→ October 30, 2018
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Let the Sunshine In.

Let the Sunshine In (available to rent on amazon and iTunes) is a star turn for Juliette Binoche, a thinly plotted wisp of a movie that works entirely because of Binoche’s performance as a middle-aged woman looking for something in her love life but unable to find it – perhaps because she doesn’t know what it is she wants. It’s a sort of cringe comedy for adults, full of awkward interactions in and out of the bedroom, punctuated by emotional scenes of Binoche lamenting her unhappiness and questioning the decisions she’s made, while she’s surrounded by some generally awful men.

Binoche plays Isabelle, an artist and single mother who, at the start of the movie, is experiencing but definitely not enjoying sex with a rather unattractive banker named Vincent, who quickly reveals himself to be something of a pig – and is also quite married and full of himself. Isabelle says she’s in love with him, although her actions would imply otherwise. Between watching Vincent treating a bartender like he’s something less than human and hearing Vincent say he will never leave his wife, Isabelle decides to break it off and venture out on her own, which leads to a couple of doomed affairs with brooding artist types and a lot of conversations about her misadventures and melancholy.

It’s unfair to say nothing happens in Let the Sunshine In (the actual title of which, Un Beau Soleil Intérieur, is better translated as “a beautiful sun within”), but what does happen is usually inconsequential. Isabelle seems unable to distinguish physical intimacy from genuine emotional affection, a confusion of which men around here seem more than happy to take advantage – I was reminded of the opening couplet from the Shelter song “Here We Go,” about a guy using love for sex while the girl is using sex for love. Nearly all of the men Isabelle encounters are creeps of varying levels of aggressiveness, and when the one possible ‘nice guy’ in the film kisses her but doesn’t want to rush right into sex, she feels rejected. There’s no destination here, or even any real growth; the film ends with Isabelle’s visit to a psychic (and, obviously, a fraud) played by Gérard Depardieu, with his bad advice and her questions continuing through most of the closing credits.

With the wrong actress as Isabelle, this would have been unwatchable; even though there are a few sex scenes and a few other big moments, the script is powered entirely by dialogue, nearly all of which involves the main character. Binoche delivers an Oscar-caliber performance here, owning the screen every time she’s on it, conveying a mix of strength and vulnerability, the understanding that she’s still attractive (can confirm) but the awareness that she’s aging and that her ‘window’ to find that perfect mate might be closing. The character is locked in a sort of arrested development when it comes to romance, thinking of love and sex as a young adult might, even though Isabelle is somewhere in middle age (never specified, although Binoche was 52 when this was filmed). She still dresses young, and that sex-for-love confusion dictates nearly all of her behavior with men, exacerbated by the fact that pretty much all of the men in this movie are terrible to her.

But is there a point to all of this? It’s not quite #CancelMen territory, although all the men in this movie who get more than a few minutes on screen are either out to get laid or to find someone to mother them (or, in at least one case, both). Isabelle herself has plenty of points in the film that could cause her to reevaluate her decisions in dating, yet she continues forward on the same path, so she just repeats her mistakes, right down to the decision to go to a clairvoyant (whom we see is a phony in one of the few scenes that doesn’t include Binoche). I’d watch Binoche work in almost any movie, and Isabelle is a suitably three-dimensional character, just one deserving of a more complex story.

(Random trivia: Director Claire Denis’ first film was called Chocolat, but it’s not the same film as the Oscar-nominated film of that name that starred Binoche and earned the latter a Best Supporting Actress nod.)

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→ October 26, 2018
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Disobedience.

Sebastián Lelio directed 2017’s A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this spring and was one of my top five films of last year. His follow-up, Disobedience (available free on amazon prime), is his first English-language movie, but continues the theme of focusing on people who are and feel marginalized by their communities, in this case looking at two gay women who have taken different paths since their sexuality was uncovered by the Orthodox Jewish community where they lived. It’s based on the 2006 novel by Naomi Alderman, who later won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Power.

Ronit (Rachel Weisz) has returned to the community from exile upon learning that her father, Rav Krushka (Anton Lesser), has died, but it’s clear from her arrival at her childhood friend Dovid’s (Alessandro Nivola) house that she is an outcast. She’s also surprised to see that her other close friend from childhood, Esti (Rachel McAdams), has married Dovid in the interim, and that no one even tried to contact her to tell her of the wedding. Dovid invites Ronit to stay in their guest room, to the chagrin of the more conservative members of the community, and the film slowly reveals the history between the two women – that they had some kind of affair as teenagers, and were discovered by the Rav, which led to Ronit’s hegira to New York, but also led the Rav to push Esti to marry Dovid. The two women find their attraction to each other hasn’t dimmed, but as the flame is rekindled, the inevitable consequences ensue, and Esti and Dovid both find themselves facing difficult choices between the constraints of their insular community and the exercise of the free will that the Rav himself discussed in his final sermon.

