→ December 14, 2022
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The Wonder.

The Wonder is another adaptation of a book by Emma Donoghue (author of Room), directed by Sebastian Lelio (Una Mujer Fantástica, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), and starring Florence Pugh. It has no reason not to be good. And it is good, imperfect but good, taut and spare and well-acted, with Pugh, who seems very unlikely to get any awards love for her performance, showing once again what a compelling talent she is.

Set in 1862, The Wonder tells the story of Elizabeth Wright (Pugh), a nurse who is called to an Irish village where a young girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), appears to have been fasting for four months, requiring no food or sustenance, subsisting solely on prayer. Her Catholic family wants to believe she’s blessed by God, as does the local priest and several other town authorities, although there’s enough disagreement that the triumvirate of local leaders (Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Dermot Crowley) have called in Mrs. Wright and a nun to watch over Anna for two weeks, taking twelve-hour shifts to determine whether she’s for real or is somehow sneaking or being given food. An Irish journalist with a questionable past (Tom Byrne) shows up as well, and he’s even more skeptical than Mrs. Wright is, but it’s unclear if or how Anna and her family might be pulling this off.

The Wonder isn’t really a film about religious mania or doubt, although those themes are there below the surface, but about the way in which adults use children – and, really, all manner of people – as objects to advance their own ends. The religious leaders and Anna’s own family are so invested in the possibility that her survival without food is the product of divine intervention that they’re willing to overlook signs that she’s dying, even ignoring the protestations of Mrs. Wright that the girl needs food. The nurse herself has a past of tragedy, telling Anna’s family that she’s widowed but leaving out several other details from her history, and it turns out the journalist is doing the same, leaving both of their motivations here open to question as well.

Of course, you can’t read this without seeing an implicit indictment of religion’s capacity to harm and kill, and the way that people will turn to religion, even with that capacity fully on display, in times of strife. The novel and film are set in the wake of the Irish famine caused by a potato blight that led to the deaths of about a million Irish people and the emigration of two million more, a time where you might think that people would ask why God had abandoned them, especially given the island’s history of dedication to the One True Church of Rome even as their overlords in England tossed it aside for divorce and other heresies. Instead, we have a family and a town clinging to that faith as fiercely as ever, impervious to material explanations and physical evidence of harm (as when Anna spits out an entire tooth, a sign of malnutrition), turning even more deeply into religion even when any rational person would see a person surviving without food for four months as a physical impossibility. The script doesn’t dwell much on the science versus faith battle directly, instead pitting the rationalist nurse against the nun and the spiritual leaders as a stand-in for that debate, which had just exploded on the world with the publication of On the Origin of Species just three years prior to the film’s setting.

This film is nearly all about Pugh’s performance, with a strong assist from Cassidy. Pugh has become one of those “whatever she’s in, I’ll watch, unless Olivia Wilde directed it” actors, and while she’s not going to get any awards consideration for The Wonder, it’s certainly worthy of it. Her portrayal of Elizabeth as a skeptic who’s dealing with her own secret pain and finds herself geographically and socially isolated in this small Irish hamlet is compelling and credible, and her interactions with Cassidy’s Anna are the best parts of the movie. The film overall feels a bit small for awards attention – its only nominations so far were from the British Independent Film Awards, where it earned twelve but only won for Original Music – and that might be why Pugh’s been overlooked in a very packed category. I’ll give this the highest praise I can give a film, though: I was never bored, and what’s more, it took me a while to figure out what might be going on.

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→ February 24, 2021
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The Trial of the Chicago 7.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (now on Netflix) has a great movie at its heart, with all of the quick, witty dialogue you’d expect from an Aaron Sorkin script, but it is the most over-Sorkined thing imaginable. The actual story of the Chicago Eight (later reduced to seven, when Bobby Seale was granted a mistrial) is compelling enough that Sorkin had to do nothing more than supply the dialogue. Instead, he fabricated events and added melodrama to a story that didn’t need it.

The Chicago Seven were seven men who were involved in some way in the protests against the Vietnam War held in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which itself took place in the wake of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy. Those protests descended into violence when the Chicago Police Department responded with violence to the protesters’ mere existence, but the city, and then the new Republican Administration of President Nixon, chose to charge eight men with conspiracy to incite violence. The eighth, Seale, wasn’t at the protests, but was the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, and had the misfortune to be in Chicago for a few hours during the convention, so he was arrested too on a charge that was even more bogus than those faced by the other seven. The trial was a farce, over before it started, thanks in no small part to a judge who kept one foot on the scales the entire time.

