→ November 20, 2018
→ By

Widows.

Steve McQueen’s new film Widows, his first since his Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave in 2013, is an adaptation of a 1980s British TV series of the same name, a series McQueen says he wanted to adapt for some time. He’s maintained much of the framework of the series’ six-episode first season, which spawned a second season (Widows 2: Electric Boogaloo) and later a sequel series, but added some new elements and rewritten the resolution completely. It’s a dense, layered, frenetic heist film that packs a ton of backstory into the first two-thirds of the film – too much, really – before a tremendous finish worthy of the genre.

Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is the leader of a four-man crew that we see trying to escape from a robbery at the start of the film, only to have them die in a police shootout and explosion, which leaves their four wives as the widows of the film’s title. Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis, who’s going to get an Oscar nomination for this) finds out that Harry stole from would-be city alderman Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who wants his $2 million back and gives her a month to find it any way she can. Harry left behind a notebook with details on his next job, with a potential $5 million prize, so Veronica decides to contact the other widows – whom she’s never met – to assemble a crew and pull off the heist themselves so she can pay off Jamal and set the widows up financially.

The effort by the widows to become a team and pull off this heist is the main plot in the film, but there’s so much more layered on top of it that many scenes end too quickly, so the tension doesn’t always build enough and we don’t always get enough exposition on the characters. Jamal is running against Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), who’s trying to win the seat long held by his father (Robert Duvall as a pretty obvious Trump surrogate), but it turns out that Jack has a connection to Harry, and also ends up with other connections to the widows. Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), another of the widows, was abused by her husband and by her mother (Jacki Weaver, underutilized here), and ends up trying to be a high-end escort to make ends meet, but really comes into her own by working with these other women and taking care of herself for the first time. The third widow in the crew, Melinda (Michelle Rodriguez), is the least interesting character by far, with the most cursory backstory, a role that certainly does the actress playing it no favors and ultimately ends up overshadowed by the other members of the group, including the woman they bring on as the driver, Belle (Cynthia Erivo).

There is a lot of extra material in this movie, which feels at least like McQueen might have tried to pack in all the backstories from the TV series into one two-hour film. There’s a strand around Veronica’s son, deceased before the movie begins, that has no relevance to anything else in the movie and feels like it’s been tacked on to make a political point (a valid one, but not germane to this film). The political campaign is overstuffed for a subplot, and includes its own threads that never get resolved – the black preacher whose support is with the white candidate gives us a dynamic sermon and then seems to serve no other purpose in the film. Jamal’s story is vague – possibly by design – and his arc has no real ending. The salon is where we first meet Belle, but nothing else about the salon is interesting; it reappears later in another scene that tries to make a political point, this one less effective than the one about Veronica’s son. Even Frumpy Carrie Coon is just a prop here, which is a waste of a terrific (and beautiful) actress.
The real strength of Widows isn’t its story, but its cast, which looks like someone drafted a fantasy team of actors in a league with only four players. Davis is excellent, as she always is, although I think her character doesn’t become three-dimensional enough until the film is well underway. Erivo doesn’t even arrive until halfway through but she is an immediate force, with an epic scene when Belle first meets Veronica. Debicki – who towers over the other women, even though her character starts as a shrinking violet with no strength to defend herself – has the strongest arc of the women in the crew and delivers an outstanding performance to make that character growth credible, discovering that she’s capable of doing more than she imagined while also learning to stand up for herself. (Her character’s scenes as an escort, with a very short-looking and oddly coiffed Lukas “The Pin” Haas, give the film its best side quest.) Daniel Kaluuya plays Jamal’s brother and is utterly terrifying as a sociopathic killer. Farrell’s role could easily have been a caricature of a crooked Chicago political scion, but he turns on the Farrell charm – not to mention a passable Chicago accent – and gives the character some emotional depth and enough different faces to avoid that trap.

There’s a pervasive sense in Widows that McQueen is telling the story of women pushed into bad situations by the men they trusted, then finding their own power and agency in the wake of the botched heist, only to have even more men threaten them, push them around, or just ignore them. We can see Alice develop that sense of confidence and empowerment explicitly, like when she asks Melinda for the building plans and manages to figure out where the target is (with one convenient little coincidence). Belle hustles to make money to support her daughter, but is held back by a lack of economic opportunity or a reliable support structure. Veronica had the strongest career prior to their husbands’ deaths, but is also pushed into unexplored territory, the extent of which isn’t clear until the final scene of the film.

Where McQueen goes astray is in piling so much other thematic material on top of this. There’s a statement about politics, how so many of the people who want to represent us offer both good and bad sides, that issues are frequently not as clearcut as we’d like … and then there’s Tom Mulligan speaking like President Trump about minorities and immigrants. There’s a subplot about white police shooting unarmed black citizens that has nothing to do with the rest of the story – and much of the content here that touches on issues of race just doesn’t work, even as it sits alongside discussions of gender that do. Economic inequality pops up. All of these are themes worth covering, but the total puts a weight on Widows that no two-hour film that is also busy telling a ripping heist story could support.

