→ January 10, 2023
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Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is the full-length feature based on the series of short films from 2010 that featured the title character, a one-inch tall shell with an eye in its aperture and, yes, shoes on, voiced by Jenny Slate. It utilizes stop-motion animation to bring the dimunitive, wide-eyed shell to life as it shows us around the world he has created in an AirBnB, where he lives with his grandmother (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) after most of their family vanished when a previous tenant moved out. It’s charming, and slight, and for most of its 80-odd minutes it feels like a short that’s been overstretched, but the whole thing is salvaged by a tremendous finale. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Marcel and his grandmother have jury-rigged a bunch of devices from household objects to help themselves adapt to their living space, most notably rolling around the apartment in a tennis ball, and to allow them more easily move between their indoor and outdoor environments. The gimmick in this film is that a guest at this AirBnB has decided to film his conversations with Marcel and post them online, where they find a cult following (as the real clips did), which leads to interest from the favorite show of Marcel and his grandmother, 60 Minutes. Their favorite host, Lesley Stahl, ends up visiting the apartment to interview Marcel and explain his quest to try to find the rest of his family, which, of course, leads to the big finish.

There’s not a whole lot more to Marcel the Shell with Shoes On; either you get on this film’s wavelength, and you enjoy the dialogue between the interviewer and the shell, or you don’t. The film is more witty and cute than laugh-out-loud funny, although the line about “everything comes out in the wash” did get a big laugh from me. Some of Marcel’s soliloquies veer awfully close to “inspirational poster in a waiting room” territory, and those were the ones where I found myself tuning out – that’s great in a short film or sketch but wears very thin over an hour-plus. With only the three characters for the vast majority of the movie’s running time, there’s a sameness that sets in until Lesley Stahl shows up to save the day.

From the point the filming of the show-within-the-movie starts, the movie’s tempo picks up, and suddenly it’s not entirely about Marcel’s witticisms and observations. Cute has a half-life, and it turns out it’s pretty short. When Marcel reunites with his family, the whole tone changes as well, and it’s surprisingly emotional as well, while also showing off a higher level of animation quality. That final twenty minutes or so takes this movie from below the ‘recommend’ line to just above it.

Marcel earned one of the five nominations for Best Animated Feature Film at this year’s Golden Globes, although I’m going to guess it has no chance to beat both Turning Red (which was mid) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (which I haven’t seen yet). I’ve only seen one other potential Oscar contender, another stop-motion film, Wendell & Wild, which was more entertaining throughout than this one but had a less inventive story. You can see Wendell & Wild, which was co-written by Jordan Peele, on Netflix; it has some important themes about race, gentrification, and the weight of history, but I thought the main character’s narrative was too familiar. Also, they kill the parents in the first scene, which I thought was trademarked by Disney. I’m hoping whatever wins the awards is still out there among films I haven’t seen yet.

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→ January 9, 2023
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Tár.

Tár is writer/director Todd Field’s first film since 2006’s Little Children, and only his second since his debut feature In the Bedroom, which was nominated for Best Picture in 2001. And for about two hours, Tár feels like the best film of 2022, anchored by an incredible lead performance by Cate Blanchett as the title character, until it sputters out with a jarring increase in the tempo and increasingly unrealistic resolution to the main narrative event in the story.

Lydia Tár is the world-famous conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, arriving there after stops in New York, London, and so on. As the film opens, she’s sitting for an interview with Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker, in front of a live audience, in part to promote her new memoir Tár on Tár. Once the Q&A is over, we follow Tár to a class she’s teaching at Julliard and to her work in Berlin, where she’s preparing for a live performance of Mahler’s 5th Symphony that will be recorded for release. She’s extremely reliant on her assistant Francesca, who looks jealous of any contact Lydia has with any young woman, and there are mentions of a former student in her fellowship program who may be having personal problems and could be stalking Lydia. It’s clear that there are demons in Lydia’s closet, and that she hasn’t and still doesn’t treat the people around or below her well, including the patron Eliot Kaplan (Mark Strong in the world’s worst hairpiece), which at some point has to come crashing down around her. She’s also a rare woman leading a major symphony orchestra – there’s just one in the U.S. right now, Nathalie Stutzmann in Atlanta – and is also queer, married to a woman (played by Nina Hoss), bringing intersectionality into play even as she’s going to face the wrath of cancel culture later in the story.

For the first two-thirds of the film, Tár casts an incredible spell with its taut, intelligent dialogue and sense of tension simmering below the surface. Blanchett is at her absolute zenith here, with such precise intonation and micro-gestures that it’s hard to believe this isn’t her actual self, bouncing between English and German while standing in front of the orchestra, expressing this meticulous level of control over herself and those around her. She is Lydia Tár, even though Lydia Tár is herself a creation, which means that when the chickens come home to roost, as they must in any such story, the character comes apart at the seams so quickly and so melodramatically in the final third.

The film moves at such a perfect pace for the first two-thirds that it feels like Field either didn’t know how best to depict Tár’s fall from grace or that he might have wanted to make the film three and half hours long. We see Lydia’s imperious nature at home and work through scenes that leave the subtext, and sometimes the entire meaning, ambiguous, so that the picture of her character emerges gradually but the specifics – such as what happened with the former student, and whether she’s a victim or aggressor or both – remain uncertain. She’s clearly balancing on the knife’s edge mentally and professionally, so when the denouement comes, it’s cataclysmic, but the film shifts from second gear to sixth (is that a thing?) after that, and the script’s extreme commitment to realism evaporates. (I actually might put the start of its deterioration slightly when Lydia goes into what is supposed to be an apartment building in a less affluent part of town, only to find herself in a maze of hallways straight out of Piranesi.)

