→ February 8, 2019
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Of Fathers and Sons.

This year’s slate of nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature might have had the biggest surprise of all in its omission of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the rare documentary to cross over into popular success, earning over $22 million at the U.S. box office, putting it 12th all time in the category on BoxOfficeMojo. (The categorization there is itself debatable; three films in the top 11 are concert films, another is a Dinesh D’Souza propaganda piece, and two are Michael Moore propaganda pieces.)

One of the five films that did make the Oscar cut this year was the little-known Of Fathers and Sons, an Arabic-language film by the Syrian-Kurdish director Talal Derki, who was previously honored for his film Return to Homs. For Of Fathers and Sons, Derki spent over two years with a jihadist family in Syria, watching the Islamist father radicalize his sons and speak of the inevitability of a world war that leaves his particular brand of fundamentalist Sunni Islam triumphant across the world, in fulfillment of prophecy. It is harrowing and defeating, yet deeply personal, even intimate, as we watch two of the sons in particular react differently to their father’s exhortations.

Abu Osama is the father, apparently one of the founders of al-Qaida in Syria, and Derki spent those two years watching Abu Osama and his eight sons, most all of whom are named after jihadists, including his eldest, Osama Osama, and another son, Ayman Osama, named for current al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The documentary has no narration, other than Derki occasionally posing questions to Abu Osama, and the only narrative arc is a natural one – the father’s indoctrination of his sons into the rhetoric and mania of a holy war against the enemies of their very specific branch of Salafi jihadist Islam (which includes pretty much everybody else, although Americans, Jews, and Shi’ites all get their turn as targets of derision). This process is set against domestic scenes, including more ordinary interactions between father and sons, as well as scenes of the boys by themselves, mostly just being boys, a strange reminder that jihadists are made, not born, and that even the father, who comes across as inhuman almost every time he speaks to the camera or to other adults, has a human side when it comes to his family. Eventually, however, the time comes for Osama to head off to training camp to become an al-Qaida fighter, while Ayman balks at the brutality of the training, and Abu Osama suffers an injury that shifts the story without deterring him from raising an army of jihadist children.

The marvel of Of Fathers and Sons is its access, apparently unfettered where the males are concerned, but with virtually no women or girls appearing on camera – the only women of any age on screen are shown at a distance in public spaces, such as outside the local school. Abu’s niece is outside at one point, never shown, when we hear the boys yelling at her that she shouldn’t be outside without her burqa, and Abu then jokes about punishing her or worse. Then we find out she’s two.

And that’s where Of Fathers and Sons becomes very uncomfortable to watch, which cuts both ways. Derki has ceded his voice to maintain access (and, perhaps, stay alive?) among men who would gladly commit murder for the sake of their very narrow beliefs. Abu has a sniper’s hideout near his house, and at one point, he and Derki are in it, when Abu seems someone on a motorbike and shoots him, gloating that the man fell off but asking someone off-camera for another gun so he can kill the man, which he doesn’t appear to do. Does Derki have any moral responsibility to say something there? Could he, without compromising his life and those of whatever crew he had? Less strident but just as disturbing is the sequence where he shows Osama, who is about 12 but whose age Abu doesn’t even know, how to shoot a pistol; with all of the kids looking younger than their stated ages, probably due to their diets, seeing a child who isn’t old enough to shave holding a pistol and shooting with an adult’s confidence while talking about God’s will and, eventually, training to fight with al-Qaida is even more disturbing to watch than the on-screen slaughter of a sheep towards the end of the movie.

I know it might sound contrarian to say this, but I’m completely fine with this getting a nomination over Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. Of Fathers and Sons has something important to say, and Derki lets the subjects say it for him. His direction feels totally hands-off, which means there are some scenes in here that might be superfluous, but do serve to fill out the picture of Abu Osama and his sons as a family who still have some bonds in common with any other family, but who live in a war zone, in dangerous conditions, and preach hate as a regular way of life. It is a story without hope, at least not for these boys, but perhaps a warning to the rest of us if we want to prevent the next generation from growing up to be jihadists too.

