→ July 18, 2019
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Never Look Away.

Never Look Away (iTunes • amazon) was the last film for me to see from this year’s Oscar batch; I like to try to see all of the films nominated in major categories, including acting and directing, which is often a challenge for the five films nominated in Best Foreign Language Film. Never Look Away, Germany’s submission for last year, took one of those nominations but also earned a nod for Best Cinematography, and writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck had won the foreign film award previously for the acclaimed 2006 film The Lives of Others, which I need to see (and is streaming on Netflix at the moment). The particular catch with Never Look Away is that the movie is 189 minutes long, which is well beyond what I think I can handle in a single sitting in the theater, so I missed its run in the art theaters of Philly. It’s really tremendous, in hindsight one of my top ten movies of 2018, and certainly deserved its spot in the Best Foreign Language Film category. I wonder if, had it been shorter and a bit easier to see, it would have had a little buzz for Best Picture, because it’s such a beautiful, high-minded film, anchored by two very strong performances.

Never Look Away is based loosely on the life of Gerhard Richter, a German painter best known for a particular style of painting photographs on canvas, hewing closely to real events of his childhood and his professional life. The protagonist here, renamed Kurt Barnert, is born just as the Nazis are gaining power in Germany, and is traumatized by seeing his favorite aunt, who encouraged his interest in art, suffer a mental health breakdown, after which the Nazis forcibly commit her and then put her to death in a concentration camp. In art school, he meets a young woman named Ellie – who reminds him of his deceased aunt – and falls in love with her, not realizing that her father, a gynecologist, had an important role in the Nazi regime. Kurt and Ellie survive the war, but in postwar East Germany he only gets to paint scenes of Socialist Realism, so the two defect shortly before the Berlin Wall goes up, allowing him to secure a place in an important art school in West Berlin, where he eventually has his creative breakthrough. The love story between the two characters, which is the movie’s major fictional aspect, is woven into the lead character’s artistic narrative, as the saintly Ellie serves both as the great love of Kurt’s life and also a major inspiration for his eventual success as an artist.

Never Look Away moves along shockingly well for a movie of this length and scope, in part because von Donnersmarck doesn’t linger too long over most scenes, especially after the fairly extended prologue of scenes just before and during World War II, which serve primarily to set up Kurt’s character and the ensuing drama with Ellie’s father. Schilling is very compelling as Kurt, appropriately brooding and intense, never truly at ease even with Ellie, while Sebastian Koch (who reminds me of the late Austrian singer Falco) is perfectly insidious as Ellie’s father, whose professional demeanor hides his machinations and drive for self-preservation.

Paula Beer plays Ellie as well as she can, but the character’s primary function is to stand still and look pretty, which is arguably the movie’s biggest flaw – there are no female characters here of any depth. There are various women who play critical roles in Kurt’s life, from his aunt Elizabeth to Ellie to Ellie’s mother (Ina Weisse, looking a lot like Cate Blanchett from Carol), but they’re all at the story’s periphery, and Ellie – who I think is a pastiche of Richter’s wives, but is clearly not a real, single character – gets virtually no exposition, no explanation of why she’s in love with Kurt, no description of her life outside of his view, and no function in the plot beyond the connection to her father and her trouble getting pregnant.

Once a film gets past 130-140 minutes, the question of need becomes salient – did the movie have to be this long? Did Never Look Away need to run a shade over three hours, and does it make sufficient use of that time? The answer is rarely yes, but in this case, von Donnersmarck doesn’t waste a minute; the pace is consistent, never dragging, but of course never rushing, and he uses some of the space he’s allotted to himself to express the struggle of an artist looking for his voice without boring the viewer. (The film has very little humor, but the scenes of Kurt trying out new ideas, and getting reactions from his colleague Günther, are the closest this movie comes to comedy.) The cinematography that garnered such praise is a function of different camera angles and shifting shots to compare the scope of art to the world around it, rather than the lingering landscape scenes I tend to associate with Best Cinematography nominees.

Roma was obviously going to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but in the competition for second place behind it, Never Look Away was clearly worthy of one of the four other nominations, and I think if the film were shorter it might have at least gained support in another category – perhaps Best Director, where Pawe? Pawlikowski got a nod for the Polish-language Cold War. I’d put Never Look Away over Cold War for a more credible story and its stronger exploration of the meaning of art, both to the public and to the artist himself, although I can’t put it above Burning, my #1 movie of last year, or Roma. Even with the lack of definition around the women in the film, it’s still riveting, and for me to say that about a movie of this length is more evidence of just how compelling it was.

