→ January 24, 2019
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Cold War.

Pawel Pawlikowski won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015 for his movie Ida, and returned this year with the critically acclaimed Cold War, distributed by amazon studios, which just earned three Oscar nominations this week for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, and, in one of the biggest surprises of the nominations, Best Director. The taut 85-minute, black-and-white drama sets a doomed romance against the backdrop of the Cold War itself, with its two main characters moving back and forth across the Iron Curtain as the political climate tears them apart and their animal magnetism pulls them back together.

Based heavily on the story of Pawlikowski’s own parents, who were musicians in Poland after World War II and split up multiple times before Pawe? was born, Cold War stars Joanna Kulig as Zula and Tomasz Kot as Wiktor, who first meet when Wiktor helps put together a music ensemble to play and honor traditional Polish folk music under the Communist government. Zula has singing talent but lies about her background and experience to con her way into the group, and Wiktor feels an immediate attraction to her that she recognizes and exploits to secure her place at the makeshift academy. This eventually explodes into a passionate affair that leads Wiktor to plan for their defection while their company tours Berlin, only to have Zula choose to stay behind at the last moment, setting in motion a series of meetings and partings over the next fifteen years between Paris, Yugoslavia, and Warsaw, with Zula becoming a jazz singer, Wiktor ending up a political prisoner, and the two absorbing increasing costs to leave each other and come together again.

The pain of parting may be nothing to the joy of meeting again, but Zula and Wiktor are unable to maintain that joy for very long, and begin to tear each other apart – especially Wiktor, who seems to often treat Zula like a prize to be won, or an object to be possessed, as opposed to an independent woman with her own agency. Kulig and Kot have absurd on-screen chemistry that allows Pawlikowski to show virtually nothing while making the desperate passion between the two characters palpable: There’s one love scene where the camera and the actors pause, and we only see Zula’s face, and in the span of under ten seconds the viewer can feel the intensity of this relationship while still understanding that it can never end well.

The decision to shoot the film in black and white appears to have resonated with Academy voters, as both this and Roma landed cinematography nods; Pawlikowski said that color didn’t work when they tried it, as he wanted to replicate the gray bleakness of Poland in the aftermath of the war and the communist takeover. It gives the Polish scenes that depressing air, although it works against the portions of the movie in the nightclubs and salons and ateliers of Paris, where the sense of life is muted … or perhaps that was Pawlikowski’s point, that Zula and Wiktor, as products of the war and the communist regime, can’t fully appreciate or embrace the artistic and personal freedom of the west after their experiences?

Kulig smolders as Zula, moving deftly from ingenue to partner to free spirit to an independent woman who can be petulant and indignant as Wiktor begins to treat her worse the more they’re together. Kot, looking like a slightly older, more rakish Michael Fassbender, drifts more abruptly from dark remove to desperation, as Wiktor’s ability to take Zula for granted once she’s there is completely mystifying, while his single-minded focus on finding her when they’re apart is palpable and easier to understand.

Cold War is short – it’s less than half the length of fellow nominee Never Look Away, which clocks in at 188 minutes – and it zips along once Zula enters the picture, sometimes a little too quickly for some of the tension between the two characters to develop naturally. The film’s ending is problematic, although the last line and shot are both beautiful, in a way I can’t discuss without a huge spoiler; I’ll just say I don’t think it’s adequately set up by the 80 minutes that come before. That puts it behind my big 3 of foreign films from 2018 (Burning, Roma, Shoplifters), but the first 95% of this movie is so good and such a gripping depiction of the familiar story of star-crossed lovers that it’s still a success and worth seeking out.

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→ January 20, 2019
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The Guilty.

The Danish film The Guilty earned one of the nine spots on the shortlist for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with an English-language remake coming at some point with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role. That Oscar category is loaded enough this year that I’d be surprised if it landed one of the five nominations, but The Guilty is a tremendous thriller, one that grabs you by the throat early on and never lets go, while also providing an insightful character study into the only significant person to appear on screen. It’s available to rent right now on amazon or Vudu for $7.

Asger Holm is a police officer who’s been accused of an unspecified violation on the job, the details of which appear much later in the story, and demoted to desk duty where he takes 112 (the Danish equivalent of 911) calls and doesn’t seem to take the job very seriously. After a few relatively minor calls, including one from a man who was robbed by a sex worker and doesn’t want to admit that that’s what happened, Asger takes a call from a woman, Iben, who manages to communicate that she’s been kidnapped by someone she knows and is being taken somewhere outside of Copenhagen in a moving car. She pretends she’s talking to her daughter, Mathilde, who is now home alone with her baby brother Oliver, while Asger navigates a conversation to try to get details on where Iben is – and then later gets a call from Mathilde as well. The film never leaves the call center and Asger is in every shot, just moving between two rooms, as he tries to figure out who took Iben and where she’s going, raging against his powerlessness in the situation while eventually confronting his own misdeeds that put him on desk duty in the first place.

