→ January 31, 2020
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Pain and Glory.

Antonio Banderas landed one of the five nominations for Best Actor this year for his role as Salvador in Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria), the latest film from Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (All About My Mother). It’s a command performance from Banderas, who gets his first Oscar nomination at age 59, one that would get my vote (if I had one) in his category for the range and depth he shows in bringing this complex, sad character to life in a story that meanders like the memories it’s trying to depict. (You can rent it on amazon and iTunes.)

Salvador Mallo is a once-famous Spanish director who is now in professional and physical decline, wracked by joint and back pain and hobbled by various other ailments (some of which may not be real), all of which leaves him feeling like he’s unable to work, and if he can’t make movies, he doesn’t see any point to living. He’s thrust into the past when a local cinema restores and airs his film of 30 years earlier, Sabor (Flavor), whose star, Alberto, played the lead character so differently than Salvador intended that the two haven’t spoken since. The two meet again, tentatively, and Alberto shares some heroin with Salvador, who tries it on a whim but becomes hooked, and while he gets high we see more flashbacks to his childhood with his mother (Penélope Cruz, who doesn’t seem to age) in a cave house in rural Spain. While there, Salvador meets Eduardo, an illiterate but kind local laborer, whom he teaches to read, write, and do basic math; and fights with his mother, who wants to send him to a seminary to continue his education so he doesn’t end up ‘like his father.’

The two tracks, in the present day and in the world of Salvador’s memories, both move forward in linear fashion, but the latter jumps around enough to resemble the way our memories actually work. Almodóvar then combines the two timelines when Alberto discovers an unpublished treatment Salvador wrote called “Addiction,” that tells the true story of Salvador’s affair with a man who was also addicted to heroin, an affair that ended because he couldn’t kick the habit; Salvador confesses he doesn’t even know if his former lover is still alive. When Alberto convinces Salvador to let him stage the play, you can probably guess what happens, and how that kind of closure helps Salvador finally take some small steps to help himself, and to let his incredibly devoted friend and assistant Zulema help him.

Most of the summaries I’ve seen of Pain and Glory have focused on Salvador’s infirmities, describing it as a meditation on aging and mortality. While those themes are clearly present, the movie, and Banderas’ performance, are both far more hopeful than you’d expect from such a description, while also trying to explore how our past experiences and our memories of them can shape our lives for years or decades afterwards. Salvador flashes back to various scenes because of how much they’ve influenced his later life, especially in how his relationship with his mother, right up to her death, has affected and haunted him well into adulthood. Confronting those memories is a crucial step in his recovery not just from his temporary addiction but from the depression that has taken over his entire life, threatening his career and possibly more.

Salvador is not exactly Almodóvar, but there is a lot of the director in the character, and Banderas does a marvelous job bringing that character to life with the kind of depth and rounded edges that he needs to have to engender enough empathy and interest from the audience. Some of the key points about Salvador, including his physical pain, come across in ways that feel organic without overwhelming the character or the story – he’s in pain, and that often leads to him choosing not to do things, but he is not inert on the screen because Banderas renders him in three dimensions, especially finding small ways to show that there’s some energy left in the old man even if his back or his legs aren’t willing. It could have been a monument to self-pity, but Banderas avoids that trap and instead gives one of the best performances of the year.

Almodóvar still makes some quirky choices that don’t entirely work; the sequence near the start of the film where Salvador runs through all of his maladies with the help of some animation feels incongruous and took me right out of the movie just as we were getting started. There was no way this was going to beat out Parasite for Best International Feature Film (for which both are nominated), but some of those small decisions are enough to keep it from coming close to the South Korean hit in my own estimation. Cruz is excellent in small doses as Salvador’s mother while he was still a child, but she could have used some more screen time to further develop both her character and her relationship with Salvador, and those scenes suffer a bit because Banderas isn’t there. His performance is so strong – he’s not going to win, as his character obviously isn’t crazy enough to beat out Joaquin Phoenix – that it elevates Pain and Glory from something maudlin into an elegiac lament that still gives its main character reasons to hope and to live, right up to the film’s glorious final shot.

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→ January 29, 2020
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1917.

Sam Mendes’ 1917 was a bit of a surprise winner at the Golden Globes, where it took the Best Motion Picture – Drama prize and Best Director honors despite only receiving one nomination in any other category (Best Original Score). It feels like the kind of movie that awards voters love – it’s an ambitious war movie, it’s about the struggles of white men, and it has a significant gimmick to it that would appeal to the more technically minded voters – even though the film itself is more competent than brilliant, with a plot that borders on the ridiculous and a gimmick that is ultimately too distracting.

Although Sam Mendes has said the film is inspired by true stories his grandfather Alfred told about his experiences in World War I, the story itself is fictional. It follows two Lance Corporals, Tom Blake and Will Schofield, as they attempt to cross into no man’s land and possibly slip behind enemy lines to deliver a message to a colonel who is planning an attack that will actually lead his 1600 men into a trap set by the Germans. Along the way they meet many of the horrors of war, including multiple dungeon-crawl-like trips through English and German trench networks, run into half the cast of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and somehow manage to avoid all of the bullets flying in their directions en route to their destination.