There is far too much good in Widows for all of these quibbles to bring the film down too far; it’s still a lot of fun and very sharp, never talking down to the audience except for the police brutality thread, and with some details in the heist sequence itself that aren’t properly resolved. There’s a ton to unpack from this movie, and five performances that are at least worthy of consideration for awards – Davis seems like a lock for a Best Actress nomination, while Debicki, Erivo, Kaluuya, and Farrell are each outstanding in supporting roles. If you can hang with all the prologue and the terse editing, the payoff here is enormous.

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→ November 19, 2018
→ By

Burning.

Burning, Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is based loosely on a 1992 short story by Haruki Murakami called “Barn Burning.” It takes that very brief framework and builds a dreamlike, post-noir feature film, running nearly two and a half hours, that entraps viewers in its layered mysteries early and then increases the tension like a vice as it approaches its shocking resolution. (The Murakami story appears in The Elephant Vanishes, and is also in the online archives of the New Yorker.)

Lee Jong-su* is an unemployed, would-be writer who bumps into an old classmate, Shin Hae-mi, whom he doesn’t recognize because she’s had plastic surgery. She spots him, and makes it clear that she has some interest in him, eventually bringing him back to her tiny apartment and sleeping with him. She also asks him to feed and clean up after her cat while she takes a two-week trip to Africa, which he agrees to do even though it’s a long drive from his father’s farm in the country. When Jong-su goes to pick Hae-mi up on her return, she’s with a new guy, Ben, who is rich, condescending, and possibly her boyfriend. Jong-su seems resigned to the loss of Hae-mi to Ben, but those two keep inviting him out with them, stringing him along, until one day Ben confesses to Jong-su that he has a hobby of burning greenhouses, burning one every two months or so because it’s the ‘right pace’ for him. Later that night, Jong-su makes a cutting remark to Hae-mi, after which she vanishes, leaving Jong-su to try to figure out what’s going on. From there, the story turns darker as Jong-su follows – or stalks – Ben in search of the girl.

* Korean names are written with the family name first; I’ve held to that convention in this review.

At one point in the film, Ben says to Hae-mi, “it’s a metaphor,” after which she asks what a metaphor is, and Ben says Jong-su should answer, since he’s a writer. This entire film is a metaphor wrapped around a set of smaller metaphors. There’s a strong subtext of the pervasive nature of class distinctions in Korean society, and how the upper class may view the lower classes as not just inferior but expendable. Ben represents the idle, entitled rich, while Jong-su and Hae-mi both come from the lower classes. Jong-su lives on a farm while his father is in jail for assaulting a government official, and has very little spare cash; his estranged mother reappears at one point, complaining of how rich Koreans treat her in her menial job and saying how she needs money, which Jong-su promises to provide despite lacking means. Hae-mi, we learn, is broke, with outstanding debts she can’t pay, working just occasionally as a model/dancer outside shops that hire girls like her to try to drum up business. Ben drives a Porsche, lives in a gorgeous apartment, thinks nothing of spending money on food or drink, and appears to have little regard for people he views as beneath him, as do the friends of his who appear in the film – totally ignoring Jong-su while he’s at their parties while treating Hae-mi and Ben’s next girlfriend as if they’re some sort of entertainment, not actual people.

Throughout the film are smaller metaphors, not least of them the actual burning and references to it. There are cigarettes everywhere (and the occasional joint), fires in the background of shots, the burning color of the sun at sunset, and hints of the world burning around our characters with Donald Trump appearing on a TV lying about immigration and with North Korean propaganda audible outside Jong-su’s house. Birds make several appearances; there’s a postcard drawing of a bird in Hae-mi’s apartment, but it’s gone after she vanishes. Hae-mi tells a story about a well that might also have been a metaphor, but discussing its implications would reveal too much.

The main criticism of Murakami’s writing has long been that he doesn’t write compelling women, and the woman in “Barn Burning” is nothing but a prop, so the screenwriters here had a blank canvas … and didn’t do a ton with it. Hae-mi, played by Jeon Jong-seo in her first film role (where she really reminds me of Lily James), is a Boolean character – she has two modes, the flirtatious and perhaps overly sexual coquette as well as the stark depressive who seems to lack a will to live. All her edges are extremely sharp, while Jong-su in particular is drawn with far more nuance to just about every aspect of his character. Jeon does what she can with a character that verges on the ridiculous, at times appearing more like the object of male fantasy than like a fully realized woman, but the writing limits what she can do.

The two male leads deliver outstanding performances. Yoo Ah-in plays Jong-su as a sort of slack-jawed stoner – seriously, his mouth is constantly open – whose expressions and slow reactions would imply that he’s not very bright, but there’s more intelligence beneath the surface here, and Yoo gives him some emotional depth that I wasn’t expecting given how the film first introduces the character. Stephen Yeun is totally magnetic as Ben, smarmy and confident and charismatic, the character Jong-su wants to dislike but can’t quite come around to doing so because Yeun gives him that extra layer of amiability on top of what appears to be a rather unpleasant core.

