→ August 14, 2017
→ By

American Honey.

American Honey was the last movie on my to-watch list from 2016 that I hadn’t seen, put off by its running time (163 minutes) when there were so many other, shorter movies to see. It’s too long, which almost goes without saying, and the story doesn’t really gel until the final twenty minutes, but this is a star-making turn for neophyte Sasha Lane, and the meandering script still has some cogent points to make about the American teenaged underclass, enough that you might still want to tough this one out through the slow parts. The movie is available free on amazon prime or to rent on iTunes.

Lane, who was discovered by director Andrea Arnold while on spring break and then won the part after her audition, plays Star, a possibly 18-year-old girl who scavenges dumpsters for food, is regularly molested by her (step?)father, and watches two (half-)siblings because their mother is too busy getting drunk and line dancing to bother. A van of young adults traveling the country selling magazine subscriptions door to door stops in a parking lot right in front of her, when team leader Jake (Shia Laboeuf) flirts with her and recruits to join them. Star runs away the same evening, foisting the younger kids on their disinterested mother, and the remainder of the film follows the van of misfit boys and girls across several stops, focusing on the incipient relationship between Star and Jake – and the ongoing one between Jake and their boss, Krystal (Riley Keough, the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley).

Lane is a revelation in this role, stepping into it like a child actor who’s been on screen for years, switching effortlessly from false bravado to childlike neediness, emanating an inner strength shackled by her lack of any life experience or the self-confidence that comes from it. Lebro is convincing as Jake, but the character is so unlikeable – manipulative, greedy, amoral – that it’s hard to see why Star would remain attracted to him or desirous of his attentions after he has repeatedly taken advantage of her, lied to and in front of her, stolen, and even threatened several people with a gun (in the least believable scene of the film). If we’re just rehashing her childhood – girl from an abusive environment is attracted to abusive men – then we need some sort of growth for Star, character development she doesn’t really get from the script. And Krystal is as one-note a character as they come, a mere plot convenience who’s there to throw a wrench into the Jake-Star relationship.

The other fundamental problem with this movie is how joyless it is until the last couple of scenes. Even when the kids are supposed to be having fun, there’s nothing fun about these scenes; there’s often a Lord of the Flies vibe just under their surface. You can tell a story about kids with no direction and little hope yet still show their quotidian lives as having moments of happiness that eventually lose out to the bigger despair, but there just isn’t much of that here. Only when Star bottoms out and then runs into a family that reminds her of her own home life does she have a small epiphany that propels her forward even as the other characters remain the same. That may be the point – that for most of these kids, the same is all they’re going to get, and maybe we should pay more attention to this underclass so they don’t end up selling possibly-fake magazine subscriptions while riding around the country in the back of a van singing bad rap songs – but the story needs to go somewhere, and it doesn’t really get enough of an ending.

(One detail that bugged me: The van was full when Star joined, but later we see the crew picking up more recruits. So did they just dump some of the others? Or is the van actually a sort of clown car?)

Water recurs as a motif throughout the film, including in the final scene, in a way that I think was intentional, a symbol of rebirth but also of a primal need that ties everyone, regardless of wealth or poverty, together. (Thirst comes up several times in the movie, which I’m including as the same symbol as the water.) Star ends up taking a ride with a trucker – she’s too trusting – and they end up discussing how neither has ever seen the ocean. She slips into a puddle and has a momentary meltdown. And when she hits her nadir, she’s surrounded by oil, with no water in sight.

Will Leitch and Tim Grierson often refer to an old line of Gene Siskel’s, asking whether it would be more enjoyable to watch the movie or have dinner with the cast and crew. (At least, I think that’s the quote. If not, just go with it for now.) There is no question in my mind that dinner with the actors who play the kids in American Honey would be a more interesting, even educational experience. Arielle Holmes plays Pagan, but she herself spent several years as a homeless heroin addict on the streets of New York, eventually writing a memoir and starring in a movie about her own life. Arnold cast several other non professionals in the other roles; I can’t believe they wouldn’t collectively have a more interesting set of stories to tell me than the one told in this movie. Maybe she should have given us fewer characters but told more about the ones she shows, instead of using them as backdrop for the Star-crossed lovers’ broken romance.

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→ July 20, 2017
→ By

The Salesman.

The Salesman won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this past February, although the film’s victory was obscured by director Asghar Farhadi’s refusal to travel to the ceremony after the current Administration attempted to enact a de facto travel ban on people from his native Iran, among other countries. The ban and the director’s previous, eloquent statements criticizing it may have secured the win for the film, especially given the overall tone of the proceedings this year. Separating the movie from the atmosphere around it (as best as I can), however, the story and the two lead performances are more than deserving, and, as with his Oscar-winning A Separation, Farhadi has shown how much a strong screenwriter can do without resorting to the usual pandering of sex and violence. (The film is available on Amazon Prime, or for rent on iTunes.)

