for Best Actor this year for his role as Salvador in Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria), the latest film from Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (All About My Mother). It’s a command performance from Banderas, who gets his first Oscar nomination at age 59, one that would get my vote (if I had one) in his category for the range and depth he shows in bringing this complex, sad character to life in a story that meanders like the memories it’s trying to depict. (You can rent it on amazon and iTunes.)

Salvador Mallo is a once-famous Spanish director who is now in professional and physical decline, wracked by joint and back pain and hobbled by various other ailments (some of which may not be real), all of which leaves him feeling like he’s unable to work, and if he can’t make movies, he doesn’t see any point to living. He’s thrust into the past when a local cinema restores and airs his film of 30 years earlier, Sabor (Flavor), whose star, Alberto, played the lead character so differently than Salvador intended that the two haven’t spoken since. The two meet again, tentatively, and Alberto shares some heroin with Salvador, who tries it on a whim but becomes hooked, and while he gets high we see more flashbacks to his childhood with his mother (Penélope Cruz, who doesn’t seem to age) in a cave house in rural Spain. While there, Salvador meets Eduardo, an illiterate but kind local laborer, whom he teaches to read, write, and do basic math; and fights with his mother, who wants to send him to a seminary to continue his education so he doesn’t end up ‘like his father.’

The two tracks, in the present day and in the world of Salvador’s memories, both move forward in linear fashion, but the latter jumps around enough to resemble the way our memories actually work. Almodóvar then combines the two timelines when Alberto discovers an unpublished treatment Salvador wrote called “Addiction,” that tells the true story of Salvador’s affair with a man who was also addicted to heroin, an affair that ended because he couldn’t kick the habit; Salvador confesses he doesn’t even know if his former lover is still alive. When Alberto convinces Salvador to let him stage the play, you can probably guess what happens, and how that kind of closure helps Salvador finally take some small steps to help himself, and to let his incredibly devoted friend and assistant Zulema help him.

Most of the summaries I’ve seen of Pain and Glory have focused on Salvador’s infirmities, describing it as a meditation on aging and mortality. While those themes are clearly present, the movie, and Banderas’ performance, are both far more hopeful than you’d expect from such a description, while also trying to explore how our past experiences and our memories of them can shape our lives for years or decades afterwards. Salvador flashes back to various scenes because of how much they’ve influenced his later life, especially in how his relationship with his mother, right up to her death, has affected and haunted him well into adulthood. Confronting those memories is a crucial step in his recovery not just from his temporary addiction but from the depression that has taken over his entire life, threatening his career and possibly more.

Salvador is not exactly Almodóvar, but there is a lot of the director in the character, and Banderas does a marvelous job bringing that character to life with the kind of depth and rounded edges that he needs to have to engender enough empathy and interest from the audience. Some of the key points about Salvador, including his physical pain, come across in ways that feel organic without overwhelming the character or the story – he’s in pain, and that often leads to him choosing not to do things, but he is not inert on the screen because Banderas renders him in three dimensions, especially finding small ways to show that there’s some energy left in the old man even if his back or his legs aren’t willing. It could have been a monument to self-pity, but Banderas avoids that trap and instead gives one of the best performances of the year.

Almodóvar still makes some quirky choices that don’t entirely work; the sequence near the start of the film where Salvador runs through all of his maladies with the help of some animation feels incongruous and took me right out of the movie just as we were getting started. There was no way this was going to beat out Parasite for Best International Feature Film (for which both are nominated), but some of those small decisions are enough to keep it from coming close to the South Korean hit in my own estimation. Cruz is excellent in small doses as Salvador’s mother while he was still a child, but she could have used some more screen time to further develop both her character and her relationship with Salvador, and those scenes suffer a bit because Banderas isn’t there. His performance is so strong – he’s not going to win, as his character obviously isn’t crazy enough to beat out Joaquin Phoenix – that it elevates Pain and Glory from something maudlin into an elegiac lament that still gives its main character reasons to hope and to live, right up to the film’s glorious final shot.

