→ March 1, 2022
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The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

Jessica Chastain won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a Film this past weekend for her portrayal of the title character in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, yet another in the ongoing series of crappy biopics churned out by Hollywood as Oscar bait. It’s especially unfortunate here, as Tammy Faye Bakker was a far more interesting person than this movie even considers, and wastes a solid performance by Chastain that’s more than the garden-variety impersonations that usually win these categories. (It’s streaming free on HBO Max.)

If you know of Tammy Faye Bakker already, it’s because she was the wife of televangelist Jim Bakker for most of her life; they met in college and she appeared on air with him for over two decades, helping him build a following and then an entire network, while also becoming a bit of a punch line herself for her excessive makeup and the way it would run when she’d cry. Their empire imploded when two scandals hit – Jim had been siphoning off donors’ money, and some of it went to pay off an employee, Jessica Hahn, who accused Bakker of raping her. The Bakkers divorced while he was behind bars, and Tammy Faye later married a business associate of theirs who himself later went to prison for bankruptcy fraud – she could sure pick ’em! – and died in 2007 of colon cancer.

That’s her story, at least the most public part of it, and that’s the story that The Eyes of Tammy Faye tells, when it bothers to tell a story at all. (Don’t even get me started on how much is made up in this film – pun intended.) This is a biopic, but not a biography. It’s not interested in telling us about Tammy Faye Bakker, the person. It’s a recitation of things that happened to her. She had an unhappy childhood. She married young. She helped Jim Bakker build his business with her puppets and her high, sing-songy voice. Her marriage crumbled, then fell apart. We get a few glimpses of her character, such as the various times she refuses to be the subservient wife when Bakker’s colleagues Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are around – Jerry Jr. isn’t depicted, as he was busy with the pool cleaner – but those are scant, because a script this perfunctory has to play the hits. (Vincent D’Onofrio is unrecognizable as Falwell, although you might pick up his voice behind the clipped speech.)

The script does show the most important anecdote from Tammy Faye’s public life, at least: her on-air, live interview with Steve Pieters, a gay pastor who was diagnosed with HIV in 1982. (He’s still alive and gave a wonderful interview with Religion & Politics about the experience and the new film.) It was a compassionate, non-judgmental conversation, one that was consistent with Tammy Faye’s view of Christianity, showing love and compassion for everyone without judgment, but not Falwell’s and Robertson’s. Even today, it’s hard to imagine an evangelical TV show airing such a segment. In 1985, though, it was revolutionary – and Tammy Faye remained a supporter of the LGBTQ+ community for the rest of her life, even serving as the grand marshal of a pride parade at one point. This illustrates a lot more about the person she was than a series of vignettes, like the nonsense one about how they first ended up on television after their car was stolen (never happened), shows us.

Instead, The Eyes of Tammy Faye paints by numbers – this happened, and this happened, and then this happened, and then she took a bunch of pills, and then it all fell apart. (As far as I can tell, she never appeared intoxicated or stoned on air, either.) It is a series of unfortunate events, with no attempts to connect any of them, or give the audience any understanding of the people behind them other than painting Jim in broad strokes – which may be all he deserves, as both a philanderer and a fraud – and Tammy in only slightly less broad ones.

Chastain and Andrew Garfield expend so much energy trying to sound like the Bakkers that their work feels more like mimicry than acting – which is probably unfair to them both, but more to Chastain, who also has a lot more to do than Garfield does. Garfield’s Bakker is wooden, ambitious, single-minded, and if his faith was real at some point, it loses out to his desire for money and power. That transition occurs off screen, although you could argue its impact on Tammy Faye deserved more explanation. Chastain’s performance is more central, given that she’s the protagonist of the film, yet her imitation of Tammy Faye’s voice and mannerisms, as well as hair and makeup that make it hard to recognize the actress beneath, is hard to separate from the performance. She’s probably better than Nicole Kidman’s in Being the Ricardos, but there is no way on earth I’d vote for her over Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers or Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter, and I think Alana Haim was better in Licorice Pizza as well. The Eyes of Tammy Faye also got a nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling; I’ve only seen one other nominee, Dune, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this one win. It’s just not a very good movie, despite, or perhaps because of, all the emphasis on making it look right.

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→ February 22, 2022
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Parallel Mothers.