It is absolutely gripping to watch in what seems like real time, with a script that seldom eases up on the throttle for you to relax. Even when Blake and Schofield are alone, they end up in some sort of danger, and eventually we follow one of the two into a bombed-out village that looks like a death trap for him between the lack of cover and the various Germans stationed around the ruins. When the action stops, there’s usually the threat of action around a (literal) corner, and Mendes has no issue ratcheting up the tension or the extent of the threats to his characters to make the film more exciting – even though Schofield in particular seems to survive multiple incidents that would kill an actual human being. It’s as exciting as any mainstream action film, without the usual crutches of the latter genre.

The gimmick I mentioned above is the use of long takes to make the film appear to comprise one continuous shot, although there’s one very obvious break and a couple of others you’ll probably think you spotted. This isn’t actually new; Birdman tried it and won Best Picture at least in part because of it, and Alfred Hitchcock did it in Rope when there were far more severe limitations on how long any single shot could be. It is immersive, and thus effective at putting you more in the action as you watch, but within a half an hour my eyes were already tired of the constant motion and from trying to shift focus between the characters in the foreground and the endless activity in the background. I was more than ready for the film’s one actual break, where one of the two main characters passes out and the screen goes black for a few seconds, less for the pause in the action – which I generally enjoyed – than for the rest for my eyes.

There’s also a good bit of stunt casting here, as the famous names attached to 1917 each appear for a few minutes, at most. Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch – all of whom appeared in the 2011 adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – each have cameos, as does Andrew Scott as the hot priest … no, wait, wrong show, he’s a lieutenant whose regiment has just been hit. None is on screen for very long; the two stars are less well-known, although you’ve likely seen one before: George Mackay (Captain Fantastic) plays Schofield, doing a very credible job in a role where he’s asked to carry a substantial amount of the weight, while Dean-Charles Chapman (Game of Thrones) plays Blake and has more to do in the first third of the film. There’s one woman anywhere in the movie, and I believe only one person of color speaks, a Sikh soldier, even though there were plenty of black and south Asian soldiers in the British army.

As I write this, 1917 has emerged as a favorite for Best Picture, even over what I think are more highly acclaimed films in Parasite, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and The Irishman. (Even Little Women seems to be better regarded, but no one thinks it has a snowball’s chance of winning.) I found it generally entertaining, if stylized and a bit absurd, with an ending that simply doesn’t work. The cinematography is remarkable, and seems likely to get Roger Deakins his second Oscar in three years after 13 nominations without a win. It may also win for Production Design; as much as I would like to see Parasite win for the house, the re-creation of the trench networks and some of the battlefields here was a much more significant undertaking. But the overall experience of 1917 felt a little bit like a shell game, pun intended; this isn’t a true story, or even a plausible one, but it’s depicted like one, and when it was over I thought I’d been taken for a ride – especially after the ending. It’s more of a great technical achievement and a good film than a great film in its own right.

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→ January 27, 2020
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Joker.

In what appears to be a remake of Falling Down with clown makeup, Joker has somehow ended up a critical darling, leading all films in 2019 with eleven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay, for this year’s Academy Awards. It’s a grim picture that manages to lionize a murderer, present an insulting image of mental illness, and retcon a major character’s backstory, driven entirely by the lead performance by Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker descends into madness. (Joker is now available to rent on amazon and iTunes.)

Joker is a new origin story – because the world hasn’t had enough of those – for the most iconic villain in the Batman stories, a character portrayed quite memorably by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, among others. Arthur Fleck, played here by Phoenix, is a clown for hire, a meek, lonely adult man who lives with his frail mother and has the very rare condition known as pathological laughter, a form of pseudobulbar affect that is usually the consequence of a brain injury. He can be weirdly childlike, but only at certain times, and he has some sort of serious mental illness that requires seven different medications, although the illness is never identified. Most of the first half of the film shows how little use or regard society has for Arthur, until a series of revelations finally causes him to go off the rails, becoming the psychotic killer we recognize as the Joker.

There’s a clear intent to get after some Big Themes here, two in particular. The first, around mental illness and how little regard our society has for people who suffer from it, is the film’s major flaw and one I’ll return to in a moment. The second is a simpler depiction of growing economic inequality, with Arthur and his mother on one side of the divide, and Thomas Wayne and his family (including the young Bruce) on the other. Arthur’s first crime makes him a sort of inadvertent Gavrilo Princip, spurring a grassroots movement of people in clown masks railing against the 1%, while Thomas Wayne, here depicted as a cold, ambitious billionaire running for Mayor of Gotham (which differs from previous backstories), is a derisive, entitled man who hides behind wrought-iron fences and attends fancy banquets while showing no regard for anyone beneath him.