The original story has Jong-su’s character comparing Ben’s to Jay Gatsby, a line that also appears in the film, while William Faulkner comes up twice during the movie as well. (I had a book with me to read while I waited for the film to start, and in a pure coincidence, it was Faulkner’s The Unvanquished.) The Faulkner connection is fascinating as his writing was frequently opaque, full of symbol and metaphor, and covered themes like racial prejudice and the moral decay that can accompany rising financial status. Ben’s skin is substantially lighter than those of the other main characters, as are his friends’, and the question of his morality and motivations, and even how he acquired such wealth, hangs over the last half of the film.

Murakami’s story doesn’t make the ending clear, but the film makes it much more evident what’s happening with these characters – at least, I think it does, although director Lee Chang-dong ensures that we never get explicit proof that our suspicions are correct. There’s sufficient misdirection here to keep viewers thinking about this film for days afterwards, as I have been. It’s well-written, extremely well-acted, features some stunning and memorable shots, and is just tortuous enough to keep you off balance right through the final scene. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.

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→ November 18, 2018
→ By

The Wife.

The Wife, based on novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer, has received early acclaim primarily for the performance of Glenn Close as the wife of the movie’s title. She delivers a solid performance, as you might expect, but the movie is dreck, the cinematic equivalent of painting by numbers, with moments so big and predictable that I actually walked to the back of the theater at one point to message a friend about how bad the movie was.

Close plays Joan Castleman, the wife of author Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) who, as the film opens, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993; the story takes us with Joan and Joe to Stockholm for the ceremony while giving us flashbacks to when they met and through the development of his career and their marriage. Joan was a student in Joe’s writing class at Smith, with Close’s daughter Annie Starke playing young Joan and Harry Lloyd hamming it up as young Joe, and they start an affair even though Joe is married and the two are teacher and student. Their romantic relationship also involves a professional partnership, as Joan is a gifted writer in her own right, but subverts her talents because she believes there is no market for a female novelist, while she can help Joe turn his writing into something that can succeed critically and commercially. Back in Stockholm, Nate (Christian Slater) is hounding the family so he can write a biography of Joe, while their adult son David (Max Irons) is there to sulk, smoke pot, and yell at his father. Of course, the tensions build over the course of the film to a melodramatic climax where we learn the truth about Joe’s work while Joan makes some major decisions about the rest of her life.

The hackneyed story runs through a series of coincidences, clichés, and outright groaners that destroy any suspension of disbelief because you can’t possibly accept anything this stupid as remotely realistic. Joe’s about to kiss the stunning young photographer who’s been assigned by his publisher to take pictures of him in Stockholm when the alarm Joan set on his watch to remind him to take his heart medication happens to go off at that precise moment. The winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics is supposed to be there for comic relief but is just an unfunny caricature of the overbearing, bragging parent, and of course we later find out that his kids are messed up. Nate is an even worse caricature of a mercenary writer, unctuous enough to soak the audience in grease, even dressed to depress with a cheap leather jacket and jeans while everyone else is attired for the occasion. David is the brooding young author and his fractured relationship with his father is overwrought and undersold. The scene with the walnut in the hotel room is insultingly trite. And if you can’t see the ending coming with all the clues the film positively throws at you from the beginning, the little plastic castle must be a surprise to you every time.

Close’s performance in The Wife has garnered substantial praise and she’s considered very likely to earn a Best Actress nomination, both for her performance and because the subject matter is clearly Oscar bait. Close is … fine. She gives a good performance in a role that is just not all that interesting – Joan’s character is just not that remarkable and the confines of the script do not give Close all that much room to stretch out. Joan says she doesn’t want to be seen as the long-suffering wife, but that’s just what she is, and we’ve seen this character a thousand times before. Close does what she can, but there’s no new thing under this sun.

Pryce is a scene-chewer by nature, although he deserves credit for how spot-on his Brooklyn Jewish accent is; he gives Joe a little charisma so you can see how women might still be interested in him despite his gruff manner and bombast. Irons scowls his way through the film, although the script gives him little else to do, and Elizabeth McGovern, whose bizarre diction was a constant distraction on Downton Abbey, tries to deliver some sort of weird 1950s dame voice to match an overblown speech that alters the course of Joan’s life.

The groupthink around this film just flabbergasts me – this is a badly written story with two competent performances at its heart, neither of which can elevate this movie beyond the level of dreadful. Even the few laughs are forced and the jokes frequently obvious. If Close gets a nomination over Rosamund Pike (for A Private War) or Melissa McCarthy (for Can You Ever Forgive Me?), it might be more a career achievement honor than a reflection of their respective performances.

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→ November 18, 2018
→ By

A Private War.

Marie Colvin was a highly decorated war correspondent for The Sunday Times, a British newspaper, for more than 25 years, scoring interviews with major anti-American figures like Muammar Gaddhafi and Yasir Arafat while reporting from war zones in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and Sri Lanka, where she lost sight in her left eye during a grenade attack. She’s been credited with saving the lives of over 1500 women and children in what is now Timor-Leste from an attack by Indonesian-backed forces, and later revealed the existence of a mass grave in Iraq that had the remains of 600 Kuwaiti prisoners. She continued to dive into dangerous situations to report from Libya and then Syria, where she was eventually killed by Syrian artillery fire during the siege on Homs in 2012.