The movie’s title comes from the play within the film: A married couple, Rana and Emad, are also starring in a stage production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, with Emad as the protagonist Willy Loman and Rana as his wife, both wearing prosthetics and using makeup to appear much older than they are. The movie opens as the couple’s apartment building is evacuated as the structure begins to crack due to construction in the neighboring empty lot, putting the edifice at risk of collapse. One of their co-stars in the play has a vacant apartment in his building and offers it to the couple rent-free, but doesn’t fully explain why the previous resident left or why all of her stuff is still sitting in one locked room. Someone visits the apartment, apparently thinking the previous tenant is still there, and ends up assaulting Rana, putting her in the hospital with a skull injury and possible concussion. The aftermath of the assault drives a wedge between her and her husband, as she suffers obvious PTSD and doesn’t want to pursue a case against her unknown assailant while Emad struggles to understand why she can’t just ‘get over it’ yet simultaneously becomes fixated on finding the culprit and enacting vengeance.

Farhadi thrives on delicate pacing and dialogue that leaves much unsaid, which can be more powerful in the right hands but puts a great burden on the actors. Taraneh Alidoosti delivers one of the best performances of the year as Rana, going from the confident, matter-of-fact woman from before the attack to a woman showing all the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, looking for emotional support her husband can’t give her, still trying to act in the play as it’s the one ‘normal’ thing she might be able to do. Shahab Hosseini is a bit maddening as Emad because he’s so perfectly aloof, unable to see past his own anger to help his wife, obsessing over finding the perpetrator – only to stumble on an answer he didn’t expect. And when that character is revealed in a tragicomic parallel to the play, Emad and Rana end up opposing each other over what to do about him: whether to grant him forgiveness or ruin his life by telling his family what he’s done.

The Salesman establishes its velocity early and never wavers from it; Farhadi doesn’t speed things up as we approach the resolution, and there’s no fake action to give the film a burst of energy. It’s a slow build, such that the tension near the end and the sense that something awful is going to happen is close to unbearable, after which Farhadi leaves the audience with an ambiguous closing scene (like that of A Separation) that leaves many aspects of the story open to interpretation. The story seems like it would demand an easy answer or a big finish, but even its most basic questions, like whether or how to forgive someone who committed a crime like the one depicted here, remain unresolved. His depiction of the attacker introduces an element of uncertainty that, at the very least, raises the possibility of empathy rather than justifying the initial reaction of one of the neighbors that he’d like to skin the culprit alive.

I’ve seen all five of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film from last year – the others are Land of Mine, Tanna, Toni Erdmann, and A Man Called Ove – and would have voted for The Salesman too, giving it the edge over Tanna on story and the two lead performances. South Korea’s film board chose not to submit The Handmaiden, which I think would have at least given The Salesman a run for its money in the voting given the former’s high production values and strong LGBT storyline, although in the end the best film was the winner anyway.
 

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→ June 28, 2017
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The Handmaiden.

A psychological and erotic thriller built around a classic con story, the South Korean film The Handmaiden made a number of critics’ top ten lists for 2016, but wasn’t even submitted by the Korean Film Council for consideration for the 2016 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film even after the film was generally praised on release at Cannes that year. Directed by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Thirst), The Handmaiden manages to combine a double-cross story worthy of Hitchcock, a drawing-room mystery worthy of Charlotte Heyer, and erotica worthy of Cinemax into a single, stunningly shot film that still manages to compel even as Park’s train wobbles off the tracks in its final third. It’s free on amazon prime and can be rented via iTunes.

Adapted from the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, The Handmaiden is told in three parts, beginning with the story of Sook-hee, a peasant thief who is recruited by the con artist “Count” Fujiwara to become handmaiden to a wealthy heiress and convince the ingenue to marry the fake count so he can then dump her in an insane asylum and make off with her money. Sook-hee agrees after negotiating a better cut of the proceeds for herself, only to fall in love with her mark, Hideko, and lose her commitment to the con. No one’s motives are truly clear here, and Lady Hideko’s uncle isn’t merely the reclusive rare book collector he appears to be; once the first part of the con is revealed, the narrative shifts back to the beginning and shows much of the same material with missing details restored. Everything you see in part one has a purpose, even if it takes most of the film to discover it.