The Guilty clocks in at just 85 minutes, and there’s no fat on this story: there’s the main plotline around Iben’s kidnapping and the subplot around Asger’s demotion and a court hearing the following day that will determine his fate and that involves his partner Rashid. The Iben thread twists and turns multiple times, with the tension ratcheted up by dropped calls, her kidnapper asking to speak to her daughter, and eventually Asger getting the kidnapper on the phone. Asger’s own frustrations, both over this case and over his career and personal life as well, boil over into his calls, especially as he feels like the dispatchers he calls aren’t taking the incident seriously enough – and again, he finds himself powerless to do what he’d ordinarily do if he were out in the field, but has been emasculated by his suspension from that role and can only work through others. Eventually, he makes a mistake, as any human would, and has to face the consequences in real-time as the kidnapping is still in progress.

Asger’s character is the only one of any significance to the viewer – Iben is there, on the phone, but we only see of her what Asger hears, and while he learns more about her as the story progresses, it remains superficial throughout. He seems unsympathetic at the start, sneering through his headset at the people who call for help because they’re stupid or did something while drunk, but his interest in Iben, and willingness to break rules and potentially endanger his own career for her shows depth to his character and makes him more sympathetic … but there are still layers beneath that one that will add to our understanding. He’s the hero, but a flawed one, and is flawed in a realistic, human way that informs his words and actions to form a coherent, three-dimensional rendering. Without that depiction, and the strong, restrained performance by Jakob Cedergren, the film simply would not work.

The Guilty has been highly acclaimed in Europe, earning Bodil Prize (the Danish Oscars) nominations for best film, best director, and best actor for Cedergren. I’m guessing, having seen three of the other eight nominees and read reviews and background information on the others, that this film won’t make the final five; Roma and Burning feel like locks, Cold War and Shoplifters bring incredible reviews and accolades from elsewhere, Capernaum is highly topical, and Never Look Away comes from the director of the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others. Of the four shortlisted films I’ve seen, though, it’s the easiest to recommend by far, because it’s the most straightforward and the most purely entertaining: this is a smart, concise thriller that sets out one goal and puts everything in its script towards achieving it. Because it’s so lean, the narrative never flags, and director/co-writer Gustav Möller instead conveys Asger’s frustration by only letting us see Asger and through the use of long pauses in most of the phone conversations. The story here is solid, boosted by a couple of twists, but it’s the way Möller tells the story and Cedergren portrays it that makes The Guilty such a great watch, even if you can sort of figure out where this is headed. I wouldn’t put it above the three other foreign films I’ve seen from the shortlist, but it’s easily the most accessible of the four, and does so without sacrificing its integrity or insulting the viewer’s intelligence to do so.

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→ January 19, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 1/19/19.

Nothing new from me this week, between prospect writing and a trip to NYC the last two days to attend a MEL magazine event. The prospect rankings will start to run on ESPN.com on January 28th and will roll out over two weeks.

And now, the links…

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→ January 18, 2019
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An Unkindness of Ghosts.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts bears a blatant stylistic similarity to the writing of N.K. Jemisin in her Broken Earth trilogy, from prose to characterization to both writers use of old-time religions in futuristic settings. And both writers put young women right at the heart of their respective stories, with Solomon giving us Aster, a young adult on a ‘generation ship’ that has, over centuries of drifting in space to an unknown and possibly nonexistent destination, devolved into a caste system by ship deck that incorporates skin color into its stratification, resulting in something that looks a good bit like American slavery.

Aster is a self-made scientist and doctor’s helper, often working with the Surgeon General, Theo, as well as tending plants in her botanarium, even though she’s a low-decker on the ship Matilda. That vessel has been in space at least 300 years, and thoughts of its Golden Land destination are more remote and have become tied up in a sort of doomsday religion that most of the ship practices – or, perhaps, that the upper-deck castes use to control those on the lower decks. Aster is neurodivergent, although Solomon never identifies her difference in any specific way, and for reasons that are only somewhat revealed by the end of the book, she’s marked for especially cruel treatment by the Lieutenant, a sadistic leader who is poised to take control if the Sovereign in charge dies. (You can guess whether that comes to pass.) Lune, Aster’s mother, took her own life the day Aster was born, but left behind cryptic clues in a series of notebooks that Aster and her bunk mate Giselle start to decipher when they realize its code may contain clues about the ship, as well as a potential way off of it.