A Private War attempts to tell the story of this fascinating, complicated woman in under two hours, a near-impossible task, but one that this film comes close to approaching by limiting the scope of its chronology to the last thirteen years of her life. This narrow focus gives the film more time to spend with Colvin, played here superbly by Rosamund Pike, in those conflict zones, giving us gripping sequences to highlight her bravery while also showing the violence to which she was regularly exposed. That last point is crucial to the film’s primary theme – that Colvin herself battled post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her dedication to reporting from conflicts, and engaged in some self-destructive behavior as a result. That “private war” of the film’s title is not sufficiently resolved in this film, but Pike does a remarkable job inhabiting this character and all her complexities, enough that we can get a picture of Colvin as a hero who was still very human.

The film thrives on Pike’s performance, which feels note-perfect throughout – she has Colvin’s voice and diction down pat, and shifts comfortably from the confidence, bordering on arrogance, of Colvin at work and in the field to the damaged side of someone suffering from PTSD and, for the first half of the film, refusing to acknowledge it. Colvin sought treatment, depicted in the film, but continued to drink heavily to try to mask it, telling friends she was “in the hole” when the flashbacks and night terrors became so overwhelming she would isolate herself for days. Pike’s Colvin drinks and especially smokes not just to forget but as a reflexive reaction to trauma, both first exposure and its return via flashbacks, yet she’s also compelled to return to the field and even to move further into danger. In the character’s own words, it’s because someone had to tell these civilian war victims’ stories, and if it wasn’t her, no one else would. The film is removed enough from her character to make her motivations ambiguous; her empathy for victims seems real enough, but she appears to be driven by something more, whether it’s adrenaline, ambition, or a need to prove herself.

A Private War plays a little loose with some key points in Colvin’s story, notably that her husband, Juan Carlos Gumucio, killed himself in 2002, within the timeframe of the film – he’s never mentioned at all. The scene outside of Fallujah where Colvin, her longtime photographer Paul Conroy, and a local crew uncovered the mass grave is depicted as the discovery of Iraqi bodies, but the story Colvin wrote on the uncovering identifies them as Kuwaiti prisoners executed and dumped by Saddam Hussein’s forces. Colvin entered Syria for the last time on a motocross bike to get over the border despite a ban on journalists, a scene that isn’t in the film but seems like it would have been tailor-made for Hollywood. The eleven-year-old Palestinian girl whose shooting death the movie version of Colvin describes seeing appears to have been a 22-year-old in real life, which may tie into a regular flashback we see Colvin experiencing throughout the film. And the movie version of Colvin tells a different, over-dramatized story of her childhood and her relationships with her parents, at least compared to the version she gave in real life.

(The film is based on a Vanity Fair article from shortly after Colvin’s death, titled “Marie Colvin’s Private War,” which I’ve used extensively here in this review. One fact in that article that I find fascinating is that she took a class from John Hersey where she read his New Yorker story “Hiroshima,” which still stands today as one of the greatest works of journalism to date. I can’t believe reading that had no effect on her choice of careers.)

If A Private War is flawed, it’s that no film of 110 minutes could give a complete picture of someone like Marie Colvin, who lived a life of enormous achievements, left a tremendous legacy of work and dedication, and was still a three-dimensional human with emotional problems, messy relationships, and demons she acquired through her work. Pike delivers an incredible performance, although it seems like there may be no room at the Oscar inn for her; I’ve only seen two of the five probable nominees for Best Actress but would rank Pike’s performance here over Melissa McCarthy’s in Can You Ever Forgive Me? It’s a more nuanced biopic than most are, and tells a story more people should hear – including me, since I was unfamiliar with her work or legacy before seeing this.

(One warning, however: the film has some harrowing scenes of flashbacks and nightmares to depict Colvin’s PTSD, which seems to me like a probable trigger for audience members with the same disorder, especially if it’s caused by exposure to violence.)

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→ November 16, 2018
→ By

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ November 13, 2018
→ By

Beautiful Boy.

Beautiful Boy, the film, is based on twin memoirs by a father and son, titled Beautiful Boy ($5.18 on amazon right now) and Tweak, respectively, of the latter’s long struggle with drug addiction, especially to crystal meth. It’s by turns a bleak portrayal of the effects a child’s addiction can have on the family and a distant, almost toneless depiction of what should be a gut-wrenching subject, saved primarily by yet another star turn by Timothée Chalamet as the son in the one great performance in the film.

Steve Carell co-stars as David Sheff, the father in the story, looking very paternal, as a successful journalist who is surprised to find out that his son has a serious drug problem and tries to throw himself at the issue to solve it. His son, Nicholas, behaves as you might expect an addict to behave – lying, stealing, deceiving, and then collapsing in apology and self-loathing. The cycle repeats multiple times until Nicholas eventually overdoses in New York, the event that more or less closes the movie and in real life marked the start of his journey to sobriety.