The con drives the plot, but the power of The Handmaiden resides in the scenery and the lead performances. The film is gorgeously shot, from the uncle’s mansion to the Japanese gardens even to the night scenes among the trees, with Park manipulating light and dark or introducing bursts of color to enact quick shifts in tone. There are very obvious parallels to Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and there are scenes in the gardens on the estate where you’d expect to see the girl from Fragonard’s The Swing swaying to and fro.

Kim Tae-ri, making her feature film debut as Sook-hee, nails the urchin’s mixture of overconfidence and naivete, while Ha Jung-woo is perfect as the suave, unctuously charming con man Fujiwara. (The two are both in the upcoming South Korean drama 1987, about the student protests that year that brought down South Korea’s military regime.) Kim Min-hee won several awards for her portrayal of Hideko, perhaps the most thankless role of the three because so much of the script requires her to act numb, although the character gains complexity once the depravity of her uncle becomes apparent in part two; her role just seems less demanding, other than the makeup and hair she’s required to wear while Hideko delivers readings of the books in her uncle’s collection.

The film would almost certainly have received an NC-17 rating here for the two sex scenes between Sook-hee and Hideko, which some critics have tabbed “soft porn” but which would probably escape remark if they involved a hetero pairing. If there’s something objectionable here, it’s the scenes’ length, or some of the dialogue, perhaps badly translated, from Sook-hee that I think was supposed to show that she’s just as naive as Hideko. (Waters herself defended the scenes, saying the women are appropriating a very male pornographic tradition and that queer audiences welcomed them.) Establishing the attraction between the two women as genuine is critical for the credibility of the overall story, and while the second scene is probably too long by half, skipping them entirely would have left the film worse off. The movie’s conclusion, however, brings the off-screen violence from implication to reality with a needlessly grisly torture scene that would have survived just as well without showing us any severed fingers; I haven’t read the novel but I believe that scene was Park’s invention.

I doubt any film would have topped The Salesman for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, given the political circumstances around the latter’s nomination, but I would rank The Handmaiden above the four other nominees. You can argue it’s pornographic, but I think those scenes are both transgressive and true to the original author’s intent; the violence is far more disturbing and less essential to the plot. And the plot is reason enough to watch the film – it’s an old con done up in a new way, with double dealing and secret schemes, by actors who fully inhabit the devious characters they’re portraying. It’s easily among my top ten movies of last year.

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→ May 24, 2017
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Lion.

Lion (now out on amazon and iTunes) was the last of the 2016 Best Picture nominees I needed to see (I’ve said before I’m skipping the anti-Semite’s film) and just never got around to it while it was in theaters because I saw a bunch of other movies I thought would be more interesting and then hit draft season. It turns out that I’d shortchanged the movie, which is based on a true story, largely because the commercials and trailer made it look like a much more sentimental, cloying film than it actually was. It’s still driven more by great performances – Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman both earned well-deserved Oscar nominations – than by a great script, but Lion still delivers a compelling story without resorting to too much claptrap.

The movie follows Saroo from age four to adulthood on a story that would be hard to believe if it wasn’t true. Saroo becomes separated from his brother in a train station in northern India while they’re begging for money, falls asleep on a train, and ends up over a thousand miles away, in Kolkata, where he doesn’t speak the language (Bengali) and can’t help anyone find his family because he mispronounces the name of his village and doesn’t know his mother’s name (he tells a police officer her name is “Mum”). He’s then adopted by an Australian family and seems to assimilate well into the new culture, but as a young adult, is spurred by a handful of fairly minor events and a diverse circle of friends to try to find out where he came from, a quest that relies heavily on Google Earth and eventually gets him back to the village of his birth.

What truly surprised me about Lion was how thoroughly it affected me. I’m used to mainstream films (and TV) trying to manipulate my emotions, and I’m largely immune to it at this point, because I see it coming and often find it hackneyed. Lion certainly cranks up the intensity of some of its emotional payoffs, but they’re grounded in reality, and many of those moments rely on universal sentiments – especially the scene where Saroo returns to the village of his birth for a reunion with his family that comes with a heartbreaking corollary. There’s a bit of that scene that feels very Hollywoodized, where the women of the village come around a corner, almost marching, in a stunning array of colors (thanks to their saris, which can really put Western fashions to shame), to come meet Saroo … but it’s trivial, and it’s over in a flash, after which you get the moment you’ve waited 100 minutes to see.

That’s not to excuse the numerous tweaks to the true story that did detract from the film’s impact. Saroo has another (biological) sibling who’s simply erased from the film. The beautiful woman who seems to be trying to kidnap or sell the young Saroo was a man in reality. And Saroo’s girlfriend is a total cipher of a character – I forgot her name (Lucy) because the character was so utterly bereft of any defining qualities, and is played by Rooney Mara, who has always struck me as a fairly bland actress, which compounds the problem. Lucy is a plot device, not a character, and it’s hard to understand why Saroo, depicted here as a sensitive adult who starts to lash out at loved ones because he’s struggling with his identity, would be attracted to her in the first place.