Where A Fantastic Woman was dramatic and brisk, moving the lead character from one crisis to the next, Disobedience is subtle and measured, relying on words far more than actions to advance the plot. Esti is the real heart of the film, because she chose to stay when Ronit left, and is now facing the same emotional conflict a second time – but now has the obligations of marriage as well as the understanding of an adult. The script emphasizes the lack of agency for women in such a community, which could just as easily apply to strict Muslim or fundamentalist Christian communities, even before we consider the taboos of homosexuality in such religions. Ronit’s life in New York is defined solely by her career as a photographer; there is no mention of friends or lovers, except when she confesses to Esti that she hasn’t been with another woman since their liaison ended, so while there’s an implication that Ronit is happy because she fled, there’s also a void where the information surrounding someone’s life would be. Yet if Esti has friends, we don’t really see them either; her role is the devoted wife of the presumed heir to the Rav’s place as leader of the congregation, but there is no definition to her independent of that.

The film is anchored by three very strong performances, McAdams’ in particular, as Esti has the central struggle in the film – deciding whether to even give in to her feelings, and then, since she does (in the movie’s one truly intense scene of action rather than dialogue), coping with the consequences and the choices she must make in the wake of those. You could diagram the film’s story as one where the troika’s friendship has devolved to the point that Esti is now pulled equally by one friend on each side – Ronit on the side of freedom, Dovid on the side of tradition or family or obligation. Nivola’s accent is utterly convincing; the American-born actor’s grandmother was a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in the 1930s, but he also studied Hebrew to be able to recite many of the lines in the film and the accuracy of the accent helps establish his character’s hidebound nature. When the denouement arrives, Dovid has as much to do with it as Esti does, with the film’s themes of agency and free will returning after the late Rav’s speech introduced them in the opening scenes. The ending might be a little too pat, making the next steps that come after the big decisions seem easier than they would certainly be, but the path that these characters take from Ronit’s arrival until that moment is a journey to appreciate.

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→ October 15, 2018
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Hold the Dark.

The Netflix movie Hold the Dark, which was released briefly in theaters and debuted at the Toronto film festival, is a slow-burning mix of Jim Thompson-esque noir and psychological horror, set in the bleakest of American landscapes – a small Native American village somewhere in Alaska. Based on the novel by William Giraldi and directed by Jeremy Saulner (Green Room), the movie falls for a few cliches of the noir genre but keeps the tension high at virtually every point, eventually arriving at a climax that appears to have left many readers guessing at what it meant.

A writer and wolf expert Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) gets a letter from an Alaska woman named Medora Sloane (Riley Keough), who says her son was kidnapped by wolves and asks Core to come find the wolf and kill it. He does, but things get weird almost immediately, when on his first night staying in her house, she appears nude, wearing a wolf mask, and lies down next to him while trying to get him to choke her. Her husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård), is seen in graphic scenes of firefighting in Iraq, and is nearly killed, returning home to find his son dead and his wife by that point missing, which in turn sets off a string of violent shootings that envelop an unwilling Core in their web and the manhunt for Vernon that ensues. (Medora is the young woman who waits at home for her pirate captain lover Corrado on Verdi’s opera Il corsaro; she and Corrado both die at the end, because that’s just how things went in 19th century opera.)

Hold the Dark is decidedly, deliberately creepy, with barren white landscapes and wooden cabins with dark interiors, so that nearly all of the movie is a little hard on the eyes and leaves you unsettled regardless of what’s happening on the screen. Core is the central character, although the narrative does shift to follow Vernon on the lam, and much of the camera work tries to give you that same sense of dread and confusion that Core would be experiencing as he’s exploring the Sloanes’ basement or is caught in a firefight with cops and a suspect. There’s a lot of graphic violence – almost every shooting involves blood and flesh flying from the body, certainly more than anyone really needs to see here – but the most powerful on-screen deaths are the ones that occur with little or no warning. Core is a witness to nearly all of them, and his reactions, coupled with the trouble he has coping with the short daylight hours of the Alaskan winter (it’s near the solstice, so the days are just five or so hours long), infuse the film with a sense of permanent unease, like the world is spinning just a tick faster than normal and you can’t find your footing.

Wright is especially apt for his role, as the grey in his beard and his overall mien convey seriousness and an implacability that will be quickly tested by the events of the story, and he has the deep, sonorous voice that can work even as the characters are mumbling. There is a lot of mumbling, though, which struck me as a too-hard attempt to give the movie that noir feel – it’s all serious, we’re serious, a little violence won’t even change the cadence of our speech – when the plot itself should do that. This is dark noir, like Thompson or even some James Cain, where no character is safe and thus you don’t feel like you can anchor yourself to anyone in the film. Even Keough tries to join in, with a vacant, affect-less speech that makes her sound more strung-out than anything else (exacerbated by makeup that makes it look like she hasn’t slept in a long time – which would fit her character’s arc).

The sky and the dark are frequent themes and characters mention them several times, both as a metaphor for the psychosis that appears to have gripped some of the characters in the film and as a literal reference to the effect that the wide open spaces and pervasive darkness can have on people who are already living isolated lives. The wolf mask and several scenes with wolves acting in what appear to be counterintuitive ways speak to the fact that we are animals at heart, and the story seems to ask whether we are really all that able to suppress the animal instincts within us. There’s also a subtext here, never spelled out but to which the dialogue alludes a few times (and with one picture), that I shouldn’t mention for fear of spoiling the ending, although apparently this is clearer in the book (I did not think it was very clear), but it’s important to fully understand what Hold the Dark is trying to achieve. If you can stand the violence – and I would say this was on the edge of what I tolerate – it’s a really gripping, dark vision into humanity on the edge of civilization, and most of the film lives up to the tension of a good thriller.