Joker‘s big failing is that Arthur should not be a sympathetic character. He describes himself in the film as a “mentally ill loner,” and he is utterly beaten down (literally and figuratively) and discarded by the dystopian-but-accurate society of Gotham, which, in the script’s logic, turns him into a gleeful killer. Several of his victims appear to have had it coming in this twisted worldview – he kills several yuppie douchebags on a subway train early in the film, and then later, after receiving some news that seems to cause him to completely snap, enacts revenge on multiple people in his orbit who have harmed him, and in each case the script seems to justify it. There’s more than a kernel of truth behind the story – the United States is about the worst place in the developed world to have a serious mental illness, especially if you’re not well-off, and of course it’s ridiculously easy for people who shouldn’t have access to guns to get one. The script just paints way too much of a straight line from mental illness to violence, which way too often mirrors both media portrayals of real-world serial killers and mass shooters – nearly all of whom look a lot like Arthur – and the excuses we hear from gun-rights people whenever there’s another massacre.

Phoenix does give a good performance here, although the role itself is written to be extreme, so his performance is going to stand out more for its sharper peaks and valleys; it’s a bit like a great hitter going to Coors Field and putting up video game numbers, where he’s still a great hitter but the superficial stat line may overstate the case. (As an aside, I did wonder if choosing the music of an incarcerated pedophile for Phoenix’s now famous scene on the outdoor staircase was deliberate.) Two of the best ways to get an Oscar nomination for acting are to play someone famous and to play a crazy person; Phoenix certainly got the second one, and he plays it to the hilt. He’s appropriately disturbing when he needs to be, although his affect when he’s just regular Arthur tends to come and go a bit, including his use of an infantile voice in certain scenes but not others. There are other good actors in this film – Bryan Tyree Henry and Zazee Beats are both wasted in minuscule roles – but no character gets beyond two dimensions, not even Robert Deniro’s talk show host Murray Franklin, although Deniro at least appears to be having fun with the role.

We’ve seen examples of genre films tackling serious themes successfully in recent years, including Black Panther, so it can clearly be done. Joker is not as successful, especially when it comes to its treatment of mental illness, and in the process also turns an incel into some sort of folk hero when the history of the character is that he’s a sociopathic villain. I don’t dismiss it as a comic book movie, but I do think it aspires to a level of seriousness it fails to reach, and in the process mixes its messages in a way that’s actively unhelpful. Todd Phillips getting an Oscar nomination for his direction here over Greta Gurwig and Lulu Wang is an absolute joke. I’m sure Phoenix is going to win Best Actor for this performance, but any more honors for Joker will only serve to elevate a movie that doesn’t deserve it.

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→ January 23, 2020
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The Two Popes.

Netflix’s The Two Popes – or, as my friend Will Leitch likes to call it, Coupla Popes! – is a showcase for two great, aged actors, Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, playing the current and previous popes in conversation as Pope Benedict is about to step down as Pontiff and Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, tries to dissuade him through a wide-ranging conversation that covers almost the entire film. As a movie, it’s perfectly fine, often funny, generally thoughtful, a bit verbose, but also problematic in its portrayal of history. As a platform for the two actors, it’s quite good, with Pryce stealing much of the show with his performance and dedication to his accent.

The film is based on a play called The Pope that presents a largely fictionalized conversation between the two men, and that is a bit problematic, as the events are quite recent (mostly 2013) and the two men depicted are still alive. The script definitely brushes aside the very serious matter of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal and Pope Benedict’s role in covering it up; it’s broached, but the characters discuss it and dispense with it. There’s even a fictional confession given by Benedict to Bergoglio, which I find deeply troubling given the role of penance and the Seal of the Confessional in Catholic doctrine; sure, it’s fake, but it feels like an invasion into the character of the erstwhile Pope to assume what he might have said in such a confession.

We get a brief look at the conclave where Joseph Ratzinger is selected as Pope over Bergoglio, who we see was a distant runner-up in the voting, and thus becomes Pope Benedict XVI. He resigned as Pope in 2013, the first such abdication of a pontiff’s own volition in over seven centuries; Bergoglio was selected by the next conclave to replace him, becoming Pope Francis. The bulk of the movie covers Bergoglio’s visit to the Vatican to resign as Cardinal, during which Benedict reveals he plans to resign as Pope, a conversation that reveals their philosophical and theological differences. That meandering dialogue gives us frequent flashbacks to Bergoglio’s youth and to a period in the 1970s when his actions and inactions led to the detention and torture of two priests under his command. The flashbacks are powerful, as are the scenes where Cardinal Bergoglio recalls his actions, and shows remorse; in their entirety, they’re the best parts of the film.

Those scenes are also the best moments for Jonathan Pryce, who is really superb as Bergoglio, right down to a credible Argentine accent – in contrast to Hopkins, who makes scant effort at a German accent. Pryce is a solid likeness for Bergoglio, which helps his performance, but he also infuses the character with emotional depth and a lot of the charm that has made the real-life Pope Francis so popular. He’s the more interesting character of the two in reality, and Pryce brings that to life on the screen. I think it’s the best thing he’s done since those Infiniti commercials. It’s a contrast to Hopkins, who is playing a rather uncharismatic character, and does so accurately, almost as if he was more focused on getting Benedict’s mannerisms and old-man’s gait more than his persona.