My experiences with this kind of addiction are mostly through depictions in writing and on screen; I had one relative who dealt with it, hiding it from me for most of my life, until the last few years before his suicide when he was probably no longer capable of the deception required. So when I say I think Beautiful Boy does a solid job of showing Nicholas’ addiction, and his up-and-down cycle through rehab, recovery, and relapse, or that I think the way his disease tears his family up is accurately portrayed, bear in mind that I’m playing with a handicap here.

But the rest of the script feels heavy-handed and even one-sided. Nicholas’ mother (Amy Ryan) lives in LA and is only on screen a few times, but the character is a shrew, and the fact that she takes care of Nicholas for about a year when he’s clean is brushed under the rug so she can fall apart again on the phone when he relapses after a weekend of visiting David. David’s second wife, Karen (Maura Tierney), is an artist, the mother of Nicholas’ two step-siblings, and is something of a cipher of a character, given more screen time but no development. There’s one scene near the end where she takes action after years of watching the damaging David-Nicholas dynamic, a wordless sequence that is the best thing any woman gets to do in the film – but that just speaks to how little the script regards its women, and I can’t believe that neither Nicholas’ mother nor his stepmother was that important in his early life or his path through addiction.

Chalamet is superb, again, probably earning his second Oscar nomination in as many years for this performance; he physically fits the part, looking a little haggard for someone with such a young face, earning the plaudits every time Nicholas experiences moments of clarity and remorse. It’s Carell who disappoints here – he looks right, but he’s just inert in this performance, and I found myself without any emotional connection to his character, even though I am a father myself and should at least have felt that paternal anxiety and grief through his eyes. If David Sheff is just a bottled-up guy, maybe Carell’s performance would make a little more sense, but it doesn’t translate well on screen. I needed a lot more here to feel what the character was feeling and didn’t get it.

There’s also a bunch of stuff in Beautiful Boy that a decent editor would have clipped – the weird, incongruous sex scene between Nicholas and a girl he hooks up with late in the movie served no purpose, and I’m not sure why we saw Karen working on her art at all – and the flashbacks to Nicholas’ youth aren’t well integrated into the primary narrative. Andre Royo has a nice bit part as Nicholas’ sponsor in NA, a fun bit of casting for viewers who remember him as Bubs on The Wire, but the fact that he’s so little used in the story also points to how little we see of Nicholas’ time in those meetings or in the process. There is one little fact delivered toward the end of the film by a doctor played by Timothy Hutton, where he explains to David that the rehab facility director lied to him about success rates of rehab from meth addiction – that the success rate tends to be in the single digits because meth damages the user’s nerve endings. Nothing shook me in this script more than that scene; even I, someone generally empathetic to addicts because I understand it’s a disease and saw it lead to the suicide of a loved one, didn’t quite understand just how brutal it could be. Nicholas Sheff recovered, and is still alive today, working, writing, and living a life that was probably unimaginable for him or his father during the time covered in Beautiful Boy. That miracle needed to come across more in the film.

One postscript: Nic Sheff did an interview with The Fix where he praised the film and Chalamet’s performance in it. It’s worth reading even if you have no interest in the movie.

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→ November 8, 2018
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First Man.

First Man reunites director Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling, who worked together two years ago on La La Land, in a different sort of movie, this time a serious biopic that deals with the biggest themes possible – life, death, and man’s search for meaning. Ostensibly a biography of Neil Armstrong from the death of his young daughter from cancer to his landing on the moon, First Man is much more a story of grief and coping, or not coping, and as a result less insightful as any sort of document of the man himself.

Gosling plays Armstrong, whom we first meet as an engineer and Navy pilot whose two-year-old daughter Karen is seriously ill with a brain tumor that will claim her life (via daughter) very early in the film, after which Armstrong shows the only real emotion he will display anywhere during the course of the movie. The story follows him through his entry into the space program, flight testing, and training, eventually to his selection for Apollo 11, but his path involves living through the deaths of at least five colleagues due to crashes and the cabin fire on the Apollo 1 craft, only furthering Armstrong’s turn inward with its constant reminder of Karen’s death. Armstrong also distances himself from his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), and two young sons, burying himself in work rather than risking further grief by getting too close to anyone else in his life.

First Man is extremely loud and incredibly close, to the point where the sound editing and cinematography, while perhaps accurate for the subject matter, make it hard to watch in several parts. The scenes aboard the various spacecraft involve a tremendous amount of shaking – not just showing us that the people on the ships are shaking, but shaking the camera so much that I repeatedly had to turn away from the screen, something I can’t remember ever doing for another film. The sound in those scenes where Armstrong is aboard any sort of ship is also mixed so that the background noise is amplified and it’s very hard to understand any of the communications between Armstrong (and any colleagues) and Mission Control; I eventually just gave up on understanding that dialogue, much of which involved technical chatter.