There is, as we say on Twitter, a lot to unpack here, as Solomon has written a tight 350-page novel that incorporates race, religion, class, sex/gender, sexual harassment and assault, how people (mostly men) use and retain power, and a healthy dose of science fiction. There are women in the upper castes, but every authority figure we see is male. Women and girls on lower decks have darker skin, and are also used, to put it bluntly, for breeding, so the ship will have an ongoing supply of workers. Officials and guards have the tacit authority to rape or abuse women as they please, and it’s implied they do so with boys as well. One scene where Aster mouths off (with justification) to an upper-class twit woman lays bare the societal strictures that hold the barriers between upper and lower decks in place, backed by the force of the guard.

Unlike so many science fiction authors, good and bad, Solomon doesn’t spend a ton of time building the world in An Unkindness of Ghosts, giving the readers just what they need to understand what’s happening in the story, or where the characters might be in the architecture of the ship, but nothing extraneous. (Somehow there is meat on the ship, quite a bit of it, and I’m not sure how that one would work unless it’s supposed to be lab-grown.) The result is that the characters are extraordinarily well-developed for the genre – Aster, Theo, even Giselle and the caretaker known as Ainy or Melusine, whose importance grows as the book progresses. Solomon also defies many plot conventions by, again to be blunt, having smart characters still make stupid mistakes, especially Aster, who often acts without foresight because of her youth or how her brain works. She’s the hero, without question, but she’s flawed in a different way than your typical flawed hero. She’s flawed because she was born that way, and her successes come both in spite of that and often because of it, because she makes the best out of who she is, and can thus do things neurotypical people probably couldn’t. All of this, and other aspects of her character including some unspoken history of abuse and her unusual connection to Theo, make her one of the most interesting protagonists I’ve come across in a long time.

Solomon can get caught up in some clumsy prose, another similarity to Jemisin’s writing, such as when they start trying to describe the physics of space travel in their universe, especially the discovery Lune made that changes everything for Aster and her comrades, or in the description of Baby, the ship’s main power source. Yet they also display facility with creating language, giving each deck its own dialect, much the way slaves in different parts of the South would blend their native tongues with English and create new patois, such as the Gulla dialect still spoken today off the coast of South Carolina. The culture and economy of Matilda feel impossibly rich for a book this short; even when I wasn’t gripped by the plot, I was enveloped in Solomon’s world. The book starts slow, but stay with it; the last hundred pages are a barnburner and the ending is satisfying without becoming sentimental or obvious.

Next up: Still reading Camus’ The Plague.

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→ January 17, 2019
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Milkman.

Anna Burns became the first Northern Irish writer to win the Man Booker Prize when her third novel, Milkman, took the honor in 2018. It’s an experimental novel, atypical for Booker winners, that reads like a more accessible Faulkner, and combines a story of the Troubles with the staunchly feminist narrative of its 18-year-old narrator for a result that is unlike anything I’ve read before.

Characters in Milkman go without names, including the narrator, a young woman who walks around with her head in a book and is literally and figuratively oblivious to the internecine warfare occurring around her, as well as the titular milkman – well, both milkmen. The milkman of the title isn’t actually a milkman, but rides around in a white van as if he were one. He’s in his 40s, associated with a local paramilitary group, and stalks the narrator while ensuring that everyone in their tightknit, gossip-ridden community knows that she is his, to the point where others, including her own mother, assume that she’s indeed having an affair with this dangerous, older man. There’s also a real milkman, whose role becomes apparent as the novel progresses; ‘maybe boyfriend,’ whom the narrator has been seeing for a year, who’s obsessed with cars, and whose life may be endangered by not-really Milkman; Tablets girl, who runs around poisoning people, including her own sister and eventually the narrator, but everyone seems to just take it as part of life; the boy the narrator calls Somebody McSomebody, who also tries to threaten the narrator into becoming his girl, which ends rather poorly for him in one of the novel’s few scenes of actual violence; and far more.