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→ January 29, 2020
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1917.

Sam Mendes’ 1917 was a bit of a surprise winner at the Golden Globes, where it took the Best Motion Picture – Drama prize and Best Director honors despite only receiving one nomination in any other category (Best Original Score). It feels like the kind of movie that awards voters love – it’s an ambitious war movie, it’s about the struggles of white men, and it has a significant gimmick to it that would appeal to the more technically minded voters – even though the film itself is more competent than brilliant, with a plot that borders on the ridiculous and a gimmick that is ultimately too distracting.

Although Sam Mendes has said the film is inspired by true stories his grandfather Alfred told about his experiences in World War I, the story itself is fictional. It follows two Lance Corporals, Tom Blake and Will Schofield, as they attempt to cross into no man’s land and possibly slip behind enemy lines to deliver a message to a colonel who is planning an attack that will actually lead his 1600 men into a trap set by the Germans. Along the way they meet many of the horrors of war, including multiple dungeon-crawl-like trips through English and German trench networks, run into half the cast of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and somehow manage to avoid all of the bullets flying in their directions en route to their destination.

It is absolutely gripping to watch in what seems like real time, with a script that seldom eases up on the throttle for you to relax. Even when Blake and Schofield are alone, they end up in some sort of danger, and eventually we follow one of the two into a bombed-out village that looks like a death trap for him between the lack of cover and the various Germans stationed around the ruins. When the action stops, there’s usually the threat of action around a (literal) corner, and Mendes has no issue ratcheting up the tension or the extent of the threats to his characters to make the film more exciting – even though Schofield in particular seems to survive multiple incidents that would kill an actual human being. It’s as exciting as any mainstream action film, without the usual crutches of the latter genre.

The gimmick I mentioned above is the use of long takes to make the film appear to comprise one continuous shot, although there’s one very obvious break and a couple of others you’ll probably think you spotted. This isn’t actually new; Birdman tried it and won Best Picture at least in part because of it, and Alfred Hitchcock did it in Rope when there were far more severe limitations on how long any single shot could be. It is immersive, and thus effective at putting you more in the action as you watch, but within a half an hour my eyes were already tired of the constant motion and from trying to shift focus between the characters in the foreground and the endless activity in the background. I was more than ready for the film’s one actual break, where one of the two main characters passes out and the screen goes black for a few seconds, less for the pause in the action – which I generally enjoyed – than for the rest for my eyes.

There’s also a good bit of stunt casting here, as the famous names attached to 1917 each appear for a few minutes, at most. Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch – all of whom appeared in the 2011 adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – each have cameos, as does Andrew Scott as the hot priest … no, wait, wrong show, he’s a lieutenant whose regiment has just been hit. None is on screen for very long; the two stars are less well-known, although you’ve likely seen one before: George Mackay (Captain Fantastic) plays Schofield, doing a very credible job in a role where he’s asked to carry a substantial amount of the weight, while Dean-Charles Chapman (Game of Thrones) plays Blake and has more to do in the first third of the film. There’s one woman anywhere in the movie, and I believe only one person of color speaks, a Sikh soldier, even though there were plenty of black and south Asian soldiers in the British army.

As I write this, 1917 has emerged as a favorite for Best Picture, even over what I think are more highly acclaimed films in Parasite, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and The Irishman. (Even Little Women seems to be better regarded, but no one thinks it has a snowball’s chance of winning.) I found it generally entertaining, if stylized and a bit absurd, with an ending that simply doesn’t work. The cinematography is remarkable, and seems likely to get Roger Deakins his second Oscar in three years after 13 nominations without a win. It may also win for Production Design; as much as I would like to see Parasite win for the house, the re-creation of the trench networks and some of the battlefields here was a much more significant undertaking. But the overall experience of 1917 felt a little bit like a shell game, pun intended; this isn’t a true story, or even a plausible one, but it’s depicted like one, and when it was over I thought I’d been taken for a ride – especially after the ending. It’s more of a great technical achievement and a good film than a great film in its own right.