The critical consensus around Lion seemed to be that it was a good film kept from being great by slow pacing, especially in the second half, where Saroo distances himself from family and friends while immersing himself in the needle-in-a-haystack quest on Google Earth to find his village. I actually appreciated the reduced pace, in part because so much is thrown at the viewer in the first 45 minutes, but also because … that’s how it would have been, right? This had to have taken hundreds of hours over a period of weeks or months, with lots of dead ends and a sense of futility. It’s the one big element in this film that felt anti-commercial, and I think it ended up a strength rather than a weakness.

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→ May 4, 2017
→ By

Toni Erdmann.

My first book, Smart Baseball, is out now!

The German film Toni Erdmann (amazon • iTunes) was critically acclaimed all over Europe and here when it first appeared last year, winning the German equivalent of the Oscar for Best Picture and earning a nomination here for Best Foreign Language Film (which it lost to The Salesman). The 165-minute movie has been widely described as a comedy, but it is anything but. It is a truly unpleasant movie to watch, an extended, pointless exercise in misanthropy and the humiliation of its characters.

Winifred is a divorced and apparently retired German man, probably around 70, who appears to be unable to stop himself from playing juvenile pranks on people, most of which involve the use of a set of false teeth. His daughter, Ines, is an ambitious, hard-working management consultant who is working in Bucharest on a difficult project involving a Romanian oil company. Winifred tries to connect with her for some quality time, showing up in Bucharest unannounced for a weekend, but the effort fails as she prioritizes work over her father. As a result, he decides to play a huge prank, posing as Toni Erdmann, a life coach to the oil company’s CEO, with an utterly ridiculous shaggy wig of black hair and those same false teeth. Every plot description says he’s doing this to spend time near his daughter, but I think he does it because he’s a giant asshole who doesn’t care what damage he does to anyone else as long as he gets a laugh.

I said as long as he gets a laugh, because we don’t. This movie isn’t funny, and I don’t think the script was trying to be funny most of the time. I suppose the brunch scene at the end may have been intended as humor, but it is so unrealistic that it doesn’t even get the cringe comic effect of the excruciatingly awkward. If Toni Erdmann had some charisma – say, as a platitude-spouting new age thinker, or a parody of the consultant who borrows your watch to tell you the time – he could have been hilarious. Instead, he’s just constantly in the way, and the script is totally unable to achieve the comic effect of the bumbler or the walking satire.

It doesn’t help that neither Winifred (outside of Toni) nor Ines is a particularly sympathetic character. We’re almost forced to believe that Winifred misses his daughter, but without any context for their past relationship, it’s hard to imagine why she’d suddenly want to be closer to him when he’s still unapproachable. Ines’ character is written as the woman who has to work twice as hard as the men around her to get the same respect, and has the awful habit of deferring to men in meetings even when they’ve disagreed with her or even undercut her points, but the script gives us nothing to hang on to in support of her character – no evidence of inner strength, or even something to explain her sheer competence, some reason to root for her against the dimwits and chauvinists around her.

(I also felt that the look of Ines, played by Sandra Hüller, didn’t work. Here’s a character who, again, we’re supposed to accept as a strong, hard-working, sharp woman in a male-dominated workplace. Yet she’s almost sickly looking at times – her hair, makeup, even her clothing all work against the character, and Hüller being so pale unfortunately plays into it as well. It was a chance to reveal something more about Ines by exaggerating her physical appearance. Perhaps this is a woman unconcerned with her appearance, but that would contradict a scene near the end where she seems overly concerned with it instead.)

So much of this movie just does not work on screen, in ways it’s hard to fathom would have worked on the page. What begins as an unconvincing sex scene between Ines and the coworker she’s sleeping with turns into an utterly gross non-joke, as if she’s playing a bizarre prank on her partner (who may have had it coming – but I liked almost no one in this movie anyway). Somehow Ines and Winifred end up at a Romanian family’s Easter dinner, where Winifred volunteers Ines to sing a song, which she does, and then runs off, after which the whole event is simply forgotten by all participants. At one point, a few of the characters, including Ines, do lines of coke, which seems completely out of character for her given everything that came before. And the brunch scene … well, without spoiling it, I’ll just say the whole thing was so preposterous I couldn’t buy into any aspect of it.