(One warning: there’s a rape scene near the start of the movie that isn’t explicit but makes it very clear what’s happening. The scene is shot strangely anyway, but I thought a trigger warning was justified.)

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→ October 9, 2018
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Dark Money.

The documentary Dark Money, now airing free on PBS after it received very positive reviews at Sundance this spring, focuses primarily on a very specific case of electoral manipulation in Montana, where the Koch brothers used various 501(c)(4) front groups – “social welfare” nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their donors – to flood districts with misleading or fraudulent materials in the last 30 days before elections. Montana’s history of restrictive campaign finance laws and tradition of citizen legislators makes it the ideal environment to expose these methods, which are at least subversive and unethical even when they’re not illegal, but a system designed to thwart such manipulation still wasn’t enough to stop it or make it easier to detect or fight. And, as the filmmakers show throughout the story, what happened in Montana is increasingly happening elsewhere, with the Koch brothers in particular behind much of it in their fights to eliminate labor unions, demonize public education, and gut environmental regulations on businesses. It’s horrifying, and Dark Money makes it clear that we the people have few if any tools available to stop it.

Dark Money largely follows the work of an investigative reporter named John S. Adams, who was let go when the state’s largest newspaper group shuttered its office covering state affairs and decided to start working on this case on his own. In several elections for the state legislature, candidates found themselves targeted by mailers that included inflammatory and often false claims, but were unable to effectively respond to them because they arrived at voters’ houses so late – and because responding would have required campaign funds they didn’t have. These mailers came from ‘dark money’ groups, nonprofits with innocuous names who don’t have to disclose their funders’ identities and in many cases don’t exist beyond a PO Box. Adams, with the help of some of the targeted candidates (many of whom were Republicans who were primaried from the right by candidates aided by dark money groups) and eventually some volunteer attorneys who helped the state build its case against one legislator, did his best to follow the money, and with some good fortune was eventually able to show that the Koch group Americans for Prosperity was behind the mailers. The film follows one specific case, against Republican Art Wittich, for accepting illegal contributions from the National Right to Work Committee, which is largely funded by the Koch brothers. The group has even continued meddling in Montana elections past the court case and timeline covered in the documentary.

Filmmaker Kim Reed does a superb job generalizing the case to constituencies beyond Montana, including showing how the Koch brothers and affiliated groups helped rig the recall election of Scott Walker and stack the Wisconsin Supreme Court with allies who shut down a state investigation into the Walker campaign’s finances. The IRS regulation on 501(c)(4) groups, which are categorized as “social welfare” organizations, is one major obstacle to allowing voters to know who’s funding those mailers or donating to political candidates. Another is the emasculation of the Federal Election Commission that began under Don McGahn, who joined the FEC with two other Republicans and made a pact to always vote in a bloc that effectively prevented the Commission from doing anything, killing the group’s authority to adjudicate in cases of campaign finance violations. (The FEC, by design, is a six-member panel, with three commissioners from each party, and thus is prone to 3-3 ties along party lines.)

And the third, of course, is the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC, where the Court ruled 5-4 that corporate donations to political campaigns were protected speech under the First Amendment – thus arguing that corporations, which are legal entities, have the same free speech rights as people. (Corporations primarily exist in law as a way to shield investors or owners from many forms of legal liability; they also enjoy different tax benefits from individuals, and also allow owners to gain from economies of scale not available to smaller entities. Corporations may act as individuals in the economic sphere, but they are not individual actors in the political space, or at least were not until Citizens United.) The rise of dark money also has created the possibility or even likelihood that foreign corporations or governments are funding American political campaigns; who’s to say that Chinese companies or the Russian or North Korean governments aren’t funding American Tradition Partnership or other front groups that support mostly conservative candidates who have agreed to reduce or eliminate regulations in exchange for campaign support?

There is so much to infuriate voters in Dark Money; even if you agree with these astroturfing groups’ policy aims, do you really agree with their methods? Should campaign funding be untraceable? Should there be consequences for sending out fliers with misleading or false statements against candidates? To what extent should corporate money be involved in politics when, as described in the documentary, those candidates will in turn vote on matters like environmental regulations where the interests of the companies funding candidates do not align with those of voters (assuming voters like clean water)? One of the many examples in the film that serves as a microcosm for the increasingly dirty, toxic atmosphere of our body politic is when the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity holds a “town hall” meeting, promising voters they can ask a specific candidate why he’s supporting Obamacare or voting certain ways on issues … but didn’t invite the candidate himself, despite using his name and image on fliers advertising the event. The candidate shows up, and the group’s director, Zach Lahn (now involved in a Koch-funded primary school in Wichita, despite having no background in education) claims he left the candidate “two messages,” and then tells a voter that he didn’t lie about the event because he used a “different definition of town hall.” Our rights are at stake, and we don’t know who’s paying for the information that shows up in our mailboxes, or to whom the names on the ballot might be beholden once they’re elected. Even if you don’t care about the methods used to get the candidates you think you want in office elected, once they’re there, they may be voting for a lot of things you didn’t know they’d support. Dark Money is the ultimate cautionary tale as our republic’s foundations begin to crack.

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→ October 2, 2018
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Love, Gilda.