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→ January 27, 2020
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Joker.

In what appears to be a remake of Falling Down with clown makeup, Joker has somehow ended up a critical darling, leading all films in 2019 with eleven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay, for this year’s Academy Awards. It’s a grim picture that manages to lionize a murderer, present an insulting image of mental illness, and retcon a major character’s backstory, driven entirely by the lead performance by Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker descends into madness. (Joker is now available to rent on amazon and iTunes.)

Joker is a new origin story – because the world hasn’t had enough of those – for the most iconic villain in the Batman stories, a character portrayed quite memorably by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, among others. Arthur Fleck, played here by Phoenix, is a clown for hire, a meek, lonely adult man who lives with his frail mother and has the very rare condition known as pathological laughter, a form of pseudobulbar affect that is usually the consequence of a brain injury. He can be weirdly childlike, but only at certain times, and he has some sort of serious mental illness that requires seven different medications, although the illness is never identified. Most of the first half of the film shows how little use or regard society has for Arthur, until a series of revelations finally causes him to go off the rails, becoming the psychotic killer we recognize as the Joker.

There’s a clear intent to get after some Big Themes here, two in particular. The first, around mental illness and how little regard our society has for people who suffer from it, is the film’s major flaw and one I’ll return to in a moment. The second is a simpler depiction of growing economic inequality, with Arthur and his mother on one side of the divide, and Thomas Wayne and his family (including the young Bruce) on the other. Arthur’s first crime makes him a sort of inadvertent Gavrilo Princip, spurring a grassroots movement of people in clown masks railing against the 1%, while Thomas Wayne, here depicted as a cold, ambitious billionaire running for Mayor of Gotham (which differs from previous backstories), is a derisive, entitled man who hides behind wrought-iron fences and attends fancy banquets while showing no regard for anyone beneath him.

Joker‘s big failing is that Arthur should not be a sympathetic character. He describes himself in the film as a “mentally ill loner,” and he is utterly beaten down (literally and figuratively) and discarded by the dystopian-but-accurate society of Gotham, which, in the script’s logic, turns him into a gleeful killer. Several of his victims appear to have had it coming in this twisted worldview – he kills several yuppie douchebags on a subway train early in the film, and then later, after receiving some news that seems to cause him to completely snap, enacts revenge on multiple people in his orbit who have harmed him, and in each case the script seems to justify it. There’s more than a kernel of truth behind the story – the United States is about the worst place in the developed world to have a serious mental illness, especially if you’re not well-off, and of course it’s ridiculously easy for people who shouldn’t have access to guns to get one. The script just paints way too much of a straight line from mental illness to violence, which way too often mirrors both media portrayals of real-world serial killers and mass shooters – nearly all of whom look a lot like Arthur – and the excuses we hear from gun-rights people whenever there’s another massacre.

Phoenix does give a good performance here, although the role itself is written to be extreme, so his performance is going to stand out more for its sharper peaks and valleys; it’s a bit like a great hitter going to Coors Field and putting up video game numbers, where he’s still a great hitter but the superficial stat line may overstate the case. (As an aside, I did wonder if choosing the music of an incarcerated pedophile for Phoenix’s now famous scene on the outdoor staircase was deliberate.) Two of the best ways to get an Oscar nomination for acting are to play someone famous and to play a crazy person; Phoenix certainly got the second one, and he plays it to the hilt. He’s appropriately disturbing when he needs to be, although his affect when he’s just regular Arthur tends to come and go a bit, including his use of an infantile voice in certain scenes but not others. There are other good actors in this film – Bryan Tyree Henry and Zazee Beats are both wasted in minuscule roles – but no character gets beyond two dimensions, not even Robert Deniro’s talk show host Murray Franklin, although Deniro at least appears to be having fun with the role.