Burns layers a story of personal terror inside a story of the societal terror that affected Northern Ireland for decades. The narrator’s life is turned upside down by this unwanted attention from a man she barely even knows, but whose reputation in the community is enough to scare her and to convince everyone else she’s submitted to him willingly (even though she never submits to him at all). When the Milkman stalks her, he also inducts her, against her will, into a theater of the absurd that mirrors reality from that time and place, where violence split Catholics and Protestants, where any official authority was seen as essentially Ours or Theirs, where an act that shouldn’t merit a second thought, like going to the hospital, would be fraught with political and social implications. She’s suddenly seen to have taken sides, and even finds herself the unwitting beneficiary of the fear others have of the paramilitaries, which further underlines for her how potent the impact of this one man’s attentions towards her are.

Burns also surrounds her narrator with families who’ve been hurt by the violence in the community, directly or indirectly, including the one mother who, by the end of the novel, seems to have lost her husband and every one of her children to direct violence, related accidents, or suicide. The narrator’s father is dead when the novel opens, while her mother is a tragicomic figure who is convinced her daughter is a sinner, who believes every rumor she hears about her daughter (some from ‘first brother-in-law,’ who is both a gossip-monger and a creep), and who goes into hysterics over every bit of innuendo, which the narrator never wants to even acknowledge because it merely prolongs the agony.

Milkman is still quite funny and even hopeful in parts among the litter of tragedies and the ever-present specter of the stalker, although we do learn at the start of the novel that he’ll die before it’s over. The narrator’s third brother-in-law, while a peculiar man himself, takes on a protector role over his young sister-in-law, as does Real Milkman, whose interest in her is a side effect of his romantic interest in her mother. There are also signs of intelligent life amidst the gossips and harridans, including the “issue women,” a group of seven residents who embrace feminism when one hears of it in town and starts up a local women’s group in the backyard shed of one of the members (because her husband wouldn’t allow it in the house).

Of course, this is all set against the ever-present backdrop of the Troubles and you don’t need to know much at all about that conflict to appreciate Burns’ depiction of the effects of the sectarian violence on this particular neighborhood. Burns draws and redraws the picture of this time and place with swirling, inventive prose, in paragraphs that go on for days, often putting unlikely vocabulary in the mouths of her characters – esoteric or archaic words, or even words she’s just made up – to provide further much to the narrative. It’s not as difficult as Faulkner or Proust, but shows the influence of those early 20th century writers at the same time, both in a technical aspect and in how Burns uses her experimental sentence structure and vocabulary to contribute the reader’s sense of unease.

I’ve only read a few of the contenders for this year’s Booker but can at least understand why this novel won. It also feels like the third straight year where the prize has gone to a novel that does something different, as opposed to the prize’s history of going to literary works that still adhere to the traditional form and intentions of the novel. I could imagine this novel seeming abstruse to readers outside of the UK, given its setting during the Troubles, but that’s merely the backdrop for a rich, textured story that is as relevant today (with its #MeToo similarities) as it would be to a reader of that time and place.

Next up: A little light reading, Albert Camus’ The Plague.

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→ January 15, 2019
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Bohemian Rhapsody.

Bohemian Rhapsody is just not a good movie, no matter what the Hollywood Foreign Press wants to tell you, and it’s hardly a surprise given the movie’s tortuous route to the screen, with multiple writers, a director dismissed from the project due to harassment allegations, and the three living members of Queen holding veto power over portions of the script. The film tries to tell the story of the band Queen and the story of Freddie Mercury, either of which would have filled an entire two hours on its own, and then somehow devolves into the (inaccurate) story of how the band ended up staging the best show at Live Aid, which, had they committed to it from the start, would have been a better movie than this pablum.

Queen were worldwide rock stars for more than fifteen years, from when Freddie Mercury, who was born Farrokh Bulsara to Parsi parents in Zanzibar, joined the band in 1971 until his death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991. Mercury was a flamboyant personality who dressed in androgynous fashion and had an electric stage presence as well as a potent voice with a four-octave range, and was the subject of longstanding rumors about his sexual orientation (at a time of rampant homophobia) and, later, about his health (when fear of AIDS was a polite form of homophobia). He had a difficult and, by some accounts, unhappy personal life, with his twenty-year friendship with Mary Austin, to whom he was once engaged, one of the few highlights, with him calling her his “only friend” in a 1985 documentary.

Bohemian Rhapsody glosses over most of the important stuff and tells a sanitized linear story that is light on the facts but avoids painting any of the three surviving band members in any sort of negative light, and presents a two-dimensional portrait of Mercury that makes him by turns pathetic and bland. You can find plenty of breakdowns of the film’s loose relationship with the truth, but that’s hardly its biggest flaw. This is a bunch of well-shot concert scenes stitched together by snippets of dull back story, most of which shows the band making music (not really great cinema, gents) or the three musicians getting mad at Freddy for being late. Much of the first 110 minutes seems to be prologue for the Live Aid scene, which the film attempts to re-create shot for shot, and which is undoubtedly the best part of the film – indeed, had they just shown me those 20 minutes, and skipped everything that came before, I would have been far more satisfied with the experience. (Also, there was popcorn.)