As an overall film, however, The Two Popes is a more than adequate, just a bit hollow in the aftermath. The script moves along, thanks in large part to the flashbacks, although it’s so dialogue-driven that there are definitely long stretches where you want something to happen. There are too many odd closeups of the two actors – we get it, they’re old – but the re-creation of the Sistine Chapel is marvelous. There’s also quite a bit of humor in the movie, more than I would have expected and probably a lot more than there was in any real conversation between the two men. It was after watching it, however, that I realized how little the script bothered with the sex abuse scandal that has engulfed the Church for two decades, one that may have contributed to Benedict’s abdication and that exists because of the choices of men like him. Without that, it feels like there’s a giant elephant in the room and these two old men refuse to see it.

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→ January 21, 2020
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American Factory.

American Factory might be more famous now for who produced it than for its content; it’s the first film from Higher Ground Productions, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, which has a deal with Netflix (where you can find this film). It’s also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, with a strong case for the honor because of how much work clearly went into this endeavor and how timely its themes are – globalization, automation, anti-union sentiment, and people voting against their own interests.

The movie starts with the closing of a long-running General Motors plant in Moraine, Ohio, which had operated for more than a half-century and provided thousands of jobs for local residents. About seven years after its closure, the Chinese conglomerate Fuyao acquired and reopened the plant as Fuyao Glass, a move that was initially welcomed by the community for the jobs it would re-create. Fuyao also brought over hundreds of employees from China to try to integrate their operations and improve the efficiency of the new plant, but over time the Chinese management’s practices, including much lower hourly pay, dubious safety procedures, and a staunch anti-union policy, begin to alienate the American workers, even though they and their Chinese counterparts have established stronger relations on the factory floor.

American Factory documents the entire process over seven years, from acquisition to re-opening, through a failed unionization vote, with a level of access that seems comical given how often the Chinese managers essentially confess on camera to violating American labor and work safety laws. There’s no question here who the bad guys are – it’s primarily Fuyao’s billionaire founder and chairman Cao Dewang and a few of his lackeys, who think American workers are lazy and have “fat fingers,” and who go out of their way to crush any attempts to unionize, a bit ironic from a company founded in the ostensibly still-communist country of the People’s Republic of China. (Workers of the world, take what we give you!) The managers openly retaliate against workers involved in organizing or encouraging people to vote yes, while the firm brings in expensive consultants to lecture employees on how there’s actually zero difference between good things and bad things and they should all vote no against their own interests so the billionaire can make more money.

The film may have a clear tilt in the direction of the American workers, but that doesn’t make it less powerful, and the filmmakers manage to keep the documentary more interesting by with some of the funniest bits you’ll see in a movie this year. None is more cringe-comedic than the scenes of the Fuyao company celebration, with a half-dozen Moraine workers flown to China to participate, including a choreographed routine of a corporate song that sounds like a mediocre pop track but has lyrics that sound more like the East German anthem from Top Secret, with lines like “Noble sentiments are transparent!” amidst blind praise of the company and its leaders. Many scenes of culture shock in both directions are simultaneously funny and alarming, as they underline the magnitude of the gap between the two nations’ differing ideas on work (one Chinese manager can’t understand why Americans won’t work six or seven days a week) and ‘loyalty.’ The ultimate outcome in such cases will always favor capital over labor; the workers here try to organize and fail in the face of the company’s overt and expensive efforts to convince them unionizing would somehow be bad for them*, and Fuyao’s vengeance is swift. Paying the workers less than half of what they made under General Motors isn’t enough for Fuyao; workers apparently should say “thank you, sir, may I have another?” while accepting lower pay and reduced safety conditions.

* The economics of unionization are certainly more complex than just “unions good!” but unions almost invariably benefit members; negative economic effects are far more likely to hit consumers or non-member workers.

There’s no narration in American Factory, and no artificial framing device; the Fuyao executives are indicted by their own words, often said as if they forgot the cameras were running or that they were saying such things in a country where workers have more rights than they do in China (for now). The film is full of amusing vignettes to provide some levity, but the slope of this story’s curve is negative and logarithmic. It’s a powerful piece with a call to action and no action available.

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→ January 17, 2020
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Corpus Christi.

This week’s Academy Award nominations didn’t include many surprises anywhere – at least, not if you assume the worst of the Academy – and many categories already seem like their winners are locks, including Parasite as the Best International Feature Film, which would make it the first South Korean winner of that award (it’s already the first nominee). Three of the other nominees were widely expected – Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, which also landed a Best Actor nod for Antonio Banderas; the acclaimed Honeyland, which doubled up with a nod for Best Documentary Feature; and the French entry, Les Misérables, which isn’t based on the novel, and won the Prix du Jury at Cannes last May.

There was one surprise in the category, however – the Polish entry, Corpus Christi, which was at least less widely-known or reviewed than some of the other submissions, but is an absolute stunner of a story, one that manages to pack substantial themes into a modest plot. Powered by an incredible lead performance by Bartosz Bielenia as Daniel, a paroled convict who wants to enter the priesthood but is told by the prison chaplain that no seminary will accept a convicted felon. When he arrives at his assigned job at a sawmill in a small town on the other side of Poland, a chance encounter with Marta, a girl he seems to want to impress, leads him to pretend to be the new priest temporarily assigned to the village while their main priest is away.