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→ May 2, 2019
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The Wild Pear Tree.

I saw a three-hour movie! It’s just not the one everyone else saw this weekend (which I’m probably not going to see, not with the laziest plot device ever at the heart of the story).

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014 for his 196-minute film Winter Sleep, so his follow-up film, last year’s The Wild Pear Tree, was highly anticipated and ended up competing for that same prize at the 2018 festival. The new film was also Turkey’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, although it didn’t make the nine-title shortlist, which has only happened once for any Turkish film (Ceylan’s 2008 title Three Monkeys). The Wild Pear Tree is also long, 188 minutes, and somewhat slow, as there’s very little action of any sort, with most of the film comprising either dialogue or pensive, wide shots of landscape, but there is a novelesque story at the movie’s heart and a strong conclusion that at least provides an adequate payoff for your time investment.

The Wild Pear Tree follows Sinan, who has recently graduated from college and faces an uncertain economic future in modern Turkey, where the best options for recent graduates include serving in the army or joining the police so you can beat up leftist protesters for fun. Sinan plans to take the national exam to qualify to become a teacher, but his real passion is writing, and he is trying to self-publish a work he describes without a sense of irony as a “quirky auto-fiction metanovel.” The film follows him through his return from college to his hometown, where his father has bankrupted the family with his gambling addiction, his grandfather is starting to lose his faculties, and his mother and sister are both stuck in a situation not of their own making. Yet despite the obvious conflict he’s facing with his father, Sinan also comes to realize that these relationships are not binary functions, and that he may relate more to and inherit more from his father than he’d like to admit – while his mother’s love and empathy are more superficial than he understands.

Ceylan’s script here – reportedly pared down from what would have been more like a four-hour running time, God help us – touches on many existential issues that are generally universal but would appear to apply specifically to modern Turkey, a secular nation by its Constitution that has faced rising despotism from its elected leader, Recep Tayyin Erdogan. Turkey’s economy actually began contracting last year, deepening an ongoing malaise that the film reflects in Sinan’s limited employment prospects and general disaffection with the lack of options for him in jobs, in marriage prospects (he refers to himself as a “peasant”), and in geography. He runs into a popular local author and, under the guise of trying to solicit the man’s advice, ends up browbeating him with his own pretentious, juvenile ideas on art and literature, eventually labeling the author a sellout. The scene that turns increasingly contentious and only is resolved in one of the film’s sudden dream sequences (or visions), right after the author, to this point very even-keeled, loses his temper and unloads on Sinan.

The most compelling scene in the movie, a lengthy conversation involving Sinan and two local imams, one conservative and one liberal/progressive, that ranges from the question of God’s (Allah’s) existence to how strictly man should interpret the Koran to the imams’ seeming willingness to pray away the sins and materialism of their quotidian lives. It’s a sort of living thinkpiece, one where Sinan probably has the philosophical upper hand but wields his words clumsily, while the two imams are more eloquent but engage in specious claims about religious texts or morality in the material world, which I assume was in turn some sort of satire or indictment of the active forces in Turkish politics and culture under Erdogan.

This is a long movie that feels longer, but Ceylan at least sticks the landing by returning to the father/son dynamic that opened the movie and recurs multiple times as Sinan leaves and returns from his village and fights with his father over the latter’s profligate ways. The concluding scene, by which point Sinan’s parents have separated, was reminiscent of the speech the father (Michael Stuhlbarg) gave in Call Me By Your Name in its power and its ability to wrap up so much of what the movie as a whole was trying to say. There’s some sleight of hand in the final few shots, although Ceylan foreshadows that by using the same visual trick multiple times in the movie, and the very last image will stay with you for a while … if you make it that far.

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→ March 18, 2019
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Free Solo.

Free Solo was the only Oscar-nominated documentary I hadn’t seen at the time of the Academy Awards ceremony, and of course it was the winner for Best Documentary Feature, but it’s free to stream on Hulu now and certainly worth a watch … although I wonder if I got a very different message from it than many other people did. I don’t think this guy is a hero at all, nor is it really a portrait of a great achievement. Free Solo presents us with a sort of modern Don Quixote whose quest is inexplicable and maybe pointless, and who pursues the goal in this film with disregard for his own life and for the wishes of the person who is, or should be, the most important to him.