Readers above a certain age will react one way to the mention of Gilda Radner’s name; readers below it will likely react less effusively, if at all. I’m above the line – I remember Radner’s brief, soaring peak as an unlikely television star in a male-dominated field, a fearless performer with impeccable timing and a gift for physical comedy, without whom Saturday Night Live might not have survived into adolescence and whose trailblazing work paved the way for dozens of women in comedy in the ensuing three decades. Now first-time director and former Gilda’s Club volunteer Lisa D’Apolito has memorialized Radner’s life in a new documentary, Love, Gilda, that relies heavily on source material from Radner herself, including journals, letters, audio recordings, and home videos, to give a simple, straightforward biography of a woman who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of women in comedy.

Relying heavily on those original materials from Radner, including recordings she made while writing her autobiography It’s Always Something (released just two weeks after her death at 43 of ovarian cancer), Love, Gilda gives viewers a window into why Radner, who grew up in relative privilege in Detroit, chose a life in comedy, and how she coped (or didn’t) with her sudden ascent to stardom after she joined the original cast of Saturday Night Live in 1975. This is a true biography in that it starts with Radner’s birth, detailing her upbringing, her close relationship with her father (who died when she was 12 of a brain tumor), a solid but flawed relationship with her mother (who obsessed over Radner’s weight and perceived unattractiveness as a child), her grandmother Dibby who served as a second mother of sorts and inspired the character Emily Litella, and how Radner started to find her acting and comedic voice as she grew up. Why this particular woman became known as one of the funniest comedians on the planet and anchored a subversive, late-night TV show that was dominated by men on both sides of the camera, is itself enough fodder for a documentary, and it’s the question that Love, Gilda answers best.

The film is framed by clips of several modern, highly successful comedians reading from Radner’s notes and journals, expressing a few stray thoughts of their own on Radner’s influence, but within the body of the film anything that isn’t from Radner herself is from people who worked with her. Several of the most important figures from her tenure on Saturday Night Live appear, all replete with praise for her comedic genius and the way she confronted institutional sexism by working harder and carving out a place for herself in a show dominated by men. It’s a bit incongruous in today’s environment, where the her approach to this sort of patriarchical workplace seems dated, but the film at least implies that for the time period she was a revolutionary.

Her time on SNL was marked by that sudden rise to fame, to the point where she was frequently recognized on the street (about which she had mixed feelings), as well as tumultuous romances with fellow cast members, notably Bill Murray. (D’Apolito reached out to Murray and over 100 other people for the film, but most didn’t respond. Chevy Chase is the only male SNL castmate of Radner’s to appear in the documentary.) Gene Wilder, Radner’s widow, is a major character in the last third of the film, but D’Apolito chose not to use any footage of her conversations with him before his death in 2016 because he was already unwell at the time.

I have two quibbles with Love, Gilda, but neither is the more common criticism about the relative paucity of clips of her work. One is that her struggles with mental illness – mostly depression, but certainly hints of anxiety, and then a diagnosed eating disorder that led to a hospitalization – are insufficiently covered, including what aspects of her upbringing may have contributed to all of this. (There’s a brief mention of her mom & pediatrician putting her on an amphetamine to try to control her weight, but it gets little follow-up.) The narrative technique of relying almost entirely on Radner’s writings seemed ideal for delving further into this subject, since Radner mentioned feeling neurotic and depressed, as well as expressing concerns about her appearance, quite a bit even in the journal entries and letters the film presents to us. There’s also no mention of what effect, if any, the public revelations about her eating disorder by authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad in 1986 – I’d argue that they ‘outed’ her – might have had on her.

The second quibble, perhaps more than just that word implies, is the lack of a real discussion of Radner’s legacy as one of the first women to break through the gender barrier in comedy. Carol Burnett preceded her, to name one, but there weren’t many women who became stars in their own right before Radner did; Radner was the first breakout star from SNL, and declined a chance to lead her own variety show on NBC in 1979 (a point omitted from the film). The filmmakers got Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Melissa McCarthy on camera to read some of Radner’s notes and offer a thought or two, but more from them, or from Radner’s contemporaries like Laraine Newman (who also appears) or Jane Curtin (who doesn’t), to try to place Radner’s impact in some context, even if it tended towards the hagiographic, would have been helpful. Love, Gilda simply assumes you know how important she was, and tells her life story in simple terms, which is fine but will be lost on younger viewers who have few or no memories of Radner’s work or popularity before her early death.

The film’s minimal reliance on clips of Radner’s work, assumed in other reviews to be a result of the filmmakers’ unwillingness or inability to pay for the rights, didn’t faze me, because I’ve seen so much of her SNL work and most of her best clips are available online anyway. I didn’t watch this film to stroll down memory lane and see the best of Emily Litella. Love, Gilda does include some significant bits from her solo stage show, although more of that, given its introspective, semi-serious nature, would have been welcome.