Sorkin chose to tell the story of the trial, giving us the protests and the violence through flashbacks, which is a reasonable device for explaining this part of history, especially given the historical populiarty of courtroom dramas on TV and in film. With the cast he’s assembled here to play the courtroom principals, he can get away with most of the action taking place inside that room, giving them the dialogue and letting the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen (Abbie Hoffman) and Eddie Redmayne (Tom Hayden) handle the rest.

There are portions of this film that work, which makes it all the worse when Sorkin decides to tinker with the story. The actual courtroom was something of a circus; Hoffman and fellow Yippies co-counder Jerry Rubin (played by Jeremy Strong) did pull a lot of the antics you see in the film, the judge (Frank Langella, good in a one-note role) really was this crooked, and what happens to Bobby Seale in the movie did happen in the real trial. So why would Sorkin insert so much fiction into this narrative? Why would he have the pacifist David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) punch a bailiff in the courtroom, when no such thing happened? Why do we get this fake honeytrap storyline around Rubin, with an FBI agent who never existed? Why wouldn’t Sorkin show any of the testimony from the many celebrities, including Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, and Allen Ginsburg, who did appear at the real trial? And the ending of the film, while certainly stirring, is a complete fantasy, and it is maddening that Sorkin decided that actual history wasn’t good enough for him or for us.

Cohen may not quite have the most screen time, but he’s clearly the star of the film, and if anyone gets a nomination for this movie – and the oddsmakers have it getting a whole bushel – it should be him. The secondary framing device showing Hoffman retelling the story of the protests and trial during a standup routine doesn’t work either, but Cohen is tremendous inside the courtroom and in the flashbacks, especially when he’s on the stand – he and Rubin were the only two of the seven to testify – and we get more of Hoffman than just the wisecracks. It’s not really an Oscar-worthy performance because the role itself is too slight, but Cohen runs it right up to its ceiling. Rylance also stands out for his performance here, also in a limited role, and this might be the movie that truly deserves the Best Ensemble Cast award rather than any individual honors.

How this got a nomination for the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama over Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom or The Nest, to name just two superior films, is beyond me. It’s entertaining, beyond a doubt; the movie never drags, and Sorkin can write some great dialogue, but this script is too bombastic, too overwritten, and, weird as it is to say, too slanted in favor of the defendants to call it a great work of art. I’m not even arguing for the side of the prosecution and certainly not the cops, not one of whom was convicted of any crime in connection with the riot they started, but Sorkin is trying so hard to canonize these seven men that he often turns them into cartoon characters. They can be heroes without Sorkin’s help, and the film is worse for his efforts.

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→ December 29, 2020
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The Prom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ November 21, 2020
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The Queen’s Gambit.

The Queen’s Gambit, adapted from the 1983 book of the same name by Walter Tevis, is ostensibly about chess, but it’s really a coming-of-age story about a chess prodigy who overcomes multiple family tragedies and drug addiction to become one of the absolute best players in the world. The story is somewhat flawed, and perhaps ties up too neatly at the end, but it’s a compelling ride from start to finish with a very strong cast.

Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy, who is certainly a star now if she wasn’t already) ends up in an orphanage when the series opens after her mother dies in a car accident from which Beth walks away physically unscathed. While in the orphanage, which is strict but not quite Dickensian, she spots the gruff custodian (Bill Camp) in front of a chess board and demands that he teach her to play. He’s a strict teacher, explaining the game and chess etiquette, but realizes how incredible her mind is and introduces her to a teacher at a local high school who runs a chess club. She’s off to the races … except that she’s also hooked on the tranquilizers that the orphanage feeds to the kids to keep them docile, which presages a long battle with substance abuse even as Beth continues to stun male players and rise up the ranks in the chess world, eventually facing the Soviet champions in Moscow.