It turns out that his timing is fortuitous for the town, as they’re still reeling from a tragedy that took the lives of seven people and that has created a rift between the families of the victims, with recriminations mostly headed towards one widow whose husband is blamed for the accident and who has been ostracized and targeted as a result. Daniel, meanwhile, fully embraces his role as priest, at first borrowing some ideas from the prison chaplain’s sermons but quickly finding his own voice, expressing his own faith with elements of Jesus’s secular philosophy, a little bit of primal scream therapy, and a powerful ability to connect with people that he didn’t even know he had.

There are points in Mateusz Pacewicz’s script where it feels like we might be heading down familiar territory – maybe this is the time when Daniel gets caught, or maybe the town experiences a spiritual awakening thanks to Daniel and everyone is redeemed. Nothing is that simple, not in the plot as a whole, and not in the subplots like that of the accident or the role of the power-hungry mayor (who owns the sawmill). Daniel’s character is rich and complex, and his transformations reflect a more basic truth about how environments affect people’s ability to change or simply to let their better selves show through. The townsfolk themselves are also well-drawn, and at times inscrutable, closing ranks even when they know they’re wrong, happy to mouth the words in church but not to live it even when Daniel reminds them of the messages of Christ’s love for mankind or of the need to forgive. The script delivers so many powerful scenes, but the one where the victims’ family members are confronted with the hate mail they sent the widow particularly stands out for its impact and how Daniel and Eliza stand in the face of such animosity.

Bielenia’s performance drives this film, and had anyone actually seen this in 2019 – if the film had been in English – he would have been more than deserving of nominations and awards for what he does for Daniel. He’s capable of grand emotions, including the rage he shows in some of the scenes in prison, but his performance is at its most powerful when he slows everything down, even when that’s an indicator that Daniel is in a bit over his head and trying to draw upon his faith to choose the right words or actions. He’s a more effective priest for his inexperience, as his sermons are more authentic, but those scenes had the potential to become trite if overplayed by the actor; Bielenia shows a restraint throughout the film, even when Daniel is confronted with threats to his secret and to his person, that makes the performance more credible and more compelling.

Director Jan Komasa particularly nails the landing of Corpus Christi, which ends in mostly unexpected fashion, including multiple shots of Daniel as he exits the church for the last time or in the final shot of the film. It’s ultimately an uplifting story, but rich with the complexity of actual people who are trying to reconcile their unspeakable grief with their faith, and who default to their baser instincts in a failed attempt to cope with their rage. Parasite is going to win the Oscar, but if the nomination gets more people to watch Corpus Christi when it’s released in the U.S. next month, so much the better. It deserves a wider audience than it might otherwise have gotten.

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→ January 15, 2020
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Hustlers.

Monday’s announcements of the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were unsurprising and kind of disappointing; the Academy’s one brief moment of acknowledging art outside of the mainstream, when Moonlight won Best Picture in absurd fashion, wasn’t a harbinger of a change in the electorate’s inclinations, but a blip on the timeline. The Academy remains as conservative and insular as ever, nominating five men for Best Director in a year with many deserving women, and snubbing many performances from films outside of the mainstream in favor of giving nods to bigger stars from more commercial films.

One of those snubs was Jennifer Lopez, who plays a supporting role that is absolutely critical to the success of Hustlers (available to rent on amazon and iTunes), a movie I liked more than I expected and in large part enjoyed because Lopez is so damn good. As Ramona Vega, the ringleader of the larceny scam that involves the lead character Dorothy/Destiny (Constance Wu) and a few of their colleagues at the strip club Moves (a fictional version of the NYC club Scores), she dominates the movie from the moment her character arrives, and the movie flags any time she’s off screen.

The film is loosely based on a true story, detailed by Jessica Pressler in a 2015 article in New York magazine, where multiple strippers at Scores concocted a scheme to rob some of their rich clients by drugging them and maxing out their credit cards, taking home a sort of commission for bringing in the clients that was well beyond what they’d ordinarily make through performing and private dances. The script tidies things up quite a bit, including making the women more sympathetic and glossing over the prostitution aspect of the scheme, but follows the original article’s story of the case that exposed them – a victim who wasn’t rich, and who had gone through some horrible personal times, but whom the girls scammed anyway, only to have him fight back and get the cops interested in the case.

The focus here is on these women, who feel demeaned and discarded by a society that values women for their physical appearance, and that only temporarily, more than it values them as people, and fought back against men they figured wouldn’t really miss the money and who were among the biggest offenders at denigrating the women in the first place. Wu’s portrayal of the woman to whom Pressler spoke is actually much softer than the way in which that woman comes across in the original article, but her character isn’t all that deep or interesting – it’s the Vega character that gets the depth and complexity, a woman of great generosity in emotion and material goods with her friends but who has a callous, even frigid side when it comes to the men who misuse her.

The script also makes sure to let the audience know that these women become a surrogate family for each other – Destiny, Vega, two women who dance with them (played by Keke Palmer and Lili Reinhart), the club’s ‘den mother’ (Mercedes Ruehl) – filling the emotional void where their biological families, who have either discarded them or died or otherwise vanished, would have been. It’s obvious, and a little manipulative, but it also was largely effective because of Lopez’s performance, with boosts from Ruehl and a brief turn from Wai Ching Ho as Destiny’s grandmother at the over-the-top but still moving Christmas party. (Cardi B and Lizzo also appear as strippers at Moves, and both are incredibly entertaining in their limited time on screen but aren’t on enough.)