The inevitable comparison here is to the year’s breakout documentary hit, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but they’re very different films. While that film, about Fred Rogers, focused more on the what – the show he created, the things he accomplished, and some of the legacy he left behind – Love, Gilda focuses more on the why. Radner was such an unlikely star, because she didn’t look like most female stars of her era, and her own insecurities about her appearance helped drive her to become one of the funniest people on television during her career. There’s a scene around the midpoint of Love, Gilda that seems to sum up her on-stage approach, and how different it was from who she was off screen. In a “Weekend Update” segment on the death of Howdy Doody, Radner is supposed to be playing his widow, Debbie Doody, whom Newman’s reporter character is trying to interview. The sketch is bombing, so Radner, with strings attached to her as if she were a marionette, improvises by throwing herself at Newman and entangling the reporter in a bit of ridiculous but sublime physical comedy. To have that kind of confidence to wing it when you’re dying up there, and to do so in the most absurd way, while struggling with a mountain of doubts about herself and her worthiness to do anything but make people laugh is the great paradox of Radner’s life. Love, Gilda at least begins to answer that question for us.

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→ September 17, 2018
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The Endless.

The Endless (just $0.99 to rent on amazon or iTunes) is very much my kind of horror film – which is to say that most viewers today would probably not consider it a horror film at all, since it includes precisely zero on-screen violence of any sort, and the horror is entirely of a psychological sort, primarily that the viewer mirrors the protagonists in their incomprehension of what might be wrong. It’s a film of creeping dread until the secret is revealed, after which the dread merely intensifies because it appears that the two heroes might have no way out of the trap, powered by a brilliant, subtle script by Justin Benson (who plays one of the two leads, with co-director Aaron Moorhead) that piles existential angst on top of the physical dilemma the two characters face.

Benson and Moorhead play brothers, conveniently named Justin and Aaron, who live a meager existence on the fringes of society, barely connected to anyone or anything but each other, whose lives are upended when they receive a video cassette from members of the cult from which the two escaped about ten years previously. Aaron, the younger of the two, is more disturbed by the video, which implies that the cult’s members expect to soon undergo “The Ascension,” which Justin interprets as a coming mass suicide, and wants to revisit the cult, citing the brothers’ pointless lives of empty work for a cleaning service and lack of any meaningful links to other people. Justin agrees to take Aaron there for a single day, which turns into a second day, by which point Justin in particular realizes something’s amiss at the cult’s campsite while Aaron seems to relish the presence of a community where he feels like he belongs. Justin encounters other people who live in the same woods as the cult but aren’t members, which shows him what exactly is wrong and why escape might never be possible.

The psychological horror story on the surface of The Endless is straightforward – the brothers may be trapped on the campgrounds with no route for escape, and it’s never clear if the cult members are trying to help or hinder them. There are totems marking the boundary of the property from which members can’t leave, and as the brothers explore the area they run into other people also trapped by the unknown force who urge them to flee before they’re imprisoned by it too. The cult itself is partly a red herring – the horror isn’t the cult members themselves, but is related to whatever they might be following; they’re just at peace with the situation while the other denizens of the woods are increasingly desperate to escape it.

The Endless is also a film about the bonds of family, and how losing can leave a person unmoored and grasping for some sort of connection. Aaron is especially lost and miserable before the brothers return to the campsite, and despite having only scattered memories of his life before they escaped, he slides back into a comfortable skin among the other members, serving as the (obvious) foil to Justin’s skepticism about the cult’s intentions towards him and his brother and their plans in general for some kind of mass event. The split between the brothers over the cult – including whether to stay longer than they’d planned – is predictable, but the script resolves this, at least partially, in an unexpected way that highlights the strength of familial bonds without ignoring the baggage that comes with them.

Aside from the two leads, the other standout performance in The Endless comes from Callie Hernandez as Anna, a sort of den mother within the cult, a character with a wide range of requirements for the actor depending on which brother is with her on screen. She’s the most interesting of the cult members, several of whom are depicted as if half in shadow to disguise their possible motivations or simply to amplify the uncertainty facing the main characters. (If her face is familiar, you may have seen Hernandez in La La Land as one of Emma Stone’s character’s friends in the “Someone in the Crowd” number.)

The Endless is apparently inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly his Cthulu writings, but I’ve never read any of his stories and really just know them through the significant number of tabletop games inspired by that universe; Lovecraft fans may find even more here to chew on than I did. Even without that background, however, I found The Endless totally compelling from start to finish, with tension that crescendoed in the second half, and a resolution that gives you just enough information to wrap the film without attempting to answer every question you might have had about what happened.

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→ September 13, 2018
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On Chesil Beach.

I read Ian McEwan’s Atonement back in 2007 but strongly disliked how manipulative the narrative turned out to be, so I skipped the highly acclaimed film adaptation that came shortly after, with a then-unknown 13-year-old actress named Saoirse Ronan playing one of the pivotal roles in the movie. Ronan is now, of course, a three-time Academy Award nominee, including one nod for Atonement, and returned to McEwan’s milieu as the star of this year’s adaptation of his novella On Chesil Beach (amazon • iTunes), which covers familiar thematic territory but does so without the trickery of the earlier work, and builds slowly to a crescendo finish that ends with an gut-punch conclusion that speaks volumes with very little dialogue to punctuate it.