Pedro Almodóvar earned his first Oscar nomination in 1988, as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the final five for that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film (now Best International Film). He won the same award eleven years later, for Todo Sobre Mi Madre, my introduction to his work, and was most recently nominated for the strong, introspective Pain and Glory, which earned a Best Actor nomination for Antonio Banderas two years ago.

Almodóvar’s most recent work, the outstanding Parallel Mothers, finds the director similarly pensive, but this time he’s looking outward, with a two-layered story about truth and reconciliation in Almodóvar’s native Spain, a country that is still grappling with the legacy of a dictatorship that ended nearly a half-century ago. Parallel Mothers starts with a story about a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War, then pivots abruptly into the two mothers of the title, both of whom give birth in the same hospital but find themselves intertwined by the events that come afterwards, before we return to the story of the grave in a sweeping conclusion. The middle story itself packs an emotional wallop, but it is also a grand metaphor for the challenges Spain – or really any country – faces in confronting the truth of its past.

Penelope Cruz, who got the film’s one Academy Award nomination this year (for Best Actress), plays the photographer Janis Martinez, who happens to be taking pictures of a forensic anthropologist named Arturo. The fascists killed her great-grandfather in the 1930s, forcing him first to dig the mass grave in which he’d be buried, and then tore him from his family a night later. Janis asks Arturo if he could help exhume and identify the bodies, with help from the government’s truth commission. They also sleep together, from which Janis gets pregnant, a development she welcomes, as she’s 40 and has always wanted children. She shares a room at the hospital with the teenaged Ana, who is unhappy at her condition, and they become friends for the moment, although they lose touch once they resume their lives outside the hospital. When they reconnect, Janis learns that Ana’s baby died of SIDS, and she asks Ana to move in and be her au pair, but she has an ulterior motive as well.

The Janis/Ana story itself contains multitudes; both characters are complex, with detailed backstories, reasons why they are who they are, yet no connection to each other beyond the coincidence of their simultaneous arrivals at the hospital. Janis knows a truth that she can’t bear to share with anyone, including Ana and Arturo, but without the truth – and even a chance for reconciliation – nobody can move forward with their lives. When that truth comes out, it sets off a bomb in their lives, threatening everything Janis has wanted, but that’s followed by a period of forgiveness and understanding that wouldn’t be possible without the truth, no matter how brutal. Only after that can we return to the story of the mass grave, as Arturo takes a team to the village where Janis’ great-grandfather died, and where her family still lives, and begins the process of searching for and disinterring the remains.

There’s enough metaphor and symbolism here to fill someone’s senior thesis. The parallels between the Janis/Ana story and Spain’s own uncomfortable grappling with the impacts of the Civil War and the fascist Franco’s tyrannical, forty-year reign give Parallel Mothers its narrative framework, but Almódovar has populated the film with smaller details that give depth to the story of the two women while also sharpening the connection between the nested stories. As for symbolism, there’s food everywhere here, such as when Janis teaches Ana to make a tortilla Española, a classic Spanish dish of thinly sliced potatoes poached in olive oil and finished with eggs to bind it. It’s a national dish (a big deal in a country with divers regional cuisines), and its history goes back at least 200 years; passing this knowledge from one generation to the next, as Janis does to Ana, may stand in for the idea of passing along all knowledge, presaging a later scene where the two argue in Janis’s kitchen, and the older women lectures Ana over her ignorance of her country’s history. (I don’t know if there’s any symbolism to this part, but I certainly noticed the gigantic wheel of Manchego sitting on Janis’s counter, under class, and you are fooling yourself if you think I’m not trying to figure out how to get my wife to sign off on that in our house.) The color red appears everywhere in the film, from Janis’s handbag to her phone case to various decorative objects in her home, which is an Almodóvar trademark; here it could stand in for the blood spilled in Spain’s 20th century, unmentioned and yet pervasive even if no one wishes to discuss it. There are substantial hairstyle changes, little language quirks, so many choices in the script that seem deliberate given what Almodóvar was trying to do with the concentric narratives.