Alex Honnold is a free solo climber, which means he climbs giant, sheer rock faces without ropes or other safety gear. This is, as you might imagine, really fucking dangerous; at one point in this documentary we see brief video or photo montages of other famous free soloists who fell to their deaths. In Free Solo, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin follow Honnold as he prepares to scale El Capitan, known as El Cap, a 3000-foot wall in Yosemite National Park in California, which nobody had free-soloed before. We know that he survived – had he died, the film might not exist, and his death would have made the news – although the way the documentarians filmed the ascent is itself noteworthy, and many of the drone shots, near and far, of El Cap are utterly breathtaking. There’s a scene at the end that gives you a sense of how small a human is in comparison to the rock itself, and I think it challenges our ability to understand the scale of the world around us.

Free Solo aims to be about much more than strictly the ascent, and it partially succeeds. Honnold is a different cat, to put it gently. He reveals things about his childhood that may explain his strange affect, and undergoes an fMRI at one point that tells him and us that his amygdala is not very sensitive to excitement, which likely contributes to his thrill-seeking behavior as well. He and his mother have extremely different stories of what his father, who died when Honnold was 19, was like. Honnold has lived in a van for years and keeps a rather ascetic existence, with bizarre habits that would seem to go along with just a peculiar choice of living arrangements. There’s a scene where he cooks some strange assemblage of vegetables and beans and then eats it with a giant, flat cooking spatula, as if no one ever showed him how to use utensils.

Early in the film, a new character appears, Sanni, who attended a book-signing of Honnold’s, slipped him her number, and has since become his girlfriend. (Nobody has ever slipped me a number at a book signing, so clearly climbing giant rocks > baseball stats.) She clearly loves him, although there’s never the sense that this is some sort of hero-worship, and she is actively working both to get him to participate in a normal, adult, romantic relationship, and to consider that chasing death with these free solo climbs now affects her life too. He’s strangely detached in most of his interactions with her – there’s one exception at the end of the movie when we see him react to her in new ways, like the egg cracked and he’s coming out of his shell – and comes off as unaware of her emotions much of the time. It does not help matters that Sanni is both very upbeat and very pretty, which I think had to bias me in her favor and likely will have the same effect on many viewers. She’s just – here’s that word – likeable, which makes Honnold look like Lukas Haas playing a character with Asperger’s by comparison.

Sanni’s arrival in the film was a necessary bit of luck, as she gives us the best window on to Honnold’s personality and pushes him at least a little to explain his motivation for continuing to climb increasingly dangerous cliffs. (It’s not mentioned in the film, but Honnold described himself in a 2011 interview as a “militant atheist,” and I can not imagine having the strong belief that there is nothing after death and then pursuing a career that is likely to lead to an early decease.) I don’t think Free Solo explains enough why Honnold does what he does; he comes off like a modern George Mallory, who answered the question of why he wanted to climb Mount Everest with the possibly apocryphal answer “Because it’s there.” We get something from that fMRI result, and more from his interactions with Sanni, but he’s still something of an enigma even at the end of it all, especially since there’s no good reason he has to climb without some sort of protection. When you watch him ascend, it is absolutely impressive and Vasarhelyi and Chin do a superb job of capturing his climb, but how he could do this when there’s someone on the ground who’s waiting to hear he survived and would be devastated if he didn’t, is completely beyond me.

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→ March 2, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

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→ February 24, 2019
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Oscar picks for 2019.

With the Oscars coming up tonight, I’ve put together this post with some loose predictions, my own picks for each award, and, most importantly, links to every one of these films I’ve reviewed. I’ve seen everything nominated in all of these categories except one documentary, one foreign film, and one animated short. 

Chris Crawford and I also recorded a podcast (for the second year in a row) to preview the Oscars, which you can download via iTunes or SoundCloud.

 

Best Picture

BlacKkKlansman
Black Panther
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
Roma
A Star is Born
Vice

Who will win: Roma
Who I’d vote for: Roma

Snubs: I don’t understand why the Academy would only fill eight of its ten allotted spots for nominations in this category, especially in a year with easily twice that many films worthy of the honor. The two most obvious candidates the Academy overlooked here were First Man and If Beale Street Could Talk, but I’d also have pushed for Burning, Cold War, even Widows before pablum like Green Book or Bohemian Rhapsody.

Best Director

BlacKkKlansman
Cold War
The Favourite
Roma
Vice

Who will win: Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)
Who I’d vote for: Roma

Snubs: I’m surprised Bradley Cooper wasn’t nominated for A Star is Born.

I’d be very surprised if Cuarón lost this one, even if Roma doesn’t win Best Picture.