We’ve seen examples of genre films tackling serious themes successfully in recent years, including Black Panther, so it can clearly be done. Joker is not as successful, especially when it comes to its treatment of mental illness, and in the process also turns an incel into some sort of folk hero when the history of the character is that he’s a sociopathic villain. I don’t dismiss it as a comic book movie, but I do think it aspires to a level of seriousness it fails to reach, and in the process mixes its messages in a way that’s actively unhelpful. Todd Phillips getting an Oscar nomination for his direction here over Greta Gurwig and Lulu Wang is an absolute joke. I’m sure Phoenix is going to win Best Actor for this performance, but any more honors for Joker will only serve to elevate a movie that doesn’t deserve it.

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→ January 23, 2020
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The Two Popes.

Netflix’s The Two Popes – or, as my friend Will Leitch likes to call it, Coupla Popes! – is a showcase for two great, aged actors, Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, playing the current and previous popes in conversation as Pope Benedict is about to step down as Pontiff and Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, tries to dissuade him through a wide-ranging conversation that covers almost the entire film. As a movie, it’s perfectly fine, often funny, generally thoughtful, a bit verbose, but also problematic in its portrayal of history. As a platform for the two actors, it’s quite good, with Pryce stealing much of the show with his performance and dedication to his accent.

The film is based on a play called The Pope that presents a largely fictionalized conversation between the two men, and that is a bit problematic, as the events are quite recent (mostly 2013) and the two men depicted are still alive. The script definitely brushes aside the very serious matter of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal and Pope Benedict’s role in covering it up; it’s broached, but the characters discuss it and dispense with it. There’s even a fictional confession given by Benedict to Bergoglio, which I find deeply troubling given the role of penance and the Seal of the Confessional in Catholic doctrine; sure, it’s fake, but it feels like an invasion into the character of the erstwhile Pope to assume what he might have said in such a confession.

We get a brief look at the conclave where Joseph Ratzinger is selected as Pope over Bergoglio, who we see was a distant runner-up in the voting, and thus becomes Pope Benedict XVI. He resigned as Pope in 2013, the first such abdication of a pontiff’s own volition in over seven centuries; Bergoglio was selected by the next conclave to replace him, becoming Pope Francis. The bulk of the movie covers Bergoglio’s visit to the Vatican to resign as Cardinal, during which Benedict reveals he plans to resign as Pope, a conversation that reveals their philosophical and theological differences. That meandering dialogue gives us frequent flashbacks to Bergoglio’s youth and to a period in the 1970s when his actions and inactions led to the detention and torture of two priests under his command. The flashbacks are powerful, as are the scenes where Cardinal Bergoglio recalls his actions, and shows remorse; in their entirety, they’re the best parts of the film.

Those scenes are also the best moments for Jonathan Pryce, who is really superb as Bergoglio, right down to a credible Argentine accent – in contrast to Hopkins, who makes scant effort at a German accent. Pryce is a solid likeness for Bergoglio, which helps his performance, but he also infuses the character with emotional depth and a lot of the charm that has made the real-life Pope Francis so popular. He’s the more interesting character of the two in reality, and Pryce brings that to life on the screen. I think it’s the best thing he’s done since those Infiniti commercials. It’s a contrast to Hopkins, who is playing a rather uncharismatic character, and does so accurately, almost as if he was more focused on getting Benedict’s mannerisms and old-man’s gait more than his persona.

As an overall film, however, The Two Popes is a more than adequate, just a bit hollow in the aftermath. The script moves along, thanks in large part to the flashbacks, although it’s so dialogue-driven that there are definitely long stretches where you want something to happen. There are too many odd closeups of the two actors – we get it, they’re old – but the re-creation of the Sistine Chapel is marvelous. There’s also quite a bit of humor in the movie, more than I would have expected and probably a lot more than there was in any real conversation between the two men. It was after watching it, however, that I realized how little the script bothered with the sex abuse scandal that has engulfed the Church for two decades, one that may have contributed to Benedict’s abdication and that exists because of the choices of men like him. Without that, it feels like there’s a giant elephant in the room and these two old men refuse to see it.

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→ January 15, 2020
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Hustlers.