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→ February 6, 2019
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Tito and the Birds.

The Brazilian film Tito and the Birds (original title Tito e os Pássaros) was one of 25 animated titles eligible for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, just now getting a release to U.S. theaters in both subtitled and English dubbed versions. It’s a visual feast with a story that is modern in details, classic in theme, and hews closely to the story templates of most animated films that try to appeal simultaneously to adult audiences and to most kids. It’s dark for its genre, but full of hope, with kids as its heroes and a simple message, cogently delivered, en route to a spectacular ending. (I saw the subtitled version.)

This year will mark the 19th time the Academy has given out a Best Animated Feature Film prize, with the number of nominees in each year tied to the number of eligible films – if fewer than 16 films are eligible, three earn nominations; otherwise, five get nods. The history of the award shows three strong biases: The Academy loves major studio releases, they prefer computer-animated films, and they strongly favor English-language films. Only one animated film that wasn’t originally written in English has won the honor (Hiyao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away won in 2002, the second year of the award); there have never been more than two nominees in languages other than English, with that last occurring in 2013 (Ernest & Celestine, which is wonderful, and Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises). The last film that wasn’t computer-animated to win was the Wallace and Gromit feature in 2005. This year’s slate of five includes two Disney/Pixar titles and one Sony Animation title, plus one co-produced by Fox Animation and Europe’s enormous Studio Babelsberg. With Mirai, a Japanese feature that wasn’t from Miyazaki or his Studio Ghibli, taking the fifth spot, the odds were stacked against Tito from the start – and then you add that the writers and directors were themselves first-timers and I don’t think this ever had a shot at a nomination. So with all of that prologue, and recognizing this hill points almost straight up, I’ll give my opinion: If Tito and the Birds wasn’t the best animated film of 2018, it was damn close, and its exclusion would be an embarrassment if the Academy were capable of that sentiment.

Tito takes place in a slightly altered version of the present, as a new pandemic begins around a disease of fear. Doctors don’t know what causes it or how it spreads, but it causes people to shrivel into shapeless blobs and, in its final and incurable stage, into rocks. The answer to the riddle of the disease seems to lie with the birds, which is where Tito and his scientist father Dr. Rufus come in; Dr. Rufus has been trying for years to build a machine to allow us to understand the language of birds, in part because he believes they are trying to warn humanity of some impending catastrophe. The machine fails and Dr. Rufus goes into exile, which leaves Tito and his friends Sarah, Buiú, and the wealthy scion Teo to try to rebuild the machine and stop the epidemic, even as Teo’s father Alaor, the film’s main antagonist, tries to stoke the fears through his television shows so he can sell real estate in his new, walled-off Dome Gardens.

Alaor is Trump, obviously – the pre-election Trump, using his platform as a reality TV celebrity to stoke fear for his own financial benefit, ignorant of or simply unsympathetic to the damage he might be wreaking on society as a whole. The disease vector is never identified in the film – this is a fear disease of fear itself, which means that Alaor can accelerate its spread by reminding people of all of the dangers in the world, foremost among which is other people. The epidemic rages as the kids work together against the city’s Gestapo-like biohazard agents and race to rebuild Dr. Rufus’ machine, failing one time after another as the disease even threatens to overtake each of them. The conclusion wasn’t what I expected – the writers had an easy way to wrap up the story, but took the long way round, and it works quite beautifully on both literal and metaphorical levels. The scripts speaks to how society should confront its fears, such as the rampant xenophobia that has infected our national dialogue, but also has a message that should resonate with anyone who’s had to cope with individual fears or anxiety.