Best Actor

Christian Bale, Vice
Bradley Cooper, A Star is Born
Willem Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate
Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
Virgo Mortensen, Green Book

Who will win: Bale
Who I’d vote for: Cooper

The Academy really botched this category, giving four of five nods to actors who portrayed real people, three of them giving us extended impersonations that were more remarkable for their accuracy than for any depth of performance. The fifth is playing a role that has been played three times before. Is that what the Oscar is supposed to reward? Is this acting, or just impersonating?

It seems like Malek has the popular momentum, and maybe he and his prosthetic teeth will win the award, but I’ll be a bit contrarian here and predict Bale takes the honor because the role is also more ‘important’ – Vice is an unabashedly political film, an outright attack on the legacy of the George W. Bush years, that has to resonate with the generally left-wing voters of the Academy.

Snubs: Woof. Ethan Hawke for First Reformed and Joaquin Phoenix for You Were Never Really Here come to mind immediately. Ryan Gosling was great in First Man; Stephan James was solid in If Beale Street Could Talk.

Best Actress

Yulitza Aparicio, Roma
Glenn Close, The Wife
Olivia Colman, The Favourite
Lady Gaga, A Star is Born
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Who will win: Close
Who I’d vote for: Colman

The Wife was the worst movie I saw in 2018 – it is awful, sentimental, hackneyed, one-dimensional dreck – yet Close seems likely to win for a fine performance of a poorly-written character.

Snubs: No shortage of whiffs here either – Rosamund Pike for A Private War, Joanna Kulig for Cold War, Elsie Fisher for Eighth Grade, Viola Davis for Widows, Natalie Portman for Annihilation, Juliette Binoche for Let the Sunshine In, Claire Foy for First Man (perhaps as a Supporting Actress).

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Mahershala Ali, Green Book
Adam Driver, BlacKkKlansman
Sam Elliott, A Star is Born
Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Sam Rockwell, Vice

Who will win: Ali
Who I’d vote for: Ali*

I put an asterisk there because I’m torn between Ali and Driver – BlacKkKlansman does not work without Driver’s performance. Grant is wonderful as well.

Snubs: Rockwell belongs here least of all – he’s just doing a good impression of W. as an amiable post-frat boy. His slot should have gone to Steven Yeun for Burning, and you could make a case for Michael B. Jordan for Black Panther.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Amy Adams, Vice
Marina de Tavira, Roma
Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Emma Stone, The Favourite
Rachel Weisz, The Favourite

Who will win: King
Who I’d vote for: Weisz

King has been penciled in as a lock since before this movie even hit theaters, even though she’s not in the film very much and her role isn’t all that well-written. Weisz and Stone both had far more to do – there’s a real debate over whether those are supporting roles at all – and do more with what they’re given.

Snubs: Elizabeth Debecki for Widows. Her performance was the film’s biggest revelation and she had by far the best story arc of the script; Adams’ spot should have gone to her.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
BlacKkKlansman
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
If Beale Street Could Talk
A Star Is Born

What will win: BlacKkKlansman
What I’d vote for: If Beale Street Could Talk

This feels like the spot where Spike Lee gets an Oscar, even though the screenplay for BlacKkKlansman was all over the place. Of course, I think Burning deserved a nomination here, certainly over the Coens’ screenplay for what was basically an anthology.

 

Best Original Screenplay

The Favourite
First Reformed
Green Book
Roma
Vice

What will win: The Favourite
What should win: The Favourite

As much as I loved Roma, the screenplay itself is the least important part of the film – it’s the look, feel, and sound of the thing, as well as the lead performance by Aparicio.

Best Foreign Language Film

Capernaum
Cold War
Never Look Away
Roma
Shoplifters

What will win: Roma
What I’d vote for: Roma

I haven’t seen Never Look Away, from the director/writer of The Lives of Others, because it’s 188 minutes long. This feels like a dead lock for Roma, but my #1 movie of 2018 was South Korea’s submission, Burning, which made the shortlist (of nine films) yet missed the cut for the final five. It absolutely should have taken Capernaum‘s slot.

Best Animated Feature

Incredibles 2
Isle of Dogs
Mirai
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse

What will win: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse
What I’d vote for: Isle of Dogs

This also feels like a lock, although I think Spider-Man is notable only for its animation style, with a very undistinguished story that relies on superhero tropes and far too much violence for its audience. Isle of Dogs may have come out too early in the year, and it may have suffered from criticisms of its portrayal of Japanese culture, but it’s a better movie across the board – and so is Mirai.

Snubs: Tito and the Birds, a Brazilian film with gorgeous animation and a good story, would have been a far better choice than Ralph Breaks the Internet, which is a mostly forgettable sequel.