The movie frames the story as Destiny telling the story of the scam to a fictionalized version of Pressler (played in sterile fashion by Julia Stiles) after they’ve been caught and have served their sentences, which works a little to give Wu more chance to show some range but flops when screenwriter and director Lorene Scafaria seems unable to figure out how to wrap things up. The conflict between Ramona and Destiny often feels contrived, never more so at the end – perhaps because the New York article stops before the real-life Destiny (named Rosie) had her day in court, and because the real story is a lot messier. The idea Scafaria conceived is sweet enough to rot your teeth, and in the end Hustlers can’t get above the level of high entertainment because the script works overtime to make these women more sympathetic.

Lopez didn’t get her Oscar nod, but I couldn’t tell you if she deserved one over Kathy Bates (Richard Jewell), Scarlett Johanssen (Jojo Rabbit), or Margot Robbie (Bombshell), not yet at least. I wouldn’t put Lopez over the two nominees whose films I did see, Florence Pugh (Little Women) and Laura Dern (nominated for Marriage Story, but just as good in Little Women). I will say Lopez’s performance was worthy of a nomination; perhaps she was just crowded out in a strong year. I don’t think any of the other omissions, such as Scafaria for directing, were actually snubs; Hustlers is good but only Lopez really rises above the material.

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→ January 13, 2020
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Little Women.

Greta Gerwig’s debut as a writer and director, Lady Bird, was a largely autobiographical story of her own teenage years in Sacramento, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role as Gerwig’s fictional stand-in. Ronan repeats the performance in a way as Jo March in Gerwig’s generally wonderful adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel Little Women, helping with the framing device Gerwig uses to tell the story in a nonlinear way… although Ronan here is completely upstaged by one of her own (fictional) sisters.

Little Women was itself an autobiographical novel of Alcott’s own upbringing in Massachusetts, telling the story of the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, who live with their mother Marmie and housekeeper Hannah while their father is away serving as an army chaplain during the civil war. The book, published here in two parts (and, in something I just learned, still sometimes seen abroad as Little Women and Good Wives), covers a period of about four years that sees the girls through courtships and tragedy, finally ending with three of the girls marrying and – there’s no way you don’t know this – one of the four dying of complications from scarlet fever. It was an immediate commercial success, spawning two further sequels (which I’ve never read), and remains a favorite for young readers today, in part because it’s one of the only novels of its century that truly focuses on its women, both as unique, well-developed characters themselves, and as women in a highly restrictive, patriarchal society.

The framing device Gerwig uses wears out its welcome a little quickly, especially given some of the abrupt transitions between past and present. She splits the time period across the seven years between Beth’s illness and her death, using different lighting and, eventually, a different haircut for one character as ways to distinguish between the periods, but some of the scenes don’t have enough time to develop fully because the next cut yanks you out of that moment and into a different one entirely. The shot of Jo grieving at her sister’s grave ends way too quickly and transitions to a scene of relative mirth that I think robbed the former of some of its power. There’s probably a good way to tell this story in a nonlinear way, still using the motif of Jo writing her great novel about her family as the framing device, that doesn’t make some of the intervening scenes so terse.

Beyond that, however, this film is just great, anchored by so many wonderful performances that it’s hard to identify just who is carrying what. Ronan is very good as Jo, although of course she is far prettier than Jo is ever described on Alcott’s pages, and particularly excels in any scene where she gets to crank up her emotions in any direction – and in her scenes with Laurie, played rakishly by Timothée Chalamet, who might as well have been born to play this young bachelor on the road to roué. But Florence Pugh is the biggest star here as Amy, a character who gets more emotional growth in the movie than she does in the book, going much farther from snotty younger sister to a young woman aware of how little the world might value her, fighting for any agency she can find. Pugh isn’t the lead, but I think she’s more important to this movie than anyone else.

Laura Dern might win Best Supporting Actress for her turn in Marriage Story, but I liked her performance here as Marmie even more – she’s the original supermom, showing the patience of a saint, and delivering one of the best and most memorable lines in the movie when Jo asks why she’s never angry. Bob Odenkirk is only in the film briefly as Mr. March, but he’s wonderful and is fast becoming one of my favorite character actors, even when the role requires little or no humor at all. Chris Cooper is delightful as Laurie’s grandfather; Meryl Streep does quite a lot with Aunt March, even though the character has maybe one and a half notes to her. Even Tracy Letts has a minor role as Jo’s publisher, and he’s the perfect amount of grump for the job.

And then there are the other two sisters, Meg, played by Emma Watson, and Beth, played by Eliza Scanlen. Watson just seems miscast here, speaking with a sort of affected precision that doesn’t line up with Meg, who truly wants the life of domesticity for which she’s destined. Scanlen, though, is just plain weird as Beth, who is also written strangely – made more infantile on the screen than she is on the page, which becomes particularly offputting when Beth is 13 and 14 in the earlier time period and she’s portrayed by an actress who is 21. Meg’s character isn’t that critical to the film, but Beth’s is, and the portrayal here is a bit jarring.