Much of the writing in Bohemian Rhapsody is just plain lazy. The band didn’t break up before Live Aid, but the script has them do so to raise the stakes for the show as a reunion and give us a rather silly scene in their lawyer’s office. There’s a Wayne’s World reference that is groan-worthy and lazy AF, and of course it features Mike Myers in a bit of stunt-casting as a record executive who never existed. There are speeches and soliloquys galore, most of which I have to assume never happened because they’re so ridiculous. There’s a Rasputin-like character Paul, who was a real person, but is exaggerated to be the bad guy who drives the wedge between Freddie and the band and is dispensed with once his role as the villain is done. (He’s played by Allen Leach, so the whole time I’m thinking, that’s Branson with a porn stache.)

The movie’s worst sin is how it straightwashes so much of Mercury’s sexuality and, eventually, how he was sick for the last five years of his life and died of AIDS-related pneumonia. The movie shows him telling his bandmates “I’ve got it,” referring to the disease, before Live Aid, but all accounts have him unaware he was sick until at least a full year later, and he didn’t tell the other members of Queen until 1989. It depicts Mary Austin as his only female lover, which isn’t accurate, and then has her largely out of his life between the end of their engagement and the run-up to Live Aid, which also isn’t accurate – she worked for his private music publishing company. (Apparently the scene where he confesses he thinks he’s bisexual and she responds by saying she thinks he’s gay is accurate, at least according to Austin.) Mercury came off in many interviews as unhappy, and exploring why – perhaps as the gay son of a Zoroastrian couple, whom he never told about his orientation, who was self-conscious about his appearance and ethnicity as well, he had issues with identity and self-acceptance. The film just doesn’t bother with this material.

Rami Malek won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama for this performance, which is a good effort but ultimately, like so much in the film, an extended impersonation because the character is so underdeveloped. Still, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters love impersonations too – they gave Gary Oldman the same fucking award last year for doing nothing more than donning a fat suit and mumbling his way through Darkest Hour — and it wouldn’t surprise me to see Malek get the same here, although if he defeats Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale, and Ethan Hawke it would be a damn shame, to say nothing of Stephan James or Joaquin Phoenix, neither of whom is likely to even get a nomination. As for Best Picture, I suppose anything is possible, but even considering the Academy’s disdain for foreign films in that category, I could give you two dozen better American films from 2018 without much effort. Giving this a nod over First Man, which is right behind it on Gold Derby’s odds page, would be criminal. It’s barely worth your time if you love Queen’s music, and you have to sit through so much nonsense to get to that stuff I wouldn’t even suggest you waste the gas money.

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→ January 14, 2019
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Hearts Beat Loud.

Nick Offerman is one of the few celebrities I follow on Twitter, and any movie or TV show becomes much more interesting to me if I find out he’s one of the stars. After seeing the trailer for last summer’s Hearts Beat Loud a few times, with Offerman playing one of the two leads and a father-daughter story around the hook of indie music, I couldn’t have been more jazzed to see it. I finally caught it this weekend, now that it’s streaming on Hulu, and it’s cute and kind of sweet and, to my surprise and chagrin, kind of boring.

Offerman plays Frank Fisher, a widowed father and former musician who runs an independent record store (as in vinyl) in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, and lives with his teenaged daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons), who is a few weeks away from heading across the country to UCLA to study pre-med. The store is failing, in part because the landlord (Toni Collette) has raised the rent beyond what Frank can afford, and there’s added financial pressure from Frank’s mother Marianne (Blythe Danner), who is experiencing some cognitive decline but still lives on her own. In one of Frank and Sam’s regular jam sessions (“jam sesh,” as Frank calls it to annoy his daughter), they write and record a song called “Hearts Beat Loud” that Frank likes enough to upload on to Spotify, where it has a little success and attracts interest from a local agent, which spurs a minor conflict between Frank, who wants to pursue it, and Sam, who thinks it’s a fantasy and by then is days away from heading to school.