This is one of my favorite films of 2021, although I wouldn’t put it at the very top. The film’s finale is moving, although it comes upon the viewer rather quickly; the script probably could have gone longer, both to resolve the Janis/Ana storyline and provide more time in the rural village where the exhumation takes place. There’s also a smaller twist in the relationship between the two women that seemed to come from nowhere, almost as a convenience, and it doesn’t contribute meaningfully enough to the plot for me to buy into it. Cruz is so good in this, with Milena Smit also superb as Ana, that combined with the literary, layered script, I still found myself lost in its depths long after I left the theater.

I’m not sure why Spain selected The Good Boss, which stars Javier Bardem (Cruz’s husband), over this as its submission to the Academy Awards this year, although the one-film-per-country thing has already outlived any usefulness it may have had, but the one nomination it got, for Cruz, is well deserved – she’s certainly better than Nicole Kidman, who may win. (Cruz also became just the fifth woman nominated twice for Best Actress for films in languages other than English, and the first to do so for two Spanish-language roles.) I have read, but have no way to verify, that the Spanish film group that chooses its submissions dislikes Almodóvar, having passed over his Volver and Bad Education, but the joke is on them, as The Good Boss made the shortlist but not the final five nominees for Best International Film.

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→ January 25, 2022
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Spencer.

Director Pablo Larraín has a specific vision when it comes to biographical films: He takes a very small, pivotal period in his subject’s life and shows it in minute detail, sometimes moving events from outside the window into it for dramatic purposes. He did this to good effect in Jackie, fueled by an outstanding performance from Natalie Portman; and to mixed effect in Neruda, which lacked focus and glossed over some of Pablo Neruda’s significant character flaws. Larraín’s vision frames Spencer, his portrait of Princess of Wales Diana Spencer, but even Kristen Stewart’s award-worthy performance as the title character can’t salvage this overblown mess of a film. (It’s available to rent on Amazon and Google Play.)

The time window in Spencer is three days around Christmas in 1991, when the Royal Family made its annual pilgrimage to Sandrington, near where Diana grew up. At this point, her marriage to Prince Charles was already in shambles, fully aware he was having an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, and she felt (with reason) attacked and scorned by multiple other members of the royal family. She had bulimia at this time, and is shown frequently running to the bathroom after and even during meals, and appears more comfortable speaking with the staff than with those of her social class. By all accounts, she dreaded these family sojourns, but was powerless to object to them.

Spencer also dealt with bulimia for about a decade, which included the time period of this film, and food is both a substantial theme and major framing device. This could have been a major point in a different script, but here, it’s lazy, and because the script has Diana behaving erratically – undressing with the curtains open, wandering the fields at night, talking to birds/ghosts/inanimate objects, breaking into her abandoned childhood home (which was not, in fact, abandoned at the time) – it comes across as just more evidence that Diana was crazy, rather than suffering from mental illness. Diana says in the film that she feels like she’s in a “cage,” with very little control over just about any aspect of her life, and the script seems to equate her eating disorder, which can be about exerting control over something, with her demand that she be allowed to select her own dresses. It comes across as unserious, accentuated by claustrophobic camera work that has Stewart crashing down hallways, drunk on despair.

Stewart is doing a fair impersonation of Diana, particularly in facial expressions (sometimes too much so), but by the time the story gets to Sandringham and she has to interact with other characters, she’s far more effective, and in many cases seems like she’s the only thing reining in this Woman on the Verge script. If she weren’t credible, and actually a bit restrained, the movie would have gone completely off the rails within a half an hour, because nobody else in the movie gets more than a smattering of lines or screen time. Sally Hawkins plays a fictional character, Maggie, the royal dresser to Diana, wearing a bad wig, with the movie’s dumbest twist, a complete waste of a very talented actor. I would guess the second-most lines belongs to Sean Harris as Royal Chef Darren McGrady, who would later become Diana’s personal chef, although the film also makes their relationship improbably casual. (The real-life Chef Darren weighed in on his Youtube channel on what’s real in Spencer and what’s not.)

The hair and makeup on Stewart are remarkable, helping make the transformation more credible – it’s easier to forget the actor behind the role here than in, say, King Richard. Jonny Greenwood’s score is way over the top, however – there’s too much of it, and it’s too loud, as if this is supposed to be a psychological horror movie rather than a biopic. It’s at its worst in the first half hour of the movie and then tapers off to sort of a dull roar, a rare miss for the Radiohead guitarist.