There’s a lot to recommend in The Queen’s Gambit, not least of which is the dedication to getting the chess scenes right. I’m not a chess expert, or even much more than a beginner, but I never felt like they were faking the ‘action’ on the chess boards – there were no obvious mistakes like moving a bishop straight up a row or column, or claiming a player was checkmated when it was visibly false. The series spends a lot of time on the chess itself, a difficult creative choice given how hard it is to make what is essentially an intellectual activity exciting on screen. The director emphasizes the tension inherent in chess (and most great two-player games of any sort), where you must figure out your opponent’s likely responses to any move you might make, and they use a gimmick to demonstrate Beth’s prodigious chess mind where she visualizes the board on the ceiling upside-down. The gimmick is cute, maybe a bit overused, but the way they parse the moves on the board with shots of the players – and some help from music and editing – makes the matches seem as tense as the end of any close athletic event.

Taylor-Joy has been on a steady ascent over the last few years, from The Witch to Thoroughbreds to this year’s adaptation of Emma, but The Queen’s Gambit is probably going to be the role that makes her a star. She’s especially good here when she’s not speaking – she’s good at expressing a broad range of emotions just with her face and body language, and handles the transition from awkward teenager to fashion plate (someone had a lot of fun dressing her in mod clothes highly evocative of the mid-60s) with aplomb. Her speech can come across a bit affected, although that’s a minor quibble. This series doesn’t work without her nailing the lead role.

There are a lot of very strong supporting performances, including Camp, Marielle Heller as Beth’s adoptive mother, and Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Beth’s obnoxious rival Benny Watts, but none made a stronger impression than Harry Melling, whose transformation into a series and versatile actor has been a remarkable surprise. Melling plays Harry Beltik, an early competitor whom Beth defeats on the board and enraptures off it, turning him into both a suitor and a friend whose loyalty she doesn’t always deserve. He shows up as an arrogant, overconfident local chess champ, but softens as he grows up, and eventually becomes a voice of maturity and reason that Beth needs, even if she’s not always willing to heed it, and Melling plays that second version of Beltik with compassion and a very amiable nerdiness that makes him the most compelling character in the retinue of men orbiting Beth’s star. Melling was good in The Old Guard as the villain and excellent in a small role in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, but this is the best thing I’ve seen him in since he finished up his run as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies.

The Queen’s Gambit has a couple of problems that didn’t detract from its entertainment value but did keep it from becoming a truly great series (that might, say, win all the awards). One is that its depiction of drug addiction and alcoholism is facile, and there have already been many thinkpieces accusing the series of glorifying substance abuse by depicting it as essential to Beth’s chess genius. That isn’t the ultimate lesson of the series, but she’s probably far too functional as a chess player for someone who is constantly shown drinking and taking benzodiazepines. A second is the use of Jolene, a Black girl whom Beth meets in the orphanage, as a Magical stereotype that ends up coming across as racist even though Jolene’s inclusion was probably an attempt to make the cast more diverse.

The one flaw in the show that did detract from the entertainment value is that Beth’s story arc is just too smooth in its upward trajectory, so there isn’t as much drama at the chess tables as there might have been. Some of this is unavoidable: she’s not going to bomb out in the first or second round of a chess tournament, playing some junior player, because chess has absolutely no luck or randomness in game play. But much of the potential fodder for drama away from the chess board is frittered away by the script, including multiple tragedies after she’s adopted, where potential difficulties are just resolved by good fortune or exceptional foresight. By the time we get to Moscow in the final episode, it’s all seemed a bit too easy for Beth to go from the orphanage basement to a match against the best player in the world.

That wasn’t enough for me to dislike the show; I was still hooked, and my partner and I watched the whole thing inside of three days. It’s paced so well that my attention never flagged, and several of the episodes ended sooner than I expected. I could have used more balance in the story, and the way Jolene returns in the last episode is borderline cringey – a shame, as the actress, Moses Ingram, does the best with what she’s given – but I completely understand the hype. The Queen’s Gambit is worth the binge.

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→ November 16, 2018
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They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

No story has a happy ending unless you stop telling it before it’s over. — Orson Welles

Orson Welles’ spent about a decade on his last film project, The Other Side of the Wind, but never completed it before his death in 1985, having shot the film for over five years and spent several more editing it, or simply tinkering with it, before he lost the rights to the footage in a legal dispute. Netflix has commissioned a completion of the film with what was shot, in line with what’s known of Welles’ plans, as well as a companion documentary about the making of the original project called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. The former film holds little interest to me, for many reasons, but the documentary is one of the most purely entertaining things I’ve seen all year. Morgan Neville, who also had a hit this year with Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, spoke to just about everyone involved in the making of The Other Side of the Wind who is still alive, used archival footage from others, footage from the movie itself, plus recorded interviews with Welles and bits of his other films to create an informative and fast-paced look at a slow-moving cinematic disaster.