The visuals here match up to the quality of the story, with an oil-painted look to the backgrounds that balances between impressionist and post-impressionist painting styles, including land and seascapes that reminded me of last year’s Loving Vincent, which took actual Van Gogh paintings and used them as backdrops for the entire movie. In our era of hyperrealistic computer animation, there’s a nostalgic pleasure in the exaggerated, inexact depictions of the characters themselves – Buiú in particular is my favorite, and the way he’s drawn reminded me of Jason from Home Movies. Their slapdash look contrasts well with the bold colors and huge strokes of the backgrounds when the characters are outside, complemented by the small elements on screen when the characters are indoors (e.g., the blue flame under a tea kettle).

That combination of a great story with strong animation feels like such a throwback, especially since computer-animated films dominate the box office as well as the awards in the category. (The Annie Awards split their Best Feature category in 2015, adding a category for independent animated features, and Tito and the Birds earned a nomination there, losing to Mirai.) It’s probably a matter of personal taste, but this kind of animation feels both nostalgic and yet still fresh, because there can always be something new when pen meets paper. For a film that began life as a script in 2011 and was finished in 2016-17, Tito and the Birds feels like it could have been finished yesterday, yet will remain relevant for a generation to come.

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→ February 1, 2019
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Capernaum.

The Lebanese film Capernaum, which landed one of the five nominations for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and took home the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is both a daring effort to tell a grim story through the eyes of a poor child and an exercise in extended misery porn that seems to border on the exploitative. Told with a framing device that never quite works as intended, the story follows a 12-year-old boy who is neglected by his oversized family as he runs away, finds refuge with an undocumented Ethiopian worker, and eventually commits a violent crime that lands him a five-year sentence in juvenile prison.

Zain, played by a novice actor and Syrian refugee named Zain Al Rafeea, has already been convicted of that crime at the start of the film when we meet him as he sues his parents for something that is never that clear, although if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen where he tells the judge he wants his parents to be forced to stop having children. (His mother is pregnant, yet again, during the trial.) Zain and his younger siblings are forced to hustle on the street every day to bring in money for their family, never attending school, until one day his parents discover his eleven-year-old sister, Sahar, has hit puberty, which means they can sell her to the local shopkeeper as a bride. Zain runs away from home and ends up on the street until Tigest, an Ethiopian woman with a baby at home whose existence she’s trying to hide from the world, takes him in, allowing him to take care of her son Yonas during the day while she works. She’s caught in a roundup of illegal immigrants while at work, leaving Zain and Yonas to fend for themselves, setting in motion a spiral of events that ends with Zain in prison.

The story is told in flashbacks between snippets from the civil case, and the framing device works against the film on several levels, not least because it’s unrealistic and serves as a sort of revenge fantasy element against Zain’s parents. (The question of whether his mother has any agency over her reproductive system is never raised; abortion is illegal in Lebanon, and birth control is available but stigmatized.) Writer-director Nadine Labaki, who also appears as Zain’s lawyer, has packed enough ideas in here for a much longer movie, including multiple issues around women’s rights, child labor, immigration laws, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the exploitation of the poor, which results in a movie without any real thematic focus that instead makes Zain’s suffering the core conceit of the plot. His character has an obvious Oliver Twist quality to him, a combination of a strong survival instinct as well as intense empathy for other children who suffer around him, but Labaki uses him like a pinball and keeps tilting the script to make things a little worse for him at every turn until he finally snaps (with reason) and commits the crime for which he’s jailed.