As if Spencer isn’t enough of a tortured watch with its melodramatic fabrications, the entire concluding sequence is such obvious arrant nonsense that it takes you right out of any suspension of disbelief you might have had going. None of this happened, because none of it could have happened. It’s all bollocks. I would be happy to see Stewart get a Best Actress nomination for this, but I couldn’t recommend this movie for any other reason.

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→ January 13, 2022
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Being the Ricardos.

Aaron Sorkin just can’t help himself: After directing The Trial of the Chicago Seven into an occasionally entertaining but bloated, self-important mess, he’s done it again with Being the Ricardos, and here the offense might actually be worse. This is a funny script about very funny people, one that touches on a couple of important topics, and Sorkin directs the audience right out of the film multiple times. (It’s free for Amazon Prime members.)

The film covers one week during the heyday of I Love Lucy, when a blind gossip item tagged Lucille Ball as a Communist, another tabloid story said that Desi Arnaz was unfaithful to Ball, and Lucille reveals that she’s pregnant, which was a huge complication for the highly censored, misogynistic medium of television in 1953. Those events all did take place, but in reality, they happened in separate weeks, and Sorkin condensed them all for (melo)dramatic purposes, which is small potatoes compared to other choices he made here. The conflation of three crises lends itself well to Sorkin’s trademark rapid-fire dialogue – yes, we get walk-and-talks – and despite its lack of adherence to the truth, it probably improves the film on the whole.

Far and away the biggest problem with Being the Ricardos is Sorkin himself. He frames the movie with what are supposed to be interview clips with the show’s three main writers in something like the present day, although those three people have all been dead for at least ten years now. The interviews add nothing, and I mean nothing, to this movie, and at times are actively insulting, such as the scene near the very end of the movie when none of the three can remember Desi Arnaz’s catchphrase. I wanted to throw something at the TV. Sorkin makes his presence felt in plenty of other ways, not least in the many scenes that tell us just how incredibly important the work of television is, what a difficult art form it is, and uses that to tell us what a genius Lucille Ball was – except the whole thing rings very fake. A fair amount of the movie is devoted to Ball obsessing over the blocking in one scene, and I’d be shocked if any of that was true, including the bizarre 2 a.m. meeting she calls to go over it again.

The script does have a lot of humor in it – zingers, banter, sarcasm, you name it, and the actors bring the energy required to keep up with a script like this. Nicole Kidman won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, a surprising result to those who follow this stuff, but she’s better here than Renée Zellweger in Judy or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody, both of whom won Oscars for what amounted to very strong impersonations. Kidman gets the voice right, but the script doesn’t have her engage in much physical mimicry, focusing instead on the very wide range of emotions Ball would have felt if all of these things had happened in the span of a week. Kidman’s performance is superb, giving Ball depth and complexity; if you don’t think she’s worthy, it’s a comment on the film, not on her performance. Javier Bardem, as Desi, is right behind her, although in his case getting the accent right was critical and I could see an argument that his performance is more of an imitation than hers was. Tony Hale also deserves some mention for a quiet but essential performance as showrunner and head writer Jess Oppenheimer, and J.K. Simmons is very funny as William Frawley, playing him as a drunken asshole with occasional moments of clarity. I’m fine with Kidman getting a nomination, as seems likely, but if this gets a Best Original Screenplay nod over, say, Mass, I might throw something else, too.

Ball was not an actual card-carrying Communist, of course, and the controversy blew over quickly in reality; Sorkin sorkins it up with a very Hollywood ending that he fabricated, perhaps to match the incredible real-life resolution to the issue of CBS refusing to let Lucille be pregnant on the show. (The telegram in the movie is real.) Sorkin overdraws his dramatic license many times, but he does bring it all together for a strong finish, with Ball and Arnaz talking in her dressing room just before they go on stage … except the movie keeps going after that, and the second ending Sorkin gives us is worse. The film starts badly and ends badly, and even though much of what comes in between is funny and emotional, someone needed to tell Sorkin to trim all this fat and just let the two main characters carry the story.

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→ January 12, 2022
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The Lost Daughter.

The Lost Daughter is the directorial debut of actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also adapted the screenplay from an early novel by the Italian author known as Elena Ferrante, the mind behind the Neapolitan cycle of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend. Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as the same character in two different eras, the film presents a haunting portrayal of motherhood in a world that prefers mothers to exist in tightly constrained boxes.