Gosling and Foy dominate the movie both in screen time and with their performances, with Gosling making Armstrong almost unknowable with his restrained portrayal, at times painful in his reticence and utter refusal to show emotion. There’s a pivotal scene where Janet forces him to talk to his two sons before he leaves for the Apollo 11 mission, knowing there was a good chance he wouldn’t return, and he can barely talk to the boys or even look at them; when one son asks if he might not come home, Armstrong responds as if he’s still in a press conference, with Gosling barely making eye contact and answering with a robotic tone and cadence. Foy gets to show a broader range of emotions, and her character develops some strength over the course of the film, enhanced by how her character is dressed and Foy’s own waifish appearance.

The movie has disappointed at the box office – much to the glee of alt-right trolls upset over the absence of a scene where the American flag is planted on the moon, which would be so out of place given the context of what Armstrong actually does after he lands – and I think one reason might be that the movie isn’t just a biopic. There is some celebration of space exploration here, and certainly some jingoism involved as the U.S. reached the moon before the Soviets could, but the larger theme in First Man is death and how we cope with it. The script’s premise is that Karen’s death changed Armstrong forever, leading him to create distance between himself and his family while driving him to take bigger risks at work, including accepting the riskiest mission in the history of the space program. (As a side note, I enjoyed watching Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and The Pin flying to the moon.) Rather than fully explaining his character, though, the script instead shows a man unwilling to open up to anyone in his grief, and the damage that ultimately does to him, to his marriage, and to his relationships with his two surviving children. Perhaps audiences wanted to see more of a hero at the heart of the film – there are a few such moments, but it’s not the dominant tone – and were surprised to see a movie that is so somber and pensive about a topic just about nobody wants to spend any time considering. That theme, and that choice to go with that theme over a rah-rah space and ‘merica tone, makes First Man a stronger film even if it’s less commercially appealing.

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→ November 7, 2018
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Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is based on the true story of biographer and literary forger Lee Israel, who discovered she had a knack for mimicking the style of famous authors and began producing fake personal correspondence from the likes of Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker when her own books stopped selling. With two strong performances by Melissa McCarthy and Richard Grant, the film bounces along at a brisk pace, running from the nadir of Israel’s legitimate career through her forgery streak to her eventual trial, but the script itself is flimsy and does way too much to try to make a remorseless con artist into a sympathetic character.

McCarthy plays Israel, a frumpy, mid-50s author who drinks too much and doesn’t really care for people, and whose agent, played by Jane Curtin, has lost interest in working with her between her difficult personality and the lack of commercial appeal of her books. We see her lose an editing job, struggle to pay bills, and experience writer’s block (presaged in one of the many heavyhanded scenes in the movie), before she eventually meets Jack Hock, played by Grant, a flamboyant gay libertine who becomes her one friend and eventually a partner in her crimes. While researching her latest book idea, on comedienne Fanny Brice, she finds a real letter from Brice tucked in a library book, steals and sells it, and hits on the idea of forging letters for profit. Eventually, she’ll be caught, giving McCarthy a scene for her Oscar reel at the sentencing hearing, and hits on the idea of writing a memoir of her stint as a forger both as a way to make money and to satisfy her inner desire to write.

The story is just too light and way too kind to its main character to work. It does show Israel as difficult and often rude to others, but the depiction of her forgery sales gives off the sense that, hey, it’s all okay because she’s just selling stuff that wealthy idiots will buy, and that the independent bookstores who buy her letters to resell them are somehow complicit for their failure to verify that her letters are authentic. Because it’s based on Israel’s memoir, there’s no attempt to explain why she is the way she is – why she drinks so much, why she likes cats more than people (her words), why she can’t maintain romantic relationships, and so on. And that means we don’t learn anything about why she slides so easily into forgery, other than that she had a financial need and then realized she was good at it. There’s zero sense that she regrets any of this, or considers that there might be consequences for the other people she involves, including Jack, and the script doesn’t even try to explain how she ended up without scruples.

McCarthy and Grant are both tremendous in their respective characters and in all of their scenes together, an odd couple of misfit friends, neither of whom has anyone else close to them. Late in the film, Israel’s previous girlfriend appears in a confessional scene, although it merely rehashes what we already knew about Lee’s character – she can’t open up, she creates walls between herself and people who try to get close to her – without explaining any of why. That somewhat limits what McCarthy can do in the role, but given its constraints she goes to an extraordinary length to try to give the character some three-dimensional qualities and create empathy for Israel, even when it’s probably not deserved. Grant makes Hock a delightful scamp, a bit ridiculous at points, but both consistently entertaining and a better elicitor of pathos for the character than McCarthy can be with Israel, as his character is more of an open mess while Israel is a closed one.

There’s already a consensus forming around Grant as a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and McCarthy probably has a shot at a Best Actress nod, although that might depend a bit on how many voters actually see this movie. She deserves plaudits for easily transitioning from comedic roles that rely on her timing and her gift with physical comedy to a dramatic one where none of those comic skills come into play. It’s the script itself that’s the problem – this is a trifle of a story, told from the perspective of the main character, someone who had every reason to lie about herself and who had an actual history of lying. Some insight on her character would have gone a long way to justifying the film, but we get none of that and too much of the drama around her friendship with Jack and her forging career. It makes for an unsatisfying product beneath the two superb performances that sit on top of the film.