The documentary covers the period from when he began the project on The Other Side of the Wind in 1970 through the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which, for reasons explained in the documentary, cost Welles control of his project, with a quick run through the last few years of Welles’ life and some of the other projects he left unfinished. Welles appears to have had a general vision for the movie, which was itself a film-within-a-film and had a clearly autobiographical bent that he repeatedly denied, but the script and that vision kept changing, while Welles, strapped for cash, kept improvising on matters of location, crew, and even cast. He tried to use impressionist Rich Little in the film, and later cast a local waitress with no acting experience (or, it would appear, talent) in an important supporting role. He tried to work with a skeleton crew of people especially loyal to him, but the set is described by surviving members as “a circus” where it was often unclear why Welles was doing what he was doing, or if he even knew.

Welles comes off as a narcissist and megalomaniac who openly lies to his cast and crew to avoid any admission that things weren’t going well. He was also a perfectionist, in the worst way that can be, in that he couldn’t bear to let films go, leaving at least four projects unfinished at his death — this one, The Deep (an adaptation of the novel Dead Calm), The Dreamers, and Welles’ adaptation of Don Quixote. The perfectionism meant that scenes were reshot and rewritten many times, often on the fly, while the editing process also took years as Welles, in the retelling of people who worked with him, altered his vision for the film as he edited it – while doing so as a squatter in the house of director Peter Bogdanovich, Welles’ friend and one of the stars of the film.

The documentary doesn’t so much address the question of why the movie wasn’t finished – that’s straightforward – or what Welles hoped to accomplish with the movie beyond making his magnum opus, which is unanswerable. It seems more a study of Welles the character, a man undone by a massive early success in Citizen Kane, subsequent betrayals by Hollywood, a lack of contemporary acclaim for later works – many now seen as great films, as his entire legacy has undergone a total reassessment since his death – and strained personal relationships. There’s even a hint at the end of They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead that Welles’ upbringing played a substantial part in his perfectionism and constant need for approbation, although it’s underexplored, likely because there was no one to interview on camera about it. Instead, Neville seems to ask this question about The Other Side of the Wind: Did Welles ruin his own movie or did the movie ruin him?

The film also includes vignettes from Welles’ personal life in the 1970s and early 1980s that both flesh out (no pun intended) his character while further explaining, or trying to explain, the endless story of the making of his movie. That includes the story of Welles’ friendship with Bogdanovich, which ended, per Bogdanovich’s telling, when Welles and Burt Reynolds mocked him during a television appearances; his longstanding affair with Oja Kador, a Croatian artist and actress who also starred in his film; and his extensive working relationship with cameraman Gary Graver, which crossed into the abusive. Those three relationships were essential both to the making of The Other Side of the Wind and its unmaking as well, as there is no way Welles would have fallen so far down this rabbit hole were it not for the devotion he inspired in his friends and colleagues.

Neville uses some quirky devices to keep the pacing brisk, especially at the beginning, such as using clips of Welles from his films to create a false dialogue with the narrator, Alan Cummings, something that I found amusing but is certainly atypical for serious documentaries. There’s also a clip of his wonderful appearance in The Muppet Movie, likely the first appearance of Welles I ever saw, which forever cemented his image for me as a hefty, silver-bearded man with a deep voice and great charisma on the screen. As it turns out, Welles had a spectacular sense of humor as well, which comes across as a side effect in They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead; he had a huge laugh and a quick, dry wit, never evident in his films but very much a part of his persona and likely a reason people in his orbit were so willing to throw their lives into chaos when he called. I can’t say anything here made me more interested in seeing The Other Side of the Wind, but it did remind me of how much I enjoyed his work behind the camera (The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil) and in front of it – especially The Third Man, a film so good that for years I assumed he directed it.

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→ November 28, 2017
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Icarus.