Leda, a college professor of comparative literature and mother of two grown daughters, has come to a Greek island on a working vacation, with Colman playing her in the film’s present day. Shortly after her arrival, a boisterous American family arrives to disrupt her idyll, including a young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter, Elena. The girl goes missing on the beach one day, and Leda ends up the one who finds her – but Leda takes Elena’s doll, holding on to it even though the girl is inconsolable. Her subsequent interactions with the family trigger a series of flashbacks to when Leda was a young mother herself (where Buckley plays her), trying to balance her career and her two young daughters, with a husband who is unsupportive, to say the least. Leda’s memories, and the choices she made, invade on her present day, leading to erratic behavior and more questionable decisions.

Much of Ferrante’s work revolves around casual sexism in Italian society (a fair analogue for western society as a whole, but probably even more misogynistic than its peers), from who women marry to what they may do for work to how they’re expected to be mothers. At its most superficial level, The Lost Daughter shows Leda today coping with the weight of memories, and some regrets, over choices she made as a young mother, all because she’s seeing a young mother now whose husband doesn’t appreciate her and who herself may not fully appreciate her own daughter. Leda faced an untenable situation, trying to complete her graduate studies with two young children at home and a husband who believes his work takes priority. An academic conference gets her a brief respite from the dual life at home, and leads her the major inflection point of her life.

Leda in the present is a powder keg in search of a spark; the flashbacks show how the keg got its powder. Gyllenhaal gives us scene after scene of Leda struggling with one or both of her girls – at bath time, at meal time, and especially when she’s trying to work and her husband is nowhere in sight. It’s such an atypical and nuanced portrait of motherhood for the movies: Most movie mothers are saints, and if they’re not, they’re monsters. We see Leda losing her patience with her kids, or failing to respond to them as a mother “should” by the norms of the genre, and Gyllenhaal portrays it all without judgment or scorn. It is here that the film becomes whole, and solid, rather than superficial. The greatness of The Lost Daughter lies in how it treats Leda’s motherhood as aggressively normal.

The Lost Daughter loses something, no pun intended, when Leda starts to act bizarrely in the present, none more so than when she keeps the damn doll. The theft itself was plausible, but to continue to keep it when the child is wailing for it and her mother and family are desperate for its return just paints Leda as a terrible person. My interpretation, at least, is that what the world has done to Leda has led her to this point, whether she’s crazy, or delusional, or truly misanthropic, and that serves to undermine the more important theme here, that society is crazy, and misogynistic, and forced Leda into a choice she still can’t reconcile.

In Greek mythology, Leda is a young woman whom Zeus covets, so he takes the form of a swan, rapes her, and impregnates her. She gives birth to a girl, Helen – as in, of Troy – which is the Anglicized version of the name Elena. (Elena was my maternal grandmother’s name. She went by Helen.) Here, Elena isn’t Leda’s daughter, though; she’s the child on whom Leda seems to fixate when thinking about her own daughters, Bianca and Martha. Homer’s version of the myth has Helen abandoning her children to elope with Paris (or, possibly, being abducted), sparking the Trojan War. The Leda myth appears elsewhere in the movie, as Leda the character was a scholar and avid reader of Yeats, who wrote “Leda and the Swan” about the legend, so the allusion is clearly intentional.

Colman has already been nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and won Outstanding Lead Performance (an all-gender category) at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. She’s a lock for an Oscar nod for the same, and deserving. At the same time, Jessie Buckley is just as pivotal to this film’s success, and overdue for this sort of accolade, delivering an outstanding performance in Beast and a similar one in Wild Rose to little fanfare. Buckley has less screen time to fill out the character of Leda the young mother, yet that character provides essential depth to the story; if Buckley can’t convince the viewer of the agony and struggle of Leda as a mother and striving academic, the present-day parts that were already shaky would collapse. Gyllenhaal should be in the running for nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay (likely) and Best Director (unlikely, given the category’s extensive historical bias against women).

This might be the best movie I’ve seen so far from 2021, and if not, it offers the most fodder for consideration after it ended. There’s more here than one blog post, by one writer, who also happens to be a man, could possibly cover.

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