Al Rafeea’s performance as Zain is remarkable, given his background: He’d never acted or had any training, had lived in Lebanon as a Syrian refugee for eight years, and couldn’t read or write. (Labaki has since said that he’s been resettled in Norway, a lightly ironic outcome as the character Zain wants to buy himself passage to Sweden. In the same piece, she says the filmmakers started a fund to try to help other kids shown in the movie who “still live in dire conditions.”) I found him credible in every way, even though the script demands that he portray a broad range of emotions, some of which you would think would be hard to fake, like the empathy he shows for other kids or the contempt in which he holds just about every adult in his life. But the lawsuit is just a gimmick; it’s never clear what the actual claim is, and how Zain gets into that courtroom with his own lawyer is funny but also wildly unrealistic, as are the two feel-good vignettes that wrap up the film. There’s much to recommend in the middle of Capernaum – just about everything involving Zain in the streets is great, and some of the camerawork when he’s running through Beirut’s slums or walking along the side of a highway with cars flying by him is tremendous – but Labaki tried to tackle too much here instead of just letting Zain’s story stand on its own. There’s just no way this should have taken a nomination over the Korean submission, Burning, which is still the best movie I saw from 2018, but didn’t make the final cut.

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→ January 24, 2019
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Cold War.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ January 20, 2019
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The Guilty.

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

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

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

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

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

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→ January 15, 2019
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Bohemian Rhapsody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ January 13, 2019
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Vice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ January 4, 2019
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Sweet Country.

The Australian film Sweet Country, now free on amazon prime, swept the AACTA Awards, that country’s equivalent to our Oscars, last month, taking home Best Film, Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and a Best Lead Actor prize for first-time actor Hamilton Morris, capping off a sixteen-month run that saw it win major awards in Toronto and Venice as well as Best Feature Film at the Asia-Pacific Screen Awards. It’s a beautiful film to watch with expansive scenes of the northwestern Australian landscape, with a simple, timeless story of racial injustice that could have just as easily been set in the United States.

The details set the plot apart a bit, but the framework is familiar: A black man kills a white man in self-defense, flees, and is then tried for murder, with the gallows already built for him before the trial begins. Sam, played by Morris, is the black (aboriginal) man here, a hired hand for the Christian farmer Fred Smith (Sam Neill), who lends Sam and his wife Lizzie (Natassia Gorey-Furber, nominated for an AACTA for Best Supporting Actress) to their new neighbor, a disturbed, volatile war veteran named Harry March. While there for the day, Sam follows Harry’s directions to go do something away from the house, a pretext for Harry to rape Lizzie. On a later day, Harry borrows another hired hand and an aboriginal youth named Philomac, only to chain the kid up on suspicion of theft. When Philomac flees, a drunk Harry goes to Fred’s house looking for him, shooting down the door, after which Sam shoots him dead in self-defense and then takes flight across the outback.

Most of the action in Sweet Country takes place in that first act, which is followed by the extended search for Sam and Lizzie in act two, showing both pursuers and fugitives as they move across territory that is hostile in more ways than one; and then the trial in act three, where a young, progressive judge gives Sam a fair trial despite unfriendly locals and the racist sergeant who led the chase to capture him. Part of director Warwick Thornton’s achievement is weaving them seamlessly into one film despite massive, abrupt shifts in both tone and tempo. The first third is full of (Hannah Gadsby voice) tension, the second contrasts this gorgeous scenery with the injustice of the hunt for Sam and the knowledge that the desert could kill any of these men, and the third becomes an ad hoc courtroom drama without the courtroom, as the trial takes place in the street due to the lack of a town hall in the remote outpost where it occurs. They could play out as three different films, just sharing characters, but Thornton, working from a screenplay by David Tranter and Steven McGregor, keeps the narrative and pace together enough so the entire film can work as a unified piece. That plays out in surprising ways, especially during the trial where the tension comes from silence as much as it does from the revelations during testimony.

Sweet Country is a slow film in many ways, at least in contrast to the pace of most big-studio American releases, and probably would look even better on a big screen where the cinematography would play up, with the second act showing the variety of landscapes and climate types across the northern part of Western Australia. It’s also lighter on dialogue than mainstream films until the trial commences, which is why my attention started to drift during the middle third of the film. I especially appreciated Thornton’s decision to cloak the rape scene in complete darkness; while it would still likely trigger some people by sound, the entire sequence is pitch black on the screen. If you’ve even read the description here of the plot, you can probably guess the film’s ending, although it’s still powerful for the reactions of the characters rather than any real sense of surprise – and again feels timeless for its depiction of a black man trying to find justice in a white man’s world.