Icarus, a documentary now available on Netflix, covers the Russian state-sponsored doping program for Olympic athletes from the most direct, personal angle possible: The director was working with the architect of the program on a completely different project when the story broke in a German documentary, The Doping Secret: How Russia Makes its Winners. So instead of merely following the chronology of the program’s execution, the leak to the press, and the subsequent drama around the WADA recommendations to ban all Russian athletes from the 2016 Olympics and the IOC’s decision to give WADA the finger, Icarus gives it to viewers in real time from the perspective of one of the whistleblowers who ends up fearing for his life.

Filmmaker Bryan Fogel decided, on what appears to be a whim, to race in a Haute Route cycling event, a seven-day endurance test across difficult terrain, this time in the Alps of southeastern France. (They also hold similar events in the Pyrénées and in the Rockies.) He finishes in the top 20, but his body just gives out near the end, so he does what any normal person would do in response – he decides to start doping to see how much a little artificial help will improve his performance. (He notes that the event bans performance-enhancing drugs but doesn’t bother testing for them.) He contacts the former head of the main U.S. testing lab, who agrees to help but eventually reneges and refers Fogel to Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the Russian Anti-Doping Centre, a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory that would test athletes for PED usage. Rodchenkov also knew quite a bit about the benefits of the various PEDs available to Fogel and helped him design a protocol, with the help of an “anti-aging” doctor here in the U.S., to improve his performance in a second shot at the Haute Route.

That second race doesn’t go as well as planned, but it becomes thoroughly secondary to the film’s real story: The German documentary exposes the Russians’ state-run doping program, claiming many of the country’s medals in recent Olympics, including Sochi, were achieved by athletes who should have failed PED tests but didn’t. Rodchenkov was actually running the doping program on the side, even while he was running the anti-doping facility, and during the filming of Icarus, he begins to fear that the government is watching him and possibly preparing to arrest him, so he flees to the U.S. and tells his everything to the New York Times for a piece that ran on May 12, 2016. That article blew the doors off the scandal and led to a longer WADA investigation, which the IOC chose to ignore because of reasons we can only imagine – as Rodchenko makes it clear that he believes Vladimir Putin, who approved the doping program, will stop at nothing to silence his enemies. We learn that one of Rodchenkov’s associates died, allegedly of a heart attack, in February 2016, shortly after the German film aired; another died the same month, with both men former directors of Russia’s anti-doping agency.

There is so much to unpack in Icarus, which is thoroughly gripping even though you invest the first 40 minutes or so in a story that doesn’t matter. (It’s never really clear why Fogel is willing to subject his body to the doping regimen, whether it’s a desire to win, a desire to show what doping can do, a Morgan Spurlock-style attitude to filmmaking, or something else). What was a weird but intriguing documentary that looked at the history of doping and the cat-and-mouse game between the athletes who use such drugs and the labs that try to catch them turns into a darker, real-life spy thriller. The film doesn’t bother with bothsidesism; Rodchenkov’s credibility isn’t questioned, nor are we given any reason to question it, and he provides Fogel with detailed notes on specific athletes’ regimens that seem to immediately convince a group of appalled members of WADA who walked into a conference room believing that this kind of program was physically impossible. (The KGB manages to tamper with WADA’s tamper-proof caps, among other tricks.) And a subsequent special investigation, led by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, found that over 1000 Russian athletes had doped in events over the time period covered.

Two angles in particular stand out from this. One, relevant to those of us here with an interest in baseball, is that a sufficiently determined and organized group can defeat even a sophisticated testing program. This isn’t about masking agents, or super-secret new drugs that haven’t hit testing protocols yet, but about physical exchange of dirty samples for clean ones that won’t test positive. It shows how difficult such a scheme would be to pull off … but also that it was pulled off, successfully, for years, and therefore is at least feasible.

But I don’t know how you can watch Icarus now without drawing the obvious parallel: Vladimir Putin approved a program to interfere with a competition that went beyond his own borders to try to engineer the results he desired – and even when given irrefutable proof of what he did, he just dismisses it as, in essense, fake news. He even gets away with it, despite those meddling kids, because I’ve seen jellyfish with stronger spines than the IOC, which just gave carte blanche to any major power to dope the hell out of its athletes. There’s even a scene where we see a Russian TV show airing emails between Fogel and Rodchenkov – emails obtained via hacking. We’re fighting someone who appears willing to do anything, perhaps even kill, to achieve his goals, and who thus far has proved immune to any penalty or retribution. It’s a grim projection for the future of international sport … and our elections, too.

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