On Chesil Beach is an ostensible love story between upper-class Florence (Ronan) and working-class Edward (Billy Howle), told mostly via flashbacks on their wedding night as the two approach their first time in bed. A sweet, awkward romance emerges in scenes from their courtship, including stories of her frigid mother and angry, distant father, as well as images of his difficult childhood with a mother who suffered brain damage in an accident and has trouble with memories and with some basic social graces (including, as it turns out, wearing clothes when required). It eventually comes out that Florence’s wedding-night jitters are more than just tremors of anticipation, but that there is something extremely wrong beyond mere ignorance of the mechanics of sex. When Edward makes his first, clumsy attempt, the flashbacks turn darker – apparently the reason for her terror is clearer in the movie than the book – and the tone of the film turns abruptly into one of regret and shame for Edward as he details his life after the wedding night.

As with Atonement, one character’s rash decision in youth affects multiple lives, but here there is no pretense or deception on McEwan’s part – we know what happened in the ‘real time’ of the script, and there’s no sleight of hand to mislead us. For me, at least, that made the final half hour, from the wedding night, the revelation (to us, but not to Edward) of Florence’s past trauma, and the jumps forward to Edward’s future without Florence gutting to watch, as he realizes what his reactions in the heat of the moment – both out of anger and shame – have cost him over the remainder of his life.

Music is a recurrent theme in On Chesil Beach as well, including the use of classical music (Florence’s passion, as she plays in a string quartet) and early rock and roll (Edward especially loves Chuck Berry) to further distinguish the two main characters’ class differences. There’s also a scene about adding a fifth member to the group where we see a totally different side of Florence, a stronger, almost domineering presence at the head of the quartet, in full contrast to the timid woman shown in intimate scenes with Edward, as if to make clear that she’s not a nervous or weak person, but is repressed in a specific situation for a specific reason.

Ronan is superb, as always, although there are certainly scenes here where she’s reduced a bit by stilted dialogue to standing around in cute dresses; her character is by far the more pivotal of the two, and requires more restraint than the role of Edward, whom Howle plays as emotionally messy and underdeveloped, himself probably as unprepared for the institution of marriage and the responsibilities one has to a partner as Florence was for sex. The movie’s first hour or so is fairly slow going, I think by design, and some of the side characters are very thin, including Florence’s mother (played by Emily Watson), whose role in all of this could have used more explanation and whose attitude towards her daughters is itself hard to fathom.

At the 80 minute mark, I was sure I’d be calling On Chesil Beach a trifle, or even a bit dull, but the turnaround towards the end was so powerful that it forced me to reassess everything that came in the first 2/3 of the film. Nothing prepared me for how the story would wrap up, or how McEwan’s screenplay would shift the focus to make it clear that the blame isn’t on Florence, and that we’ve seen too much of the story through Edward’s eyes to understand how wrong he was to react as he did. The result is a potent, wrenching portrait of regret that also serves as a plea for understanding when someone we love needs it most.

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→ September 6, 2018
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First Reformed.

First Reformed is a return to form for Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver and writer/director of Affliction, whose recent career has been marred by bad choices of projects, none worse than The Canyons, billed as a comeback project for Lindsay Lohan but a critical and commercial failure. (It also featured porn star James Deen, who was accused shortly thereafter of raping several women on adult film sets.) Featuring a virtuoso performance by Ethan Hawke, First Reformed asks powerful questions about the meaning of our existence, our responsibilities to the planet and to others, and whether people of faith can know or pretend to know the mind of God. For most of its nearly two hours, it is a taut, well-acted, Oscar-worthy film, but Schrader doesn’t quite stick the landing and I’m still not sure what to think about the closing scenes.

Hawke plays a minister named Ernst Toller, overseeing a dwindling congregation in a small rural town, subsidized by a megachurch called Abundant Life led by a charismatic minister named X (played by Cedric “The Entertainer” Kyles). Toller is visited by a woman, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), who is concerned about the mental state of her husband, a former environmental terrorist who remains obsessed with man’s destruction of the planet. She’s pregnant, and her husband wants her to have an abortion because he believes it’s cruel to bring a child into this world and the bleak future for humanity. When the husband takes his own life despite the counsels of Toller, however, the reverend is set off into his own dark night of the soul, reexamining his own past mistakes.

The movie is very much a showcase for Hawke, looking haggard and ground down by life in this role, who carries a drawn look throughout the film, the way someone fighting an inner torment and refusing to reach out for help or accept any offered might present himself to the world. We learn more about Toller’s past, and some reasons why he might act the way he does and be experiencing his own crisis of faith, but it is Hawke’s demeanor and intensity that carries the character and the film as a whole, as no other character, not even Mary, can come close to his role or his three-dimensional nature.

The choices of names in the film can hardly be accidents, and Schrader has cited specific films as influences (although I haven’t seen them, including Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, and wouldn’t have caught those allusions). The real Ernst Toller was a German playwright known for left-wing views; he collaborated with anarchists and communists and served for six days as the leader of the so-called Bavarian Soviet Republic, but spent his last six years in exile before hanging himself in 1939; the film’s Toller is himself in exile, figurative and semi-literal (as he’s cloistered himself at the head of a scarcely-attended church). Mary is pregnant in the film, and the child’s father is known but disappears from the narrative, and while she first appears on the scene as someone trying to save her husband, she’s really here to try to save Toller – or at least allow him to save himself.