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→ January 3, 2019
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Sorry to Bother You.

Sorry to Bother You (now streaming on Hulu), Boots Riley’s debut as director and writer, is a total mess of a film. It’s not a mess in the sense of, say, The Room, which is legendary for its badness, but in the sense that Riley tried to do way too much in a single 110-minute picture, packing in enough thematic material for three movies, attempting to shock the audience at least one time too often, and, when the film starts to go off the rails in the final third, steering hard into the skid when he needed to correct his course. The result is a film with high-concept ambitions that can’t achieve any of them.

Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out) stars as Cassius “Cash” Green, an unemployed Oakland resident who lives in his uncle’s garage and lands a very low-end job with a telemarketing firm, RegalView, at the very beginning of the film. After a bunch of prologue that doesn’t entirely matter, he learns from an older colleague (Danny Glover) that he’ll sell more stuff if he uses his “white voice,” which Cash eventually finds almost by accident (voiced by David Cross). He becomes a star, is promoted to a “power caller,” and goes upstairs to the VIP level at the telemarketing firm, where he finds himself selling some ethically dubious products services. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson, whose earrings are the film’s best running gag) is a progressive artist and part-time agitator who works with a leftist-anarchist group The Left Eye to protest a new company, WorryFree, that promises workers employment, housing, and food for life if they agree to work for the company for life without any salary. And Cash’s colleague Squeeze (Steven Yeun, who had a pretty good 2018 for himself) is actually a union organizer who leads work actions at RegalView. There’s more, but you’re probably getting the idea by now.

Riley is trying to take out a bunch of rabbits with a machine gun here, with entirely predictable results. Unfettered capitalism might be his main target, but he’s also hitting materialism, conscious and subconscious racism, cultural appropriation, worker exploitation, police brutality, police militarization, the dumbing down of American culture, genetic engineering, and a lot more. No film could adequately address that many disparate issues in two hours without turning into a scattershot mess; Terry Gilliam’s Brazil tried to hit fewer than half as many concepts, and was still incomprehensible to large portions of the audience.

One of the keys to effective satire is focus – the satirist picks one target, maybe two at most, and then drills deeply enough to take something essential to that target and use that facet against it. Riley goes the other way here, skimming off the top, and thus relying on superficial depictions of his targets to lampoon them by simply making them more ridiculous. The “white voice” gimmick is the best deployment of this technique, and to Riley’s credit, he doesn’t overuse it – only four characters get white voices at all, and only two get them for more than one scene, while it becomes unremarkable for Cash and his boss upstairs, Mr. _____, after a few conversations. That sort of restraint is lacking elsewhere in the film; the most popular show in the alternate universe of Sorry to Bother You, a game show called “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me!,” appears repeatedly without ever saying anything that wasn’t apparent the first time Cash and Squeeze watch it on TV at a bar after work.

The film also has one of the worst endings of any movie I’ve seen from 2018; The Wife‘s was worse, since it was the most predictable, and First Reformed‘s was more of a copout, whereas Riley just decides to go full batshit with his conclusion here, introducing a new plot element in the final third of the movie and making it essential to the resolution. (He also loses five points for casting Armie Hammer, who might know his claret from his Beaujolais but is not and will probably never be a good actor, as the CEO of WorryFree.) Riley doesn’t just go over the top in his conclusion – he pole-vaults over the top and clears it by a country mile. The problem with that approach is eventually you have to hit the ground.

I’d rather have a film with too many ideas than a film with none, and Riley has a lot to say here with enough cleverness that I’m still interested in whatever he’s doing next, even though Sorry to Bother You just doesn’t work. The bravura that Riley brings here does not serve him or the film well, and the best of the ideas – runaway capitalism and the economic inequalities it creates – suffers as a result. If Riley gets an editor, or even a voice over his shoulder encouraging him to pull back on the throttle, his vision could still lead to something brilliant down the road. This just wasn’t it.