The ending Gerwig cooks up is rather sublime, and a welcome departure from authenticity. Jo is even more Alcott here than she ever could be in the novel, and Gerwig slips in some details from Alcott’s life to spice things up a bit, making her a shrewd negotiator and getting us to the big finish with a metafictional flourish for the ages. It’s not faithful to the source material, but given how problematic Jo’s literary marriage – which Alcott apparently wrote under duress from her publishers – is for the novel and her character, this is a substantial improvement.

We’ll find out the Oscar nominations the same morning I post this, but I’m guessing we’ll get Best Picture, Best Actress (Ronan), Best Supporting Actress (Pugh), Best Costume Design, and Best Adapted Screenplay, with maybe even money on Gerwig getting a Best Director nod. We’ll see if the backlash against the Golden Globes’ all-male director slate helps Gerwig at all; (I’m assuming three slots are locks, for Scorsese, Tarantino, and Mendes, with Boon Jong Ho a good shot at the fourth.) It’s not Best Picture, but it’ll certainly end up in my top 10 once I’ve finished the various candidates from 2019; as long as Pugh gets a nomination, though, I’ll call that a win for the film.

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→ January 8, 2020
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The Farewell.

Awkwafina got her start as a Youtube comedic rapper, and didn’t even earn her first live acting credit in anything but a short film until 2016’s Neighbors 2, so her rise from that to a Golden Globe for Best Actress – which she won this weekend for her outstanding lead performance in The Farewell – is one of the more incredible and heartening stories out of the movie world in some time. (Was Cate Blanchett all teary with joy when Awkwafina won? I kind of think she was.) I haven’t seen all of the nominated actresses’ films in that category, but I can say Awkwafina gave a performance worthy of awards, and without her and the way her coarse, rational character contrasts with the rest of her slightly loopy family, The Farewell wouldn’t be half the film it is.

Awkwafina plays Billi, a 30ish, struggling Chinese-American writer who has just learned she didn’t get a fellowship she was hopeful she’d land, when she finds out that her grandmother in China, to whom she was once quite close, is dying of lung cancer. The catch is that the family, adhering to a cultural tradition, isn’t telling the grandmother that she’s dying, so she can continue to live her life as if everything was normal until it reaches a point where the truth becomes inevitable (if it ever does). Billi isn’t on board with the plan, since it involves lying to a beloved family member, so her parents tell her not to come with them to China for what is presumably the last visit they’ll have with Nana. Of course, she defies them and flies there on her own, and hilarity ensues in the face of a terminal diagnosis, from the internecine squabbles about telling her, Nana’s desire to find Billi a husband, culture clashes with other cousins who remained in China, and, oh by the way, the sham wedding of Billi’s first cousin to a woman h met in Japan (who speaks no Chinese of any dialect) that is the excuse for everyone coming to visit Nana at once.

Part of the beauty of the comedy of The Farewell is that the premise is rather simple: They’re not telling Nana she’s dying and they’re all there for a fake wedding. Everything else flows naturally from that setup; you just had to get the characters in one place for an obnoxiously passive-aggressive argument about whether the United States or China has the superior culture or is the better place to send your child for college to break out. Billi is often in the middle of the comedy, but not necessarily its prime mover; sometimes she’s Bob Newhart, the ‘normal’ one surrounded by crazy people, providing the voice of reason. 

The scenes with Billi and Nana are more tender, as if maybe Billi can forget for a moment that her grandmother is dying, than the family scenes, where she and her parents keep switching to English to talk about the propriety of the ongoing lie, which also gives the film some needed contrast. I expected more of a one-note story, yet The Farewell is anything but, especially avoiding the trap of simply making Billi the heroine whose position is right and thus for whom you’ll root in every argument. (You will sometimes, though.) Rather than burdening the script with major subplots, writer-director Lulu Wang, who based the story on her own experience with her family and her own grandmother, adds small flourishes to flesh out the main story. The best of these lets Nana’s sister tell her own story, explaining her role in the family, which gets exactly the screen time it needs without becoming a needless, ongoing plot point.

Awkwafina’s win might be the boost she needs to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress this year, which would be great news as I don’t think I’d put more than one performance over hers of what I’ve seen (Scarlett Johanssen in Marriage Story, although she has less to do overall). It seems like it would be an upset for The Farewell to get a Best Picture nod, but I’ll be pulling for it – and GoldDerby.com‘s Oscar odds page has this fifth in Best Screenplay and even has Zhao Shuzhen, who plays Nana, ranked 6th among candidates for the Best Supporting Actress award. (She’s very good.) It’s a good movie, maybe a little insubstantial to say it’s a great movie, but a movie I’ll root for next month, and one I’ll encourage a lot of people to see because almost anyone could watch this movie. It’s a very human story, simply told, without distractions or things to deter anyone from enjoying it.

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→ January 6, 2020
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The Irishman.

I had to get sick to watch The Irishman. 