The ending is distinctive and shocking enough that I won’t spoil it, but I will say here that I’m not sure if what we see in the final scenes is real, and if it is, what it’s telling us about redemption or second chances. The last fifteen minutes or so include a dream sequence that could be a bit of magical realism, and an ending that is at least open to interpretation, especially the way Mary’s character appears in the last sequence, bathed in sunlight. The few reviews I’ve read or heard about First Reformed commented on how the ending doesn’t seem to fit well with what came before, and I mostly agree with that sentiment; I thought we might be seeing Ernst having a religious experience, but if that was the case it wasn’t well set up before or afterwards. It’s a very good movie with a solid script and a great central performance by Hawke, further punctuated by some of the wide shots contrasting Toller’s old but charming church with the antiseptic megachurch that helps keep his going. Whether it’s a great movie to you will probably depend on to what extent you buy the ending.

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→ August 30, 2018
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BlacKkKlansman.

Spike Lee’s return to directing with BlacKkKlansman has been met with wide critical acclaim and a positive commercial response, with the film earning back its reported budget in its first week of release. The film is based on the true story of African-American cop Ron Stallworth, who infiltrated a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan while working in the Colorado Springs Police Department, surrounded by white officers, detailed in Stallworth’s memoir Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime.) Stallworth paired with a white partner who was his stand-in at KKK meetings, and eventually managed to speak to and meet David Duke, while revealing that there were members of the chapter who worked in law enforcement, the military, and, in two cases, NORAD. (Those last two were allegedly reassigned to Greenland or somewhere else in the Arctic.) Lee invents a few details and then intersperses the story with vignettes that are far more clearly targeted at the modern audience, closing with footage from the neo-Nazi rally and the eventual murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last year. It’s a powerful story that offers no pretense about its ideals or what viewers should think and do in this era of New Racism, and is by turns terrifically funny and intense. It’s also a total mess of a film that reeks of the director’s self-indulgence and eventually works to undermine some of its most important messages.

BlacKkKlansman is at its best when Lee focuses the story on the investigation as it was led by two men, Stallworth (John David Washington) and Phillip “Flip” Zimmerman (Adam Driver). After about 30 minutes of prologue that gives some backdrop to the racial animus in the country at the time and gets Stallworth into the police department under its minority hiring initiative – and exiles him to the records room – he makes the fateful phone call in response to an ad in a local paper, looking for new members, from the local chapter of the Klan. Stallworth calls, tells the man on the phone how much he hates black people and every other group the Klan was known for targeting, and is invited to a meeting that Friday night, which is a problem given the color of his skin. He recruits Zimmerman to go in his stead, under his name, wearing a wire, which begins the investigation that, in reality, lasted nine months and uncovered those members’ identities. (The film creates a fictional, planned bombing that never happened, but that does allow for an intense climatic scene that drowns in its own bathos as the overwritten script piles clichés on top of a pivotal moment.)

Lee appears to have been given a free hand with the project, which was produced by Jordan Peele (who was set to direct it but gave it to Lee to work on other films), and I wonder if Peele felt unable or unwilling to confront one of the most important figures in black American cinema over some of the film’s many bombastic or incoherent sequences. There are gimmicks galore here, such as the isolated head shots of black audience members listening to Kwame Ture and the hallway scene near the film’s conclusion, that are nothing more than directorbation, the film equivalent of an umpshow, where Lee has to remind us that he’s at the wheel and we are watching an artist at work. One of the film’s many interludes from the Stallworth narrative itself is the Klan initiation rite, where Stallworth’s partner attends in his stead and David Duke presides, showing the racist 1916 film Birth of a Nation to whip the members (and their wives) into a frenzy. Lee intersperses that with scenes from a black student union meeting at the local college – I think it’s University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, but wasn’t sure if it was named as such – where a man, played by Harry Belafonte, tells the story of the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, in 1917. Belafonte’s character was a close friend of Washington’s, but the character and the meeting appear to be fabricated for the film, although the grotesque torture-murder of Washington was very real, attended by thousands of whites as if the castration, mutilation, and slow immolation of a black teenager were merely the day’s entertainment.

The unexpected star of the film isn’t Washington – yes, that’s Denzel’s son – but Driver, who delivers a nuanced, two-sided performance as a cop who finds his stolid attitude that any case is just part of the job affected by his exposure to such inveterate hate, while also posing as a very convincing racist, anti-Semitic zealot. (Zimmerman’s character is a non-observant Jew, but the real undercover officer, known only as “Chuck” in Stallworth’s memoir, was not.) He’s so magnetic in the role that the film lags when he’s out of the dialogue, which I’d say is the opposite of the effect he has as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise. Washington is fine, but isn’t charismatic enough to be the center of the film, and he’s often overshadowed by others on screen including Driver; Topher Grace as a dead ringer for David Duke; and Laura Harrier as Patrice, Stallworth’s (fictional) love interest and President of the Black Students’ Union in the film. Corey Hawkins has a small part earlier in the film as Ture that is a clinic in delivering a rhetorical speech, although it’s again blunted by those camera tricks Lee employs to remind us he’s in charge.