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→ January 2, 2019
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Custody.

Custody (Jusqu’à la garde, on amazon and iTunes) is a full-length sequel to the Oscar-nominated short film Just Before Losing Everything, both written and directed by Xavier Legrand and starring the same actors in three of the four main roles. This film, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and the Louis Delluc Prize last year, follows the same family from the custody hearing that opens the film through the father’s attempts to control his estranged wife through their twelve-year-old son, building in intensity through its refusal to acquiesce to the commercial impulse toward big, dramatic moments.

The opening scene has Miriam (Léa Drucker) and Antoine (Denis Ménochet), with their lawyers, in a session where each side argues for their desired custody arrangements, which form the only real disagreement between them. Miriam accuses Antoine of abusing her, and has repeatedly changed phone numbers and often hidden her location to protect herself from him. Their daughter, Josephine (Mathilde Auneveux), is about to turn 18, and wants nothing to do with her father. Julien (Thomas Gioria), their son, also wants no contact with his father, but the judge who hears their arguments grants Antoine the visitation rights he wants – apparently dismissing Miriam’s claims of abuse for lack of ‘proof’ – which gives the father the wedge he needs to insinuate himself into Miriam’s life.

The film is spare, just 93 minutes, and even at that length there is little action and a very simple plot, reminiscent in several ways of 2017’s Loveless. Antoine is manipulative and controlling, and his interest in Julien seems limited to using the boy as a way to maintain contact with Miriam and to remain aware of her whereabouts and actions. Gioria is especially strong as a twelve-year-old boy who doesn’t want contact with his father, but also fears him and has the innate respect children have for authority figures, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re also the victims of those same adults. Some of Custody‘s strongest scenes involve Julien and Antoine doing very little, often barely speaking to each other, or Antoine demanding something only to have Julien try his hardest to avoid answering, and they’re excruciating because Legrand lets these interactions play out in something very close to real time. When Antoine demands that Julien show him their new apartment, Legrand puts us in the car the whole time as Julien tries to direct his father, left, right, straight ahead, for twice as long as you’d expect, giving more time for the anticipation of an eventual explosion to build up.

You don’t need to see the prior film to follow Custody, although it will color your view of the characters in the first few scenes; without that prologue, you can more easily see the judge’s point of view that she must figure out “which of (the parents) is the bigger liar.” It doesn’t take much time to see Antoine’s character come through – first the need to control his wife and children, then his temper and his manipulative nature, and eventually the violence – and at that point anyone watching will realize how badly the judge screwed up, and, in what I assume is Legrand’s point, how poorly the French custody process serves abuse victims if there isn’t an actual crime on record already.

Ménochet also delivers a tremendous performance here even before Antoine’s violent side starts to surface – I’d argue that the performance is better until then, because once it becomes physical, there’s less for the actor to do with the role. Legrand didn’t write this character as a sympathetic one, but also avoided completely dehumanizing the man, so that the scenes with Antoine and Julien can still work as drama – you can understand the son still seeing this man as his father, someone who says he loves him, and an authority figure, rather than just a monster. An adult would see through Antoine, but his own child will always have that inner conflict, and giving the father enough depth gives the audience Julien’s lenses to see him.

Custody has one of the best conclusions of any film I’ve seen from 2018, although it could trigger anyone sensitive to scenes of domestic violence. Given what has come before, it might be the only authentic climax to the story, and then Legrand had his choice of resolutions from that inflection point. By choosing to tell this story slowly, showing detail where most films would speed up to the next moment of action, Legrand has made a film that feels distinctly non-commercial, but that also should evoke more genuine emotions in the audience until that final scene – and by that point, the direction and the acting have earned a big payoff. It’s one of the best films of the year, probably borderline top ten for me right now, and deserves a wider audience here than it’s gotten.

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