I tend to think that English-language remakes of foreign films always lose something from the original. But with word coming that there’s an American version of Toni Erdmann in the works starring Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig, I wonder if it could be any worse than the German film; if nothing else, it will at least be shorter, as there’s no way they could expect American audiences to endure nearly three hours of this. And Wiig is truly too funny for the original script. I can only hope they rework it from scratch and see if there’s actually something good to be found in this premise.

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→ April 7, 2017
→ By

Neruda.

I admit to knowing less about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences settles on its five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film than I do about the other major awards, so when I say I don’t understand how Neruda wasn’t nominated for the honor while A Man Called Ove was, I mean that quite literally. Not only is Neruda a smarter and better film, but I find it hard to accept that a large number of movie industry people saw both and said, hey, the mawkish claptrap about the grumpy old man is the better choice. (Neruda is available to rent on amazon and iTunes.)

Neruda, Chile’s submission for the prize for 2016, was directed by Pablo Larrain, who also directed Jackie, which earned Natalie Portman a well-deserved Best Actress nomination. It’s a fictional story that stars the very real and very famous Chilean poet, Senator, and dissident Pablo Neruda’s flight from an anti-communist government in Chile in 1948, first in exile within his country and eventually in France. Through the movie, he’s pursued by the obsessed detective/inspector Oscar Peluchonneau, but Neruda has a strange plan in place, taunting the inspector with copies of books and handwritten notes while always remaining one step ahead of his predator.

As a chase film, Neruda stinks, so don’t rent this one looking for high adventure; there’s more comedy in the cops’ regular failures to find Neruda, even when he’s right under their noses. This is a far more philosophical work, one that is even structured like a poem, and that meditates openly on the nature of character and even on whether we are ‘real’ or merely the fictional products of someone else’s imagination.

Larrain has adopted a specific visual style here, where he cuts conversations up by settings, so that characters in the middle of a deep dialogue will suddenly shift positions, rooms, even ending up outside, but appear oblivious to the change in scenery. Part of this seemed to be an attempt to mimic the free verse of Neruda’s poetry, while it also seemed to underline the metafictional aspects of the story – that is, since these jumps are clearly not possible in reality, are we to suspect that other portions, even entire characters, are not real, but are merely projections of the creative genius of Neruda.

The title character is played by Luis Gnecco as a corpulent, arrogant libertine, as sure of his flight plan as he is of his literary talent, and not above the occasional champagne-soaked orgy. (There’s something inherently amusing about a man who is overweight and balding attracting women in twos and threes by virtue of his words.) He brings two voices to Neruda, one for regular dialogue, one for his poems and speeches, a gearshift for a character who, in reality, was certainly aware of his public profile and eager to play a role in his country’s history.

Oscar, played by Gael García Bernal, is the more demanding role, however, as the cop undergoes an existential crisis during an assignment that will make his career or end it in humiliation. He plays it with the veneer of the noir detective, dashing in suit and hat, betraying little emotion, always confident that the next raid will corner his prey, but little details in the performance and even his look – the unmade ties, the collar askew – show the doubt beneath the surface. In a story that truly has just two characters and focuses on the dance between them that keeps them apart until the final few scenes, García Bernals performance was literally essential, giving life to a film that could have descended into caricature or farce.

Neruda is in Spanish, and a little French, with English subtitles, which I only mention because I’m fairly sure I lost some of the benefits of understanding Neruda’s speeches and poems in the original language because I was also reading the English to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. I can understand a little Spanish, but apparently the letter “s” is banned in Chile, so I found much of the dialogue hard to grasp. Perhaps I’ll need to see about a sabbatical in Santiago; I hear they have good food there.

The real Neruda’s flight was far less daring or courageous; he was smuggled from house to house for three years, didn’t appear in public, didn’t taunt his pursuers, and eventually fled to Argentina and then France on a friend’s passport. He also earned criticism within his lifetime for his refusal to condemn communist leaders who suppressed journalists and other writers, putting party over principle, so to speak. This film version, while flawed in his personal life and his general arrogance, is far more heroic than the actual Chilean was. It’s a forgivable offense because of what it brings us in the interplay between him and Oscar, who turns out to be the real star of the show.

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→ April 2, 2017
→ By

Christine.

The 2016 film Christine is a good movie, not a great one, that gives some life and depth to a real person who’s only remembered today because she committed suicide on live television. The script itself plays pretty loose with the facts and fails to stick the landing, but succeeds at humanizing its subject and is bolstered by several extremely strong performances, notably that of its lead, Rebecca Hall. The movie is available to rent on amazon and iTunes.