The film has modest ambitions and modestly hits them, which works by keeping the story realistic but also means the stakes in the story are consistently low. The story is more slice-of-life than traditional narrative; the film ends when the store closes – so I suppose there was a chance they’d have the song save the store somehow – and Sam heads off to school, which does give a poignant moment when she breaks off her budding relationship with girlfriend Rose (Sasha Lane, great as always). Frank is a bit of a screw-up, which works in some ways – he’s not great with money, he drinks a little too much – but not in others – we get the Dawson’s Creek shtick where the kids are smarter than the adults.

Perhaps the most glaring flaw in the film is the lack of development or insight into Frank’s relationship with Sam, which would appear to be the heart (no pun intended) of the story. There are hints of Frank’s reluctance to let Sam leave New York for school, but no exploration of how he accepts that this is what she wants to do and that it’s right for her – the script skips right over that part, moving from a feel-good moment where the two play a mini-concert the night the store closes to a point after she’s already left. The backstory of Sam’s mother could give some insight into his hope that the band, which Frank titles We’re Not a Band after Sam gives that non-answer to his request for a suggested name, becomes a way to keep Sam both home and closer to him, but it’s scant and disappears from the narrative partway through. There’s a sideswipe at amazon, a fun cameo from a popular indie musician, a bunch of dumb weed jokes, and some nods to Brooklyn hipster culture, all in service of a goal I couldn’t identify.

Offerman is understated here, not in the Ron Swanson way but more in a way that underutilizes his comic gifts; there’s an early scene where he’s playing the cool dad trying too hard to annoy his daughter that was both very familiar (I’ve done almost the same thing and gotten the same reaction from my daughter) and a better use of his talents. He’s apparently quite a good guitar player, but that’s not a draw – there’s one scene where he uses a Boss Loop Station pedal to write and record a riff that they later work into a song, but the scene seems to go on forever, because watching someone write music is, unfortunately, not good cinema. Clemons is a breakout star, though, and has quite a singing voice. Collette and Ted Danson, Frank’s stoner bar owner friend, don’t have nearly enough to do. I wanted to like Hearts Beat Loud for so many reasons, but the total is so much less than the sum of its parts.

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→ January 13, 2019
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Vice.

For pure entertainment value, Vice is one of the half-dozen best movies of 2018. It’s funny, fast-paced, and packed with good performances from great actors, some of whom are disguised sufficiently to make you spend a good chunk of the movie asking yourself, “where do I know them from?” It’s also a movie that I think has the potential to sway a lot of viewers who remain ambivalent about the legacy of the Bush/Cheney administration, or simply prefer not to think about it, since so much of what the movie shows did in fact happen, and the consequences of that administration’s policies have been disastrous in so many spheres of modern life around the world.

That doesn’t make it a good movie, however, and Vice is, in fact, not a good movie. Vice is a farce masquerading as a satire; it is a polemic masquerading as political commentary. It is as subtle as a sledgehammer to the forehead. Its quick pace may be a feature rather than a bug, but it makes the movie feel unfocused and superficial, aided in the former by writer-director Adam McKay’s decision to jump back and forth in time between scenes from 9/11 and Cheney’s early years in Wyoming. (There is one truly brilliant part of this, however, around the 43 minute mark, that I won’t spoil, but it is one of the funniest bits in the movie.) There is so much for the viewer to unpack in this movie, but McKay barely gives us time to open the boxes, let alone sort through their contents, and this becomes most problematic of all if you take a moment – probably after the film ends, because you barely have any time during the movie to think – to ponder Dick Cheney’s motivations for just about anything he did in life. Vice has no answers for us.

Cheney, for the handful of you who might not know much of his history, started his political career as an intern in Congress, hitched his wagon to Donald Rumsfeld’s, and moved into the executive branch, eventually becoming Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford at age 34. When Jimmy Carter defeated Ford in 1976, Cheney changed direction, running for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat and winning in 1978, holding the seat for a decade before becoming Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush. After an interlude as CEO of Halliburton during the Clinton years, Cheney returned to public office as George W. Bush’s running mate, becoming Vice President for eight years, during which he pursued unprecedented power for the executive branch as a whole and himself in particular, power that led the United States into the fiasco that was the war in Iraq, warrant-less surveillance, widespread torture of so-called “enemy combatants,” and more.

Vice focuses on how Cheney got to that point in his career, and what he did with the power he obtained. Cheney, played by Welsh actor Christian Bale, is first seen as a drunken screw-up who is lifted out of his own mess by his wife Lynne (Amy Adams, doing Amy Adams things). Lynne is ambitious but held back by the misogynistic political culture of the 1960s, so she wants her husband to succeed and ascend as her proxy, and throughout the film she is by his side at nearly every moment, and when she’s not, she’s there in spirit pushing him on. Cheney’s ambition may be organic, but it seems more like his wife’s making in this retelling.