Best Documentary Feature

Free Solo
Hale County, This Morning, This Evening
Minding the Gap
Of Fathers and Sons
RBG

What will win: Minding the Gap
What I’d vote for: Of Fathers and Sons

I haven’t seen Free Solo yet – I will in about two weeks – but I truly have no good sense of what’s going to win this one, especially since the most popular documentary of 2018, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, was one of the biggest surprise omissions of all of the nominations this year. It’s remarkable that Of Fathers and Sons was even made, and its story is as important as any of the five nominated films.

Best Animated Short Film

Animal Behaviour
Bao
Late Afternoon
One Small Step
Weekends

What will win: Bao
What I’d vote for: Weekends

I haven’t seen Animal Behaviour, but any of the other four could win and I’d be happy with it. All are well-made, appealing to look at, and boast strong, short stories. I’d say Late Afternoon is the weakest of the four.

Best Documentary Short

Black Sheep
End Game
Lifeboat
A Night at the Garden
Period. End of Sentence.

Lifeboat was the only one of these I didn’t fully appreciate; the others are all excellent. A Night at the Garden was assembled from existing footage of a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in the 1930s, and runs all of seven minutes; I can’t see voting for that over the others, which are all original works. End Game is the most moving, and devastating. Black Sheep is the most original. Period. End of Sentence. has a wonderful story of female empowerment. I’m fine with any of those three.

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→ February 21, 2019
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Euthanizer.

Continuing my trek through films submitted for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, I watched the Finnish entry, the dark, disturbing film Euthanizer, which seems to start out as a revenge-fantasy story and ends up in an even bleaker place by the time the film wraps up. It’s also quite short, under 90 minutes, and the script sticks the landings on most of its gymnastics, although a film this tight probably needs a more limited thematic focus. It’s streaming free for amazon prime subscribers.

Veijo is the euthanizer of the film – he euthanizes pets as a side job, charging less than the local vet, but seems only willing to take on such cases if the pet is being mistreated or is otherwise ill, emphasizing that he only does this to end suffering, not, say, to help someone get rid of an unwanted pet. He lectures owners who bring their pets to him for how they’ve mistreated them – cooping up a cat in a tiny apartment, ignoring signs of illness in a dog, buying a guinea pig as a pet without getting it a companion. Veijo’s father is in the hospital in the late stages of some kind of terminal disease, in a good bit of pain, but Veijo’s caring for the suffering of others doesn’t extend to his father for reasons we’ll learn near the story’s end.

Veijo’s strange, solitary existence, punctuated by facial expressions worthy of late-career Harrison Ford, is interrupted by two visitors: the nurse who’s taking care of his father and hears him discussing his side gig, and a local thief who falls in with a white supremacist group and wants his dog put down strictly for reasons of convenience. The nurse is obsessed with death, and seduces Veijo, which leads to the most bizarre sex scene of the year, but she sees in him a fellow traveler without understanding the reasons why he euthanizes select animals but not others. The white supremacist, who looks way too much like the bassist/actor Flea, is about to lose his job at a mechanic’s for stealing tires, which he then resells to his racist buddies while trying to get into their ‘gang,’ and spends much of the film screaming at his wife on his phone or raging against nothing at all while sitting in his car. There’s a third subplot with the local vet, who appears to be more motivated by money than by any love of animals, that doesn’t work as well and serves mostly as a plot device to send Veijo off the rails for good. Veijo runs afoul of the white supremacists (not hard to do), which begins a back-and-forth revenge pattern that is satisfying at the start but ends in utterly gruesome fashion that throws the meaning of everything that came before into question.

There’s a clear point here about how we either treat animals far worse than we treat other people, as if they’re not even sentient, or how we treat animals better than other people, although Euthanizer doesn’t do enough in either direction. The film also doesn’t give us enough about Veijo until the very end of the movie to explain why he is the way he is – both why he euthanizes pets to prevent further suffering and why he’s isolated himself from just about everyone else, at least until the nurse pries her way into his life. There’s certainly satisfaction in watching him dress down people who have abused or neglected their pets, and there’s even more in watching him go after the white supremacists – who are amusingly stupid and, fortunately, never do anything racist on screen in the movie, instead just talking about how tough they are – but the final scene falls short as an explanation of everything.

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→ February 20, 2019
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At Eternity’s Gate.