Monday’s announcements of the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were unsurprising and kind of disappointing; the Academy’s one brief moment of acknowledging art outside of the mainstream, when Moonlight won Best Picture in absurd fashion, wasn’t a harbinger of a change in the electorate’s inclinations, but a blip on the timeline. The Academy remains as conservative and insular as ever, nominating five men for Best Director in a year with many deserving women, and snubbing many performances from films outside of the mainstream in favor of giving nods to bigger stars from more commercial films.

One of those snubs was Jennifer Lopez, who plays a supporting role that is absolutely critical to the success of Hustlers (available to rent on amazon and iTunes), a movie I liked more than I expected and in large part enjoyed because Lopez is so damn good. As Ramona Vega, the ringleader of the larceny scam that involves the lead character Dorothy/Destiny (Constance Wu) and a few of their colleagues at the strip club Moves (a fictional version of the NYC club Scores), she dominates the movie from the moment her character arrives, and the movie flags any time she’s off screen.

The film is loosely based on a true story, detailed by Jessica Pressler in a 2015 article in New York magazine, where multiple strippers at Scores concocted a scheme to rob some of their rich clients by drugging them and maxing out their credit cards, taking home a sort of commission for bringing in the clients that was well beyond what they’d ordinarily make through performing and private dances. The script tidies things up quite a bit, including making the women more sympathetic and glossing over the prostitution aspect of the scheme, but follows the original article’s story of the case that exposed them – a victim who wasn’t rich, and who had gone through some horrible personal times, but whom the girls scammed anyway, only to have him fight back and get the cops interested in the case.

The focus here is on these women, who feel demeaned and discarded by a society that values women for their physical appearance, and that only temporarily, more than it values them as people, and fought back against men they figured wouldn’t really miss the money and who were among the biggest offenders at denigrating the women in the first place. Wu’s portrayal of the woman to whom Pressler spoke is actually much softer than the way in which that woman comes across in the original article, but her character isn’t all that deep or interesting – it’s the Vega character that gets the depth and complexity, a woman of great generosity in emotion and material goods with her friends but who has a callous, even frigid side when it comes to the men who misuse her.

The script also makes sure to let the audience know that these women become a surrogate family for each other – Destiny, Vega, two women who dance with them (played by Keke Palmer and Lili Reinhart), the club’s ‘den mother’ (Mercedes Ruehl) – filling the emotional void where their biological families, who have either discarded them or died or otherwise vanished, would have been. It’s obvious, and a little manipulative, but it also was largely effective because of Lopez’s performance, with boosts from Ruehl and a brief turn from Wai Ching Ho as Destiny’s grandmother at the over-the-top but still moving Christmas party. (Cardi B and Lizzo also appear as strippers at Moves, and both are incredibly entertaining in their limited time on screen but aren’t on enough.)

The movie frames the story as Destiny telling the story of the scam to a fictionalized version of Pressler (played in sterile fashion by Julia Stiles) after they’ve been caught and have served their sentences, which works a little to give Wu more chance to show some range but flops when screenwriter and director Lorene Scafaria seems unable to figure out how to wrap things up. The conflict between Ramona and Destiny often feels contrived, never more so at the end – perhaps because the New York article stops before the real-life Destiny (named Rosie) had her day in court, and because the real story is a lot messier. The idea Scafaria conceived is sweet enough to rot your teeth, and in the end Hustlers can’t get above the level of high entertainment because the script works overtime to make these women more sympathetic.

Lopez didn’t get her Oscar nod, but I couldn’t tell you if she deserved one over Kathy Bates (Richard Jewell), Scarlett Johanssen (Jojo Rabbit), or Margot Robbie (Bombshell), not yet at least. I wouldn’t put Lopez over the two nominees whose films I did see, Florence Pugh (Little Women) and Laura Dern (nominated for Marriage Story, but just as good in Little Women). I will say Lopez’s performance was worthy of a nomination; perhaps she was just crowded out in a strong year. I don’t think any of the other omissions, such as Scafaria for directing, were actually snubs; Hustlers is good but only Lopez really rises above the material.

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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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