That leads, after a lot of prologue, to the pivotal scene shown in the trailer, where he negotiates with then-candidate George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell, doing a spot-on impersonation) to take on the VP role but to redefine it to gain control over a wide swath of the executive branch, including defense and energy. Bush accedes, and Cheney, aided by his attorney David Addington (Don McManus) and aide Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk), sets out to consolidate power under a philosophy called the Unitary Executive Theory that sounds a lot like the divine right of kings – if the President does it, it must be legal. (I can think of one President who would very much like this philosophy to be valid right now.) This leads to the war in Iraq, which this film presents as both a question of settling a score from Operation Desert Storm and a way to enrich Cheney as well as his friends at Halliburton and Big Oil, at a cost of maybe 750,000 lives.

McKay seems so excited to tell this story that he can barely get the words out of the characters’ mouths fast enough before each scene change, never letting the material breathe or, as a result, letting the audience consider what Cheney’s motives might be. Instead, the film dazzles us with quick cuts, loud bangs, and some incredible impersonations and likenesses. Steve Carell does some very fine work as Donald Rumsfeld, and Eddie Marsan (Mr. Norrell!) does that same as his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. Lisa Gay Hamilton gets Condoleeza Rice just right.

The film is also stuffed with gimmicks, with the 43-minute one the funniest, but leans way too heavily on this kind of bombast to work as a coherent film. The Alfred Molina and Jesse Plemons gambits are both interesting on their own, but do not work in the context of the movie. In fact, the Molina scene might be the movie’s best sequence, but does not fit in the broader narrative; it feels more like a brilliant sketch from a comedy show that understands the power of brevity. The scene where Dick and Lynne Cheney begin speaking to each other in Shakespearean dialogue – I thought it might be from one of the two Richard tragedies, given Cheney’s name, but it’s not – doesn’t work in the least. McKay is trying to tell a story, but fantasy sequences in a movie that otherwise strives for realism, such as with costume and makeup, only work against the broader purpose.

There’s also material in here that is pretty questionable. The script very strongly implies that Lynne Cheney’s father murdered her mother, which doesn’t seem to be confirmed or even seriously suspected. The first Iraq War is barely mentioned at all, even though explaining the second one almost certainly requires it – especially the neoconservative faction who supported the second invasion without Cheney’s financial ties to companies that would benefit. The script frequently implies that losing a Cabinet-level position is a massive career setback, even though such people could waltz into six-figure speaking fees or lucrative jobs on television or as lobbyists or at think tanks. But no inaccuracy is as glaring as the film’s stark implication that the Bush Administration invaded Iraq in 2003 because the American public wanted them to do so. Yes, tensions were still high after 9/11, and people did indeed want someone to bomb – which we did, with results that are complicated, in Afghanistan. The idea that Cheney and his focus groups (including the feckless Frank Luntz, who gets lampooned appropriately as a soulless pollster) helped market the war to maximize support, which then justified the war itself, is not just inaccurate, but distasteful. The on-screen text at the end of the movie says that over 600,000 Iraqis died as a result of our invasion. Don’t put that on the American people, even if they did want the invasion. That’s on Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and even Colin Powell – who weirdly gets a pass here – and everyone other cheerleader in Washington who signed off on the effort.

Bale won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his portrayal of Cheney, a hard to believe transformation if you saw his appearance and heard his voice at the awards, and he’s worthy of at least a nomination for the Oscar for the same. Adams should get a nod for Best Supporting Actress, and I could see Rockwell or Carell getting a node for Best Supporting Actor, although I could probably rattle off five more deserving names (Ali, Driver, Chalamet, Grant, Elliott, Kaluuya, Jordan … that’s seven). I thought Allison Pill was excellent in a smaller role as Mary Cheney, Dick and Lynne’s daughter who comes out as a teenager and serves as a plot point throughout the movie. And Vice seems at least even money to get a Best Picture nod, even though it’s not in my top ten or, in my opinion, worthy of the nomination.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t see it; Vice is a complicated movie to discuss, as the length of this review probably shows. There’s a lot to recommend about it, from the many jokes and gags that do land, to the serious and important point it makes about the dangers of concentrating power in too few hands. The script mentions climate change in passing maybe twice, in part to say that Cheney backburnered any talk of doing something about it at the federal level, and then shows a scene of people golfing in front of a massive forest fire at the end. That’s a big deal, and worthy of exploration, but that barely gets two minutes out of the film. You’ll leave angry, but if you leave understanding anything more about the man at the heart of the story, you’ve gotten more out of Vice than I did.