At three and a half hours, it’s the longest movie I’ve ever watched in a single sitting at home or in a theater; I’ve watched longer films, including Lawrence of Arabia, but over multiple days, because my attention span’s normal limit is around two hours and it takes a lot to overcome that. This Friday, though, I was knocked out by a virus and had a fever high enough that I wasn’t leaving the couch, so we watched Martin Scorsese’s latest entry in his opus of films around organized crime, about a serial liar and trivial mob figure who, near the end of his life, ‘confessed’ to numerous murders, including that of Jimmy Hoffa.

Taken from a dubious non-fiction book called I Heard You Paint Houses (which appears on-screen in an alternate title card), The Irishman follows the career of Frank Sheeran as he goes from a truck driver who delivers meat between Philadelphia and DC to consigliere to a local don, Russell Bufalino, and later to Hoffa himself. It’s a sprawling story with an epic scope but a focus on minute interactions, giving Scorsese’s three leads a chance to do what we all presumably came to see them do – and to see them as younger doppelgängers of themselves, thanks to digital de-aging technology, so Scorsese can use the same actors across a thirty- to forty-year span.

(By the way, Slate breaks down how Sheeran likely confessed to a slew of murders and crimes he never committed. The story is mostly fiction, with lots of real people in it.)

Frank is played by Robert De Niro, who probably looks the least like himself when he’s de-aged but whose voice and accent are unmistakable. (Although the characters are supposed to be from Philadelphia and Detroit, the accents sound a lot more like Brooklyn Italian-American to me.) Hoffa is portrayed by Al Pacino, also given away by his voice even when he’s also been de-aged. Both deliver solid performances, De Niro’s a bit more workmanlike yet a character a bit independent of the movie around him, Pacino infusing the bombastic Hoffa with the kind of bombast Pacino is known for giving his characters.

But this movie is dominated by a scene-stealing performance from Joe Pesci as Russ; I can’t say I ever forgot it was Joe Pesci, because how could you ever forget that, but of the three actors he is by far the most convincing and the most fully in character. Known for playing hair-trigger characters with on-screen histrionics, Pesci here is understated by comparison, measured, sounding well-reasoned even he’s asking Frank to take someone out (and I don’t mean for drinks). He seems the least like someone playing an archetype in a film about mobsters, even though that – and My Cousin Vinny – is what he’s best known for doing. It helps that the de-aging was least noticeable on him out of the big three. For him to come out of retirement – he’d last appeared in a live-action role nine years ago – and deliver this performance is remarkable, and I assume assures him an Oscar nomination.

The film indulges in those archetypes, both in characters and in plot points, although by the end it’s clear that Scorsese, at least, is making a much larger point about the pointlessness of such violence, and how it threatens to dehumanize the perpetrators in the long run. The various executions are gory but ultimately mundane for their frequency, and the ease with which Frank can deliver either a beating or a bullet is never explained even in the extended introduction to his character (which does introduce one of the many wonderful minor performances in the film, this one from Ray Romano). At three-plus hours, the repetitive nature of this cycle becomes clearer, and while the violence is stylized, it’s not glamorized – it’s ugly, and futile, and by the film’s conclusion, everyone involved is either dead or left with nothing.

Frank himself has been shut out by one of his daughters, played almost wordlessly by Anna Paquin in over 25 years in the movie’s present tense, and pleads with another daughter for her to help reconnect them, which she refuses to do. One of the most memorable, awful scenes in the film is when Frank goes to a funeral parlor and shops for caskets (the salesman is rapper Action Bronson, who literally doesn’t seem to know how to stand while Frank is talking to him); when the salesman asks who the casket is for, Frank reveals it’s for himself. No one else cares enough to do this for him. He will die unloved, and likely unlamented.

Paquin’s nearly silent role has come in for a lot of criticism, but the reason is so clear, and writing the character that way, as opposed to making her angry and voluble and demonstrative, is powerful in its own right and because it plays against stereotypes of women in films. The general lack of women characters of any substance in the film is a bigger problem, and not one about or limited to Paquin’s character; Frank leaves his first wife for his second and it barely merits a mention, while his wife and Russ’s are there on a road trip the four take from Philly to Detroit but they’re there for nothing more than comic relief and smoke breaks. And it’s not as if the film lacks room for female voices – there’s a fair amount of fat in this film, at least twenty minutes’ worth of overlong montages or scenes of old white men talking to each other too slowly. The entire sequence leading up to the murder of “Crazy” Joe Gallo, which eyewitnesses say Sheeran did not commit, and the murder itself could have been left out without hurting the film at all, since the murder doesn’t matter in the subsequent timeline of the movie.

The Irishman is going to earn a slew of Oscar nominations, obviously. It’ll get a nod for Best Picture. Scorcese will get one for Best Director. I think all three of my fellow paesani will get acting nominations. A movie of this length hardly exists without extensive editing, and while I have some quibbles with a few specific cuts, I think the sheer size of the job gets the editor(s) a nomination there as well. I won’t be surprised if it wins Best Picture, but little else, however, as the film is more than the sum of its parts, and if you like this film, you love this film. I’ll just personally root for Pesci to take a statue home as well.

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