Christine Chubbuck was a 29-year-old reporter for a local TV news program in Sarasota at the time she took her own life, a decision that seems to have come at the end of a series of personal and professional setbacks as well as the reemergence of an undertreated case of mental illness. Christine delves into those setbacks while also giving some depth to her character, but without romanticizing either her or her decision. She’s sympathetic despite obvious flaws here, without becoming just an object of curiosity for the ending we all know is coming.

Most of the film compresses Chubbuck’s professional and personal problems into a period of a few days or weeks prior to her suicide. Her station manager, Michael Nelson (played by Tracy Letts), is pushing everyone to chase more salacious stories, citing the “if it bleeds, it leads” maxim, to boost ratings, which shifts the kind of longform news pieces that Chubbuck wants to do on to the back burner, increasing her conflicts with Nelson, who is depicted here as anti-feminist but who understands that Chubbuck has untapped talent. She also has an unrequited crush on the show’s lead anchor, George Peter Ryan (a charismatic Michael C. Hall), and discovers that she has to have an ovary removed, reducing her chances of ever getting pregnant. (She really did have that operation, but it was a year before her suicide.)

Rebecca Hall plays Chubbuck as permanently tightly wound, regardless of mood, giving the impression that she’s bipolar rather than simply depressed, which fits her brother’s recollections of her rather than her diagnosis at the time. Hall’s Chubbuck is always in fourth gear, which makes her difficult to work with, but never a caricature of a “crazy” person; when the script calls for her to be erratic, Hall portrays her with self-control, like someone who’s internalizing the pain of her mental illness.

I had less issue with the film’s bending or fabricating of details – for example, the character Jean (Maria Dizzia, who is just waiting for her part in a Gilda Radner biopic) doesn’t seem to have existed, but here plays Christine’s closest friend at the station instead of sportscaster Andrea Kirby – than the film’s mawkish ending and cloying use of details to tie parts of the movie together. The movie doesn’t shy away from Chubbuck’s suicide, showing the shot from a distance but otherwise playing it straight, including the disbelieving reactions from coworkers who thought it was a prank at first. But it overdoes the aftermath by showing us Chubbuck’s mother watching the program (probably not true) and then a fabricated ending with Jean that serves no purpose but to tie back to a conversation the two women had earlier in the film. This last scene undermines the dramatic effects of the suicide and the seriousness of the portrayal of Chubbuck’s personal problems, but provides zero benefit in exchange.

Rebecca Hall’s performance here would be, at the moment, the second-best by a lead actress that I’ve seen in any 2016 film, just a shade behind Natalie Portman for Jackie and ahead of Oscar winner Emma Stone. She delivered nuance to a script that gave her enough latitude to play Chubbuck as unhinged or unlikable, even when working against a stock character like her mother (played by J. Smith Cameron, who, I just discovered, is married to Kenneth Lonergan). Hall hits this specific note of internal tension and holds it for almost the entire film, only letting it go briefly in scenes where Chubbuck goes to the local children’s hospital to do puppet shows for the kids (something Chubbuck did in real life). In a highly fictionalized biopic like Christine, a sloppy or bombastic lead performance would destroy the film, but Hall truly carries the picture and helps gloss over some of the script’s missteps.

Michael C. Hall is also surprisingly effective as the insecure, dumb-jock type who’s found his star on the ascendant because of his good looks and on-camera charm, while Letts is his usual workmanlike self, infusing a little depth to a character who’s largely one-note because he’s only seen when interacting with and usually just reacting to Christine. Dizzia probably has to do the most work with the least help, as her character is the hackneyed “best friend with no life of her own” type, stripping some character traits from Kirby (played by Kim Shaw), who is instead just the pretty face who gets the job and the guy that Chubbuck wanted.
I wish Christine had spent a little more time explaining the character’s struggles with mental illness, and hadn’t made her so dismissive of the topic in the one scene where it’s explicitly discussed; Chubbuck’s brother has said she was in treatment at the time of her suicide, which this film seems to contradict. But bipolar disorder (formerly called manic-depressive disorder) wasn’t in the DSM until after Chubbuck’s death, so she was only diagnosed with depression and thus was probably undertreated rather than untreated when she killed herself. The script instead focuses on her unhappiness in her love life and at work as the primary drivers of her suicide, backburnering the depression, when that was almost certainly the main cause.

Watch Christine for its strong lead performance, for the solid supporting actors, and for the film’s effort to fill out the story of a real person whose legacy has been limited to its shock value. The script has its flaws, but does manage to give the viewer a picture of Christine Chubbuck as a real person, and the decision not to sensationalize the suicide itself, instead making her character the center of the film, saved the movie from its handful of missteps.

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→ March 27, 2017
→ By

Captain Fantastic.