Willem Dafoe earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor this year for his turn as Vincent Van Gogh in the sort-of-biopic At Eternity’s Gate, which is a beautiful but sort of dreadful film that doesn’t give the viewer much of a sense of who Van Gogh was, while advancing a somewhat questionable hypothesis about his death. Dafoe is excellent, as he nearly always he is, but I have no idea what this movie was trying to accomplish.

Van Gogh was one of the most important painters in the western canon and an important bridge from impressionism to post-impressionism, a prolific painter during a short period of his life who struggled to make any money from his art while alive – we know of one painting he sold during his life, although there may have been others that were not recorded – but became immensely influential in death and whose paintings now sell for millions of dollars. At Eternity’s Gate has some wonderful sequences where we see Van Gogh at work, both in how the film reconstructs his painting or sketching – I have to assume someone stood in for Dafoe in these scenes, although the editing is seamless – and in how Dafoe depicts an artist in the flow state, oblivious to many things around him, including the discomfort of many of his subjects.

That’s about the end of what’s good in At Eternity’s Gate, which takes its title from one of the colloquial names of the painting most commonly known as Sorrowing Old Man, as the rest of the film is muddled in story and in technique. There are some positively bizarre, disorienting camera angles, often at 90 degrees to the ground, or POV shots of Van Gogh’s feet as he walks through a sunflower field, that only make the film harder to watch without adding any value. The film makes frequent use of extreme close-ups, to no apparent benefit. There are a lot of shots of Van Gogh running through fields – so while the landscape scenes are gorgeous, it’s often unclear what the purpose is. Even when there is a purpose here, such as showing Van Gogh’s confusion in tangible terms through camerawork and layered, hollow audio tracks, it also has the side effect of making the movie harder to watch.

And ultimately the film doesn’t tell us anything about Van Gogh that we didn’t already know, which is probably the greatest disappointment of all. The generally accepted cause of Van Gogh’s death is suicide by gun, but the script pushes the alternative and unlikely hypothesis that he was killed by some local boys in an accident, which feels like revising history and whitewashes Van Gogh’s history of mental illness (itself the subject of ongoing debate). Oscar Isaac appears as Paul Gauguin, another post-Impressionist artist who was similarly underappreciated during his lifetime, and the film depicts their troubled friendship, where Van Gogh appears to adore Gauguin. He does indeed eventually cut off his own ear in some sort of gesture towards his friend, although that story, which also should be part of the bigger picture of Van Gogh’s mental infirmity, also becomes muddled in the retelling here. Isaac is also generally quite good, but he does a bit of Poe Dameron here and overacts a modest part, with points added back on for his Parisian accent.

There’s no reason to watch At Eternity’s Gate unless you’re an Oscars completist; I don’t think this film does Van Gogh justice or tells us anything new about the man, his life, or his works. Dafoe is great – I thought he should have won the Best Supporting Actor award last year for The Florida Project – but even a top-tier actor can only do so much with inferior material.

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→ February 17, 2019
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The Resistance Banker.

My meandering through various submissions for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film continued with The Resistance Banker (original title Bankier von het Verzet, available on Netflix), submitted by the Netherlands, which tells the incredible, little-known, true story of two brothers who created and ran an underground bank in the country to finance the Resistance to the Nazi occupiers, eventually forging treasury bonds to keep their bank afloat. The story is the star here, told in an almost matter-of-fact way that might mute the emotional impact of what the brothers did, and the sacrifices they made, to help feed Dutch Jews in hiding and fund the national railroad strike, but an expert performance by Barry Atsma as the lead banker, Wally Van Hall, gives the film some pathos beneath the thriller at the surface.

Wally, given name Walraven, and his brother Gijs (Jacob Derwig) are both bankers in the Netherlands at the time of the invasion, and they’re approached near the start of the film by a Resistance member who asks for their help in financing the efforts to shelter Jews and fund the Resistance’s efforts. Wally jumps into the job, despite having a wife (Fockeline Ouwerkerk) and three young children, while Gijs is more cautious, and a bit closer to Meinoud van Tonnigen (Pierre Bokma), a Dutch collaborator who rose to run the Finance Ministry and the national bank under the occupying forces.

The film tells the story at a brisk pace, showing how the brothers built the underground organization, keeping meticulous records, and eventually built a process for forging bonds using government employees sympathetic to the Resistance to help them gain serial numbers and swap those bonds out for real ones that could then be called in for cash. The scheme eventually netted over 50 million guilders for the effort, over half a billion Euros in today’s money according to a note before the end credits. The bolder the underground bank became, the more the occupiers and van Tonnigen tried to find and stop them, and the more people they involved, the greater the chance became of someone finking or being captured and tortured for information – both of which eventually happen, although the bank managed to keep operating until the liberation of the country by Allied forces.