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→ January 12, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 1/12/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, as I’m working on the prospect rankings and saving those extra bullets in the hope that someone like Bryce Harper or Manny Machado will eventually sign. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest review for Paste covers the deduction board game Cryptid, one of my top ten games of 2018, in which each player gets one clue, and you need to deduce all other players’ clues to identify the one hex on the variable board where the Creature is hiding for that specific board and set of clues. It’s quite fun, like a board game with a puzzle at its heart.

And now, the links…

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→ January 11, 2019
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All the Birds in the Sky.

Charlie Jane Anders was a founding editor of io9, the Gawker subsite dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, so it’s no surprise that her debut novel All The Birds in the Sky combines those genres and works in many tropes common in those areas, especially coming-of-age novels from the fantasy realm. Despite a slow ramp-up that doesn’t hint at the novel’s greater ambitions, the story builds to a bold climax that recalls many pioneering novels in these fields without ever coming off as derivative or unoriginal.

Anders’ gambit in All the Birds in the Sky is to create two synchronous, intertwined stories, one of which draws from straight fantasy and one from realistic, hard science fiction, with one character at the head of each, and contrast the complicated personal relationship between the two of them with the growing and apparently inevitable conflict that will occur between their two forces. Set in the near future where climate change and runaway capitalism have led to catastrophic weather patterns and rapid societal breakdown, the novel keeps raising the stakes between its two protagonists and pushes them into difficult, sometimes dangerous choices that only might help save the world.

Patricia and Lawrence are those two central characters, both misfits in their junior high school, albeit for different reasons. Patricia lives with her overbearing, judgmental parents, and a too-perfect older sister whose bullying of Patricia borders on the sociopathic. Lawrence lives on the other side of town, with warmer parents who don’t quite understand him, both of whom gave up ambitions of bigger careers to settle into working-class malaise. Patricia discovers one day that she can talk to animals, if only briefly, and ends up following a chatty bird to a giant tree in the middle of their forest where the birds are holding their Parliament (which is not restricted to owls). Lawrence is a gifted hacker who scavenges parts and builds a supercomputer in his closet, giving it a machine-learning algorithm that allows it to grow by talking to real people online, one of whom is Patricia. Of course, both kids are badly bullied – to such a cruel extent that reading the first few chapters was painful – which pushes them together but later pulls them apart, something exacerbated by a guidance counselor who isn’t what he seems to be, and is acting on a vision of the future where the two lead opposite sides of a global conflict between science and magic that threatens to end the planet as we know it.

The prologue was tough sledding, but once Anders gets her characters out of school, thanks to a dramatic flourish where Patricia rescues Lawrence from misery and possible death at a military academy of dubious merit, the pace picks up and the nonrealistic elements, both magic and fictional science, contribute more to the development of both the story and the two characters. Both Patricia and Lawrence are flawed, due to immaturity and the challenges of each of their upbringings, and then are pushed into situations, Patricia by her classmates at magic school and Lawrence by colleagues at a Boring Company-like startup, for which they aren’t well-prepared. Anders’ greatest achievement in the novel is showing those characters’ growth even through failures, one of which would be particularly traumatic, so that they are better prepared when the climax of the story arrives and the decisions they must make have the largest consequences yet.

All the Birds in the Sky will remind you of many great novels in these genres without ever drawing too heavily on any one source. The entire tenor of the book brought the great Magicians trilogy to mind, including the emphasis on the flaws in the two characters and how events in our youth can have long-lasting effects on our personalities and life choices well into adulthood. The influence of the major YA fantasy series like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia is evident in the background, but never overt, and any similarities are muted by the presence of the parallel sci-fi strand around Lawrence. He’s something out of a Heinlein novel, but better, more well-rounded and a lot more aware of the existence of women as actual people than anything Heinlein ever dreamed up.

I expected the ultimate battle between science and magic in this novel to play out differently, perhaps as some sort of faith/reason allegory, but it doesn’t, and that’s just how Anders rolls – so much of this novel sets you up in a comfortable, familiar way, and then resolves matters in a way that defies expectations without cheap surprises. All the Birds in the Sky won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2017, beating The Obelisk Gate (a result that was flipped for the Hugo), and I certainly agree with that result. It’s a fun, smart, compelling read, appropriate for young and full-grown adults alike.

Next up: Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts.

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