I hadn’t even heard of Captain Fantastic until Viggo Mortensen grabbed an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance here, but when it popped up on Amazon Prime this month and a couple of you recommended it, I figured I’d give it a shot, even though the reviews I’d seen before watching it were all pretty lukewarm. It’s really not a good movie at all, thanks to a mawkish, preachy script, saved in parts by some good performances and a lot of very funny quips that still aren’t enough to justify this movie’s one-sided existence. (It’s also available on iTunes.)

Mortensen plays Ben, a father of six who lives in an isolated cabin in the Pacific Northwest with his family, where he and his wife have home-schooled the kids and raised them off the grid, rearing a bunch of child prodigies with distinctly anti-capitalist, anti-religious, socially progressive views. When their mom, who is absent in the early parts of the film because she’s been hospitalized, kills herself, the brood end up taking a road trip south to New Mexico to attend her funeral, fight with her father, and engage in the obvious comedy of having the kids see American consumer culture for the first time.

It’s a cliche-ridden mess as a script, as a story, and in most of the things the family does outside of itself, which is to say that the only parts of the script that work are the interactions between Ned and his kids, or among the kids themselves. With six of them, there isn’t enough screen time to develop their individual characters, so five of them are cut from the same cloth and seem to represent different stages of development, with the oldest, Bo, the one who gets some depth, although the two sisters, Kielyr and Vespyr, have their moments. The actors playing the children are all quite good, and I would bet this film will one day be a novelty for the fact that a bunch of good actors were all in this as kids, but they don’t have a ton to work with.

The hippie material here provides a few good laughs, although some of them were easy targets, and the film overplays the humorous aspects of having a five-year-old spout Marxist ideology or Bo indignantly inform his father than he’s no longer a Trotskyist but a Maoist. But once the film puts them in direct contact with mainstream kids and adults, like Ben’s sister (played by Kathryn Hahn, who shows how great she can be even in a serious role) and her family, the film just goes for low-hanging fruit, and never recovers the energy it showed in spurts earlier in the film.

The ending is where the wheels truly come off the bus, pun intended; the story jumps too fast, spares us a lot of explanation we need for decisions the characters (mostly the kids) make, and gives us way too much of a feel-good ending for a setup that should give us something very ambiguous. This is a movie about parenting, about the choices we make as parents, about what it might be like to be there every minute of the day with your kids, and how we might raise children to be better humans, better aware of their effects on the environment and on others, more concerned about injustice and less concerned about material wealth. But parenting is hard, and raising kids with values like those, so far out of the mainstream of our culture, is extremely difficult, so giving us a pat ending where everything’s just fine – and, by the way, who’s paying for Bo’s choice at the film’s end – is inauthentic.

Mortensen’s very good in the film, but I would have given Joel Edgerton the nomination for Loving or even Michael Shannon for Midnight Special before him. Heck, even Rolf Lassgård, without whom A Man Called Ove would have failed completely as a film, was better.

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→ March 14, 2017
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Jackie.

Here are my abbreviated thoughts on Jackie, one of two movies released in 2016 from Chilean director Pablo Larraín:

1. Jackie isn’t that good of a film.
2. Natalie Portman deserved the Best Actress Oscar more than Emma Stone did.
3. And if Portman had won, the Best Picture screw-up would never have happened.

I might also add a 2a, that if this were a better movie she would have won, although I’m not entirely sure of the politics that go into who wins what award. But I do feel pretty strongly about her deserving the nod, even though I sort of argued against her winning when she did win (for Black Swan, beating out Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone). This movie sinks or swims with Portman’s performance, and she commits to it in every possible way, including mimicking Jackie Kennedy’s unique accent and intonation, taking us through the range of emotions that the widow of JFK faced in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s shocking death right next to her. (It’s on amazon and iTunes.)

Loosely based on an interview the former First Lady did with LIFE magazine a week after the murder, Jackie follows her in non-chronological fashion from the motorcade to the funeral, with very occasional flashbacks to prior events. It is a portrait of a woman in totally unexpected grief who also finds herself in front of the nation and yet about to be cast out of the White House with two young children in tow. JFK only appears briefly. No other character gets a fraction of the screen time Portman does. This script is trying to explore the nature of the response one of the most famous women in the world had to having her husband assassinated beside her, especially the public face she gave in the days that followed and in that interview.

That made it all the more shocking to me that the movie is so bland. Portman is superb, but the script itself feels incredibly cold toward its subject. This is a movie about a personal tragedy that was simultaneously a national one, but the script seems to treat it, and Jackie Kennedy’s response to it, as some sort of public policy question. I don’t think Jackie Kennedy comes off well or poorly in the film, but I also think we could have learned a lot more about her character than we did from this script. For example, there are hints of a divide between her and her husband’s family, but those lines are thrown in and never explored any futher. And if the goal was to present her as scheming for trying to ensure that the only major press coverage of her in her widowhood was positive, well, that’s hardly a character flaw.