The van Halls put their own lives at risk to do this, powered by both a patriotic fervor and a horror at what they saw happening around them, with Wally depicted as the true believer and Gijs the more reticent of the two, sometimes to the point of reminding his brother that his family would be at risk if he were ever caught. There’s a framing device here of Gijs testifying after the war to a room of men in suits, with their roles revealed at the end of the movie, but Wally is the clear hero, and Atsma infuses the portrayal with the zealotry required for someone to undertake such a scheme, inviting torture and death if he should ever be caught, as well as the affection and pain of a man who flees from his own family partway through the war lest he be caught and put them in further danger. Atsma seems the best of all of the actors in the film at showing real emotion in his facial expressions and body language; almost every other male actor in the movie is restrained, even in distress, or seems to overexert himself to show emotion, while Atsma’s tonal shifts, even the abrupt ones, work naturally.

The Resistance Banker won the Golden Calf awards – the Dutch equivalent of the Oscars – for Best Picture, Best Actor for Atsma, Best Supporting Actress for Ouwerkerk, and Best Production Design, and won the Audience Award (I think by popular vote). The story is just tremendous, one I’d never heard before, and it seems from what I’ve read that the script hews largely to actual events (with one exception I could find – van Tonningen was already on the run by January/February 1945, so he couldn’t have met Wally in that time period). It has the feel of a great British historical spy film, which means that it’s also a bit removed, and very light on flash. If you know the real outcome, you have an idea of what’s coming, but how we get there, and how many near-misses the bankers seem to have had with exposure or arrest, is very compelling, with no lapse in tension or extraneous material here. It’s a quick two hours and a story that I think most people would appreciate. That probably wouldn’t be enough to distinguish it from the other candidates for the Oscar – it didn’t make the shortlist – but I’d find this easier to recommend to people than the mediocre Capernaum or the three-hour Never Look Away (which I haven’t seen yet, but three hours?).

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→ February 14, 2019
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What Will People Say.

What Will People Say, the second feature film written and directed by Iram Haq, was Norway’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and is heavily based on events from Haq’s own adolescence. She’s Norwegian, of Pakistani descent, and when she was a young teenager, her father kidnapped her and returned her to Pakistan to live for a year and a half because her parents feared that she was becoming too westernized. The grim and often brutal script follows its protagonist, here aged 16, through the same sequence of events, exploring the ways both Islam and her south Asian culture are wielded to control and break young women, in a story that would be hard to accept if it weren’t true. The movie is streaming free for amazon prime subscribers.

Nisha, played by first-timer Maria Mozhdah, acts like a regular teenager, rebelling against restrictive parents, hanging out with friends, with a budding relationship with a white boy. When he sneaks into her room one night, her father discovers them and proceeds to beat the boy and hit Maria, which leads to the involvement of child protective services. Maria’s mother tricks her into coming home, after which her father (Adil Hussain) and brother kidnap her and fly her to Islamabad, where he leaves her with her aunt and grandmother so she can learn to be a Pakistani housewife and mother, and, they hope, to cure her of these wicked western ways she’s learned in Norway. While there, she and her cousin fall for each other, only to be caught and humiliated by the local police, after which her father comes to retrieve her and start a new cycle of abuse and restriction that leads to the arrangement of a marriage without her consent.

What Will People Say, taking a phrase that Haq says is used in south Asian cultures to control women, is almost unrelenting once the downward spiral begins with her father’s violent reaction to finding a boy in her room. (He accuses her of having had sex with the boy, which isn’t true, but he repeats it in front of the social worker and demands that she marry the boy to save their honor.) Nisha endures some physical abuse and far more psychological abuse, but still shows strength of spirit and an ability to adapt to her situation, at least building a real affection for some of her cousins once it’s clear that she won’t be able to escape back to Norway, and eventually finding some strength to fight back against her domineering, self-loathing auntie – which makes it all the harder to stomach when she’s caught, shamed (for nothing), brought back to Norway, kept in near-total isolation, and ends up lying to social workers that everything’s fine.

Mozhdah is outstanding as Nisha, put through a gauntlet of torments and particularly asked to show outright fear, the sort of fear that incorporates terror and the loss of hope, especially as Nisha realizes her family members are working against her – especially her father, with whom she had a close relationship and thus in whom she’d placed great trust. (Haq has said she reconciled with her father as he was dying of cancer; on his deathbed, he told her to make this film, “to show how evil people can get when they are scared.”) Hussain, who played the main character’s father in The Life of Pi, is often terrifying in his role as Nisha’s father, where he’s asked to show contempt for the child he’s supposed to love and whose best interests he believes he has at heart.