For a film with a deadly serious subject, BlacKkKlansman doesn’t skimp on the humor. There’s a Wire reference near the start of the film that had me laughing very loudly – and I was the only one in the theater who did so – although I was disappointed not to hear Paul Walter Hauser drop an “incorrect” somewhere to nod to his scene-stealing performance in last year’s I, Tonya. The allusions to our modern era of ‘very fine people’ can go too far – Stallworth telling his white sergeant that Americans would never put an openly racist person in the White House is a bit too on the nose – but work well when Lee steps back and lets the dialogue and/or action show us how little has actually changed. An early scene when Patrice and Ture are stopped for driving while black and then threatened and assaulted by the officers, while also fictional, is extremely effective for how it just tells a story and lets the audience connect the dots. The telling of the Washington lynching might have been more effective as a straight scene, rather than one cut back and forth to the frothing Klan members watching and cheering on Birth of a Nation. The film just needed less of these trappings and more of the basics. The scenery, the clothes, and the hairstyles all set the scene incredibly well; even little touches like background colors in offices or the weaker lighting in some of the scenes in Klan members’ houses (so the film looks like movies or TV shows from the time period) contribute to the atmosphere. The one gimmick that really works, the transition to Charlottesville footage, with a clip of Trump referring to violent neo-Nazis as “very fine people” just in case anyone still wondered where his sympathies lie, is a masterstroke – but it’s the only gimmick BlacKkKlansman needed. Instead we get a half-dozen on top of that, so by the time you get to the end of the film, you’re exhausted from trying to figure out where any of this is going.

Note: The Slate piece discussing what’s real and what’s fictional in this film was essential in writing this review.

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→ July 11, 2018
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Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I was born in 1973, and watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a huge part of my early childhood, something I’d watch every day until I was old enough to go to school. Along with other PBS shows like Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Write On, and the later 3-2-1 Contact!, they made appointment viewing for me before the term even existed.

(Side note: My parents swear I loved the mid-70s show Zoom, but unlike the shows I mentioned above and a few others, I have zero memory whatsoever of Zoom, other than that You Can’t Do That on Television! borrowed its format and one time had its actors sing Zoom‘s theme song.)

So the new documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, about the show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and to some extent about its star and creator, couldn’t be more squarely aimed at me. Featuring extensive interviews with almost everyone who was involved in the show, it gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the program and provides some historical perspective to the show’s importance, although I don’t think it does nearly enough to explain who Fred Rogers was and what drove him to create this seminal yet utterly counterintuitive television program for the youngest viewers.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? focuses on the story of Fred Rogers from the advent of the TV show until his death in 2003, with just scant references to his life before he created Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood at Pittsburgh’s public television station WQED. Other than Betty (Lady) Aberlin, who was interviewed but declined to appear on camera (as she apparently felt too self-conscious), it seems like director Morgan Neville talked to everyone living who might have something to tell us about the show, including the actors who played Mr. and Mrs. McFeely, Officer Clemons, and Handyman Negri; producer/director Margy Whitmer and floor manager Nick Tallo; Rogers’ widow and two sons; and his longtime friend Yo-Yo Ma. Combined with clips from multiple interviews Rogers gave over his career about his work and the show, along with quite a bit of archival footage from the show itself and behind the scenes, the documentary manages to explain why Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was so influential and yet seemed so out of place in an environment that thought children needed faster-paced shows and often used the medium simply to sell stuff to young viewers.

But there is a lot missing from this story, both about Rogers himself and the pre-history of his show. The film does include some clips of The Children’s Corner, the first show he created for WQED and the place where many of the puppets who appeared on the later show were first conceived, one of which was an ad hoc fill-in because the show was live and the film strip they had been airing had melted or otherwise broken down on air. It omits the show he created for the CBC, Misterogers, which contributed numerous elements to the later WQED show, and has no mention of his former colleague Ernie Coombs, who became Canada’s Mister Dressup, a show that had much in common with Rogers’ show and which (Wikipedia claims) contributed some songs to the latter.

There are a few hints along the way about Rogers’ life before the Neighborhood, but hardly enough to give us a full picture of his character. Rogers was 40 years old when the first episodes of the show aired, having joined, left, and returned to the seminary, and participated in at least two other shows before his big success. Of his childhood, we learn little; there’s a reference to “Fat Freddy” near the end of the film, but it’s barely explained (and if the pictures we’re shown are any indication, he seemed hardly overweight). He had a quixotic obsession with the number 143, which to him stood for “I love you,” including maintaining his weight at 143 for most of his adult life. That seems like something we might explore more, but other than two of his friends commenting on it being “weird” we get nothing more.

Instead, Neville chose to include some truly tangential material like the right-wing attacks on Rogers’ show and philosophy or the PSAs Rogers filmed after the 9/11 attacks, none of which is that interesting or elucidating on this man whose character still resonates and yet still seems too good to be true. Of all of the archive footage shown that wasn’t directly part of the Neighborhood, none seems to get at this conundrum more than the cringeworthy interview Tom Snyder conducted with Rogers, in which Snyder asks Rogers if he’s “straight.” While I know the question – coming right after Snyder asked “are you square?” – could simply be asking Rogers if his character is really who he is, there’s an undeniable subtext, one this documentary acknowledges, that people assumed Rogers was gay. It is unfathomable to my ears today that an interviewer would ask such a question, but at the same time, showing it now reminds the audience that people have questioned Rogers’ authenticity for a half-century now. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a beautiful trip down the nostalgia path, and does its part to convince the viewer that Mister Rogers is very close to who the real Fred Rogers was; unfortunately it does very little to tell us why.

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