Portman owns, though. Jackie Kennedy’s weird patrician Long Island accent is tough to listen to, and other than overdoing the breathiness, Portman nails it. She’s also effective at everything she needs to convey through tone, words, and gestures – the grief, the shock, the denial, the attention to trivial details, all come across as incredibly real, and the only emotion anyone shows in this film comes from Portman herself, not from her words but from how she grips and delivers them.

Some of the supporting performances are fine, although they exist in the shadow of the lead. John Hurt, in one of his last filmed performances, is typically wonderful as the Kennedy family priest Jackie consults on the day of the funeral. Peter Sarsgaard is excellent as Robert F. Kennedy, looking quite a bit like a young Kenneth Branagh, infusing some humanity into the character who is at once grieving for his own loss and providing the only measure of stability for the main character. Billy Beane … er, Crudup is playing an entirely fictional, unnamed reporter, giving some restraint and a little humor to a role that was written a bit too much like a giant blank. I also loved seeing Jack Valenti, who later headed the MPAA for three decades and fought to extend copyright law way beyond what such laws are supposed to protect and encourage, come off as an ambitious, smarmy jackass.

I’m looking forward to seeing Larraín’s other film from 2016, the Spanish-language Neruda, which was Chile’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar but didn’t even make the nine-title shortlist. It will be released in digital format later this month.

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→ March 10, 2017
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My Life as a Zucchini.

My Life as a Zucchini (original title: Ma Vie de Courgette) was one of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and the shortest of the nominated movies at just 66 minutes. It’s a stop-motion animation film with exaggerated, absurd-looking characters, boasting a wonderful story that strikes a perfect balance between sweetness and the sad reality beneath. (I saw the film in French, with English subtitles, but there is now an English version in theaters too, with Ron Swanson providing the voice of Raymond.)

Zucchini is the nickname of the main character, the orphan Icare, whom we meet at the beginning of the film in awful circumstances: He’s the neglected child of an alcoholic mother, apparently friendless, with only a kite and his collection of his mother’s discarded beer cans to keep him company. She sits in her living room all day, drinking and yelling at the television, but dies a few minutes into the film in an accident that Zucchini caused, which sends him to the orphanage by way of the cop Raymond’s office. At the orphanage, he meets the other kids who’ll soon become his friends, including Simon, the bully with a good heart beneath his exterior, and eventually Camille, the new girl with whom Zucchini falls in love.

Every one of these kids is there for some awful reason. Alice is there because her father molested her and is in jail. Bea is there because her mother was deported to Africa while Bea was in school. (Sound familiar?) Simon’s parents are drug addicts. There’s so much sadness underneath this story that it’s remarkable the film feels so light, but the script gives us everything through the eyes of the children, and it’s a world in which I wanted to spend so much more time. And how could you not care about these kids? The characters are all realistic – not in appearance, with their gigantic heads and arms that nearly reach the floor, but in conception and in their reactions to their circumstances. Even the rough stuff is played for laughs without diminishing the harsh reality beneath; for example, Simon is the only one who knows anything about sex (referred to just as “the thing”), but it’s because he saw pornographic films his parents would watch. It’s awful on its face, but his child’s understanding of what happened on screen is written so perfectly.

Squad goals
Zucchini’s motley crew.

While My Life as a Zucchini is an animated film, it’s not for kids. My daughter is ten, and I’m glad she passed on going with me, because I think the reasons the kids are in the orphanage would have upset her. (The sex talk would have just embarrassed her.) And while I smiled and laughed through most of the film, I was always aware of the sadness beneath the surface. Even the ending, which I won’t spoil except to say that it’s a happy one, still reminds you of the bleak situation these kids – who are in what I can only assume is the greatest orphan home in the world – face. They will always feel, as Simon said, that there was no one left to love them. Mining heart and humor from such fearsome material, based on a French-language book by Gilles Paris, is an impressive reminder of the power of a great work of fiction, whether book or movie, live-action or animated. My Life as a Zucchini can’t match the technical mastery of Oscar winner Zootopia, but its story is far more powerful.

Quick endnotes: If you see the movie, look for an homage to Spirited Away in the graffiti on the wall around the Les Fontaines orphanage very early in the film. Also, be sure to stay through the end credits (at least in the French version) for an absolutely precious vignette from the audition of the child who voiced Zucchini.

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