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→ November 5, 2018
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Madeline’s Madeline.

I’d never so much as heard of director Josephine Decker’s film Madeline’s Madeline (available on amazon & iTunes) until the Gotham Independent Film Project’s award nominations came out about two weeks ago. Honoring – you guessed it – the best in independent film of the year, the movie earned one of the five nominations for Best Feature Film (along with First Reformed and the upcoming If Beale Street Could Talk), while its star, Helena Howard, earned a nod for Breakthrough Star. It’s very much an indie film, nonlinear, highly metaphorical (the first line of the film tells you this), and often inscrutable, but Howard delivers one of the best performances by a teenaged actor I can remember seeing.

The movie is very, very weird, which is why it’s regularly called “experimental,” although in this case I’m not sure what’s experimental about it beyond just the nonlinear storytelling. Howard plays Madeline, a 16-year-old actress, who has recently found her calling with a local theatrical troupe (or interpretive dance troupe), and has a deeply troubled relationship with her mother Regina (Miranda July). Madeline suffers from some serious mental illness, may have injured her mother before, and has an eating disorder and self-mutilation habits. The troupe is led by Evangeline (Molly Parker), who at first appears just like a director/writer consumed with her art, but her actual role and motivations are not so clear. She sees in Madeline both an incredible talent and a rich story of mental illness; her drive to get Madeline to open up and provide the subject for their performance lead Evangeline into a toxic relationship with Madeline that threatens the girl’s fragile tie with her mother and the integrity of the troupe itself.

Howard gives a virtuoso performance for a tyro – this is her first screen credit, film or TV – as a complex, difficult character prone to massive mood swings and primal behavior (yelling, screaming, using her body beyond simple gestures). The film depends entirely on the ability of the actress in that role, and Howard is strong from the beginning, only to get better as the film progresses and the script asks more of her. There’s a climactic scene where she imitates her mother that feels like the “that’s the scene that won her the X Award” moment in the film, but even in smaller scenes she excels at pushing the borders of the screen with those sudden shifts in mien or tone.

The script itself leaves a hundred questions along the way, resolving nothing. Foremost among them is whether Madeline is actually acting or dissociating; her most intense performances with the troupe seem to come from somewhere deeper within herself than most people can readily access, and that climactic scene ends with everyone reacting while she briefly goes catatonic. Related to that question is how much of what she tells us about her relationship with her mother is real; we see a little bit of her home life, and Regina is certainly not winning Mother of the Year given her extreme neuroses and how she takes those out on her daughter, but is it all true? For one example that comes up at the start of the movie: did Madeline actually burn her mother with an iron – or herself? Madeline’s father is mentioned but never appears; he seems to have left the family, but is discussed as if he’s present, and the most we learn about him comes when Madeline and some friends go in her basement and explore her father’s stash of porn. Why he left, and if he had any role in creating Madeline’s maladies, are both left unanswered.

The theatrical troupe is also … well, not quite right, to the point that it appears that the troupe may really be a cult, led by Evangeline, who sees a perfect recruit in Madeline, only to see the ingenue later threaten her control of the entire enterprise. The rhythmic breathing and humming, the all-black outfits, the masks (really, are you dancers, or are you Slipknot?), the often affectless way they greet each other all speak to some kind of relationship beyond members of the same dance ensemble.

I’m assuming the choices of the three main characters’ names were deliberate here, as two of them in particular have strong biblical connotations that seem to apply to the story. Madeline is derived from the same way we get the name Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus is said to have driven out “seven devils” – likely a reference to mental illness – according to the Gospel of Luke. Evangeline means the bringer of a gospel or good news, ironic since Evangeline is nothing but bad news for Madeline and her family but is unable to see anything beyond her own needs.

The story itself ends up a muddle without any clear here to there – often it wasn’t apparent whether we’d jumped back in time – and there is no answer to anything posed here. The final sequence of the script is powerful visually, and I thought reinforced the idea that this might be a cult, but I can’t say I know where we went on that journey or what the screenwriter was trying to say. That said, if you can watch a film just to see one character’s tremendous performance – not to mention to see someone throw up a 2012 Bryce Harper sort of debut – Madeline’s Madeline is worth the time just for Howard’s performance. This, it turns out, is how a star is born.

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→ November 3, 2018
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A Star Is Born.

The latest iteration of A Star Is Born, the third remake in the 81 years since the original premiered, manages to craft a clever, well-executed film beneath its enormous budget and the star power of the two leads. It dispenses with much of the schlock and sentiment of most mass-market dramas – and of the original film – but keeps the essential framework of the story, layering it with humor and well thought-out dialogue. For about two hours, it might be the best movie of the year, although the failure to set up the film’s climactic moment detracts from much of what came before.