Hussain’s performance ends up the key to making What Will People Say work in the end, when Nisha does escape, ostensibly for good, and her father shows a small sign that he finally understands her perspective – that he and her mother don’t actually share a vision of Nisha’s future, and that his actions now lead to a path where she would end up losing most of her freedom. It’s a tiny glimmer of optimism in a story that has beaten Nisha down, literally and figuratively, for most of its 105 minutes, one that would be hard to accept were it not so heavily based in reality. Haq’s script indicts so many forces, from south Asian cultures to Islam itself to the Norwegian authorities who ignored the evidence right in front of them, that it feels like a story written out of anger. Haq has said she’s not angry any more. What Will People Say transfers that anger to us.

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→ February 10, 2019
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Eighth Grade.

Comedian Bo Burnham made his screenwriting debut with 2018’s Eighth Grade, a cute coming-of-age story with newbie Elsie Fisher in the lead role of Kayla. It will compete with itself between making you laugh and making you want to crawl out of your own skin, because I’m guessing just about everyone who sees this will relate to something that happens to Kayla as we follow her through the last few weeks of eighth grade and see her navigate social anxieties and prepare for high school. The film is free now on amazon prime.

Kayla is a shy, awkward teenager – watch how Fisher walks, as if she’s trying to make herself smaller – who posts ‘advice’ vlogs that, as we see, no one watches, but also worries that she’s giving advice she doesn’t even take herself. Nothing extraordinary happens to her for most of the film; she gets invited to a pool party, wins the dubious honor of being named quietest in her class, spends a lot of time on Instagram and Snapchat (as we’re told, nobody uses Facebook any more), has a crush, hears about sex, and eventually has a day where she shadows a perky, outgoing high school senior named Olivia (Emily Robinson, who has fantastic hair). We get a school-shooting drill, impossibly uncool teachers and school administrators – really, a principal tries to dab, and I’ve never been so embarrassed to be over the age of 20 – and, eventually, one bad thing happens that triggers the big scene you might have caught in the trailer where Kayla and her dad (Josh Hamilton) have an emotional conversation around a fire pit.

Eighth Grade is by far at its best when Kayla is on the screen and at the center of whatever’s happening. She gives a description of anxiety, without naming it as such, that’s about as good a depiction of the physical aspects of the disorder that I have heard anywhere in fiction. Fisher’s bright eyes and blond hair would seem to make her a standout, but she plays Kayla as so unsure and vulnerable that she ends up seeming younger than her classmates and that much more sympathetic. And Eighth Grade should be viewed through her lens from start to finish; even the worst thing that happens to her works better because she’s always at the focus of the narrative and the camera. There’s a joke around a banana that is such picture-perfect physical comedy that I can only assume Fisher actually hates the fruit in real life – or else she deserved a Best Actress nod for that scene alone.

Where Burnham lost me and cost himself some momentum is when he went for cheap laughs, like making the adults not just uncool but sort of assertively uncool, like the dabbing principal or the teacher in the sex education video who says “it’s gonna be lit!” To a teenager, parents and adults are just generally not cool, but Burnham goes twice as far as he needs to go so he can hammer that point home. A few of the gags hit, but more miss or just seem out of place because they take the focus away from Kayla’s journey – and her story is the heart of the film in every sense of the term.

Other than Fisher’s performance, the biggest reason Eighth Grade works, even with its inconsistencies, is that Burnham has managed to hit so many universal emotions and experiences with just a handful of anecdotes over the course of about 90 minutes. While there’s nothing here that specifically happened to me as a kid, the sensations and emotions were entirely familiar – none more so than that sense that you’re the one person in the room everyone is looking at, the one person everyone else has identified as the oddball. A few of the anecdotes are rooted in modernity; all the kids are constantly on their phones, talking to each other through DMs, snaps, and instagram comments. You can generalize almost everything in this film that Kayla experiences to match something you remember feeling as a kid. And I got to feel this film on two levels, since I’m also the father of a girl just a year younger than Kayla is, so eighth grade for us is just around the corner. (I’ve already forbidden her from using Snapchat though.) So while the script is inconsistent and has some gags that don’t land, the story is so authentic to the experience of growing up as a suburban teenager that the film eventually works and resonates without resorting to cheap manipulation or big twists.

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