Bradley Cooper co-wrote the new script and directed the film while also starring as a roots-rock artist Jackson Mayne, who is selling out stadiums and can’t go in public without people trying to surreptitiously take his picture. He’s also an alcoholic and drug addict, which we see in the opening scenes of the film, and which leads him to stop in a bar somewhere outside New York City – a drag bar where their former waitress Ally, played by Lady Gaga, sings every Friday night. She performs “La Vie en Rose,” and Mayne is utterly smitten by her voice, her personality, and her looks. She confesses to him that she wants to be a singer but she’s been told by every record executive that she’s not attractive enough to be a commercially successful artist. Of course, if you know the story at all, you know that he disagrees, takes her under his wing, and turns her into a star, all while the two have a fairy-tale sort of romance that can’t possibly last given his self-destructive tendencies.

The story has been told before, although the original script, co-written by Dorothy Parker, revolved around a young actress discovered while working as a waitress at a Hollywood studio party by a famous actor already on the decline due to his drinking. The new version of A Star Is Born works hard to provide complexity to both of its main characters, including an extensive back story to Mayne to try to explain why he continues to abuse a panoply of substances; the story’s focus on those two characters to the almost total exclusion of anyone else makes it an unusually dense, smart script for a major studio release, and gives the two leads tremendous material for performances that both seem like locks for Oscar nominations.

Cooper has more to work with here, as he’s the primary character, has that more detailed character history, and has written in much more complexity to Jackson than he gave Ally. But Lady Gaga’s performance was even more revelatory, both because she has virtually no acting experience in film and very little in TV, and because she conveys so much of her character’s emotional vulnerability beyond reciting dialogue. If they gave out awards for the best use of an actor’s hands to show you a character’s emotional state, she’d be the overwhelming favorite. The two together have undeniable, immediate chemistry, and the story just of the first night they met is a perfect meet-cute anecdote that, of course, can’t last in the long term. (My only quibble with Lady Gaga is that she’s too pretty for the whole “you’re not pretty enough to be a rock star” gambit.)

For two hours, this machine hits cruise control and rolls along at 70 mph without so much as hitting a pebble in the road. The pacing is remarkably smooth, the dialogue smart and believable, and the inverse paths of the two characters’ careers handled intelligently and credibly. But the ending to this movie, which is very similar to those of previous versions, is rushed to the point that the last big plot event isn’t earned by the story that comes before it. That kind of plot device, even borrowed, needs more justification than it received here, and the way it’s written trivializes the choice that character makes. The script spends more time on the mechanics leading up to that moment – the practical steps the character takes – than on his emotional state and explaining how he came to such a drastic decision.

I’m going to predict, even though it’s early in the season, that A Star Is Born ends up with the most Oscar nominations, with at least nine, including Best Picture Director, Actor, Actress, Song, Cinematography, and some sound awards, while Sam Elliott could grab a nod for Best Supporting Actor in a small but pivotal role as Jackson’s brother and a critical member of his touring team. The concert scenes are incredibly well staged and shot, giving you a sense of the grandeur (and, to me, the anxiety potential) of performing in front of ten or twenty thousand people, yet much of the movie is filmed close – you are often right there with the characters, even when they’re talking to each other, in a way that works to heighten the intensity of arguments and breakdowns throughout the story. The sound in those concert scenes is superb as well, along with the way the film uses sound to bring the recurring bouts of tinnitus that Mayne experiences home to the viewer. It’s not the best film of the year, but it might be the biggest winner come awards season.

–

I’m going to reveal the big climactic event in the movie, since it’s worth a separate discussion. It is slightly different from the analogous moment in the three previous iterations of the movie, although in all four U.S. versions of this movie, the Mayne character dies, twice by drowning himself in the ocean, and this time by his own hand but via another method. I understand that in the real world, people do commit suicide for what might seem to an outsider a totally insufficient reason, and they also commit suicide with little to no warning. I’m holding this movie, and others, to a somewhat higher standard: If you’re going to have a character do this, I need to buy it. This time, I didn’t.

In the 1934 original, Norman Mayne’s decision to drown himself comes after a steep decline that was already underway at the start of the film. He’s a successful actor but a known drunk, he’s sozzled when he meets his ingenue Esther, and his career fortunes drop consistently throughout the film, until, near, the end, he’s a has-been and a public laughingstock. When he realizes that he’s destroying Esther’s career, he decides to take his own life. It’s not ‘right,’ of course, but the script spends more than enough time explaining how Norman got to that point.

The new version really doesn’t do that, and I think at least some of the problem comes in the writers’ choices to focus more on Ally’s rise than on Jackson’s fall. Ally gets a lot of screen time after Jackson has made her a star, including a new if unfinished arc about her choice to pursue a more commercial direction than Jackson intended for her career, one where she might be sacrificing some of her artistic integrity to sell more records. The cost of that additional story is that we get less detail to Jackson’s slide; there’s one enormous scene where he embarrasses her at the Grammy Awards (just as Norman Mayne did to Esther at the Oscars), but what follows from there doesn’t really lead to suicide. It’s the point where the film just stops being a great story and starts to rush to connect the remaining dots, so that the last 15-20 minutes don’t live up to everything that’s come before – and it all does so in a way that makes suicide seem like an entirely impetuous, selfish act, instead of the desperate decision of someone suffering from mental illness or great physical pain.

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