Tár does ask you to suspend some disbelief before that, but I could agree to those terms without too much trouble. The mere idea of a celebrity conductor of classical music in 2021 is kind of absurd; we only have a few classical musicians who might be near Tár’s presumed level of fame. Other aspects of the character are more plausible, such as her apparent lack of any friends or meaningful relationships beyond work and the one she has with her daughter Petra, the last of which also leads to a pivotal scene where we see just how far Lydia will go to protect her child. She even blows off her own mother on one of her trips to New York, which also foreshadows a scene later in the film, and is oddly dismissive to Kaplan (modeled after the financier and amateur conductor Miles Kaplan) even though he’s critical to her career and the foundation that runs her fellowship program.

One theory around the conclusion of Tár is that at least some of it is happening in her head, and the further I’ve gotten from watching it, the more I lean towards this interpretation. Either this is true, in which case I am more sympathetic towards the film as a whole, or it’s not, in which case I think the film fails to stick its landing. I think we’re watching her breakdown in accelerated time, some of which might be happening, but some of which is unreal – a dream, a hallucination, perhaps just a series of anxious thoughts from someone who has already been showing signs that she was seeing or hearing things.

Blanchett does give the best performance I’ve seen by an actress this year – probably the best performance by any actor – even though my sentimental pick for the Oscar will be Michelle Yeoh, who is great in Everything Everywhere All at Once. And even with the concerns I have about Tár’s script, and to some extent Field’s direction, it’s probably going to deserve and get nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay, because the first two hours or so are just that good, and even the tumble it takes at the end can’t completely undo what comes before. It’s not among my top five for the year so far, though.

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→ January 7, 2023
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The Menu.

The Menu is a dark comedy/horror/social satire with an incredible cast and an impressive commitment to the details around its premise. It takes a hard turn about a third of the way through the movie that starts to make the audacious twist clear, and stays true to its theme almost to the end, where the movie sticks its first landing but fails to do so on the second, ultimate conclusion, which might be the difference between this film being just very good and being my favorite of the year. It’s streaming on HBO Max and is available for rent on amazon, iTunes, etc.

The film opens as we see a handful of obnoxious rich people boarding a boat for a highly exclusive restaurant, The Hawthorn, which is on a private island and helmed by a famous chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), with a prix-fixe menu that costs $1250 a person. Our primary perspective is through the ardent foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who we quickly learn was not the woman he was originally taking to this dinner. Other guests include the has-been actor George (John Leguizamo), an insufferable food critic who helped make Slowik’s career but is clearly now a skeptic (Janet McTeer), a trio of tech bros, and an older couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who we later learn are regulars. Margot recognizes the husband right away and isn’t happy to see him, nor he her. The diner-toursts are met at the dock by Elsa (Hong Chau), a humorless automaton, who gives them a brief tour of some of the grounds around the hotel before their seating. The meal begins with the sort of food you’d expect at a restaurant like this, with foams and gels and molecular gastronomy and deconstructions, with Slowik introducing each course with a soliloquy, only to have those become darker each time around. By the fourth course, things have taken a turn for the macabre, and it’s clear that this is no ordinary night at the Hawthorn. (There’s a great deleted scene that gives a little more backstory and that I think would have even further immersed the viewers in the food criticism aspect of the film, although I understand why it might have been cut.)

There is a lot going on here, and most of it works extremely well, starting with the film’s disdain for modern foodie culture – not food culture, mind you, but foodie culture, the worship of chefs, the conspicuous consumption, and the snobbery towards those who don’t speak the vernacular or share in the adulation. There’s a clear demarcation here between those two ideas; the substantive parts of Slowik’s monologues involve a real appreciation for food, for where it comes from, for living creatures that died for our plates, for the environment and the ecologies we spoil so we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want it. Chef Dominique Crenn, of Atelier Crenn, recreated several of her restaurant’s dishes for the film, and the plates we do see look incredible – and realistic, at least for a restaurant of this caliber. It’s food designed for the diner to appreciate the food, both the ingredients and the skill required to prepare them. That is separate from the diners, who are largely here for what you might call the “wrong” reasons, such as for the ability to say they ate there, even if they don’t remember or appreciate what they ate.

Margot turns out to be significant in the plot, as she’s the unexpected guest – the one person who wasn’t on the original manifest, and her mere presence seems to throw Slowik and some of the staff off their games, where they are otherwise robotic in their cultlike devotion to the chef and his commands. The contrast between their reactions to her and their reactions to everyone else is one of the early markers that something is very wrong at the Hawthorn, although I don’t think it remotely telegraphs what’s to come. (I will spoil one thing here, because it bothered me that it might be the twist: There’s no cannibalism involved. That’s such an overdone gag at this point that I was going to be seriously pissed off if that was the answer. It’s not.)

After a series of shocking events that drive the story deeper into the abyss, we get a double-barreled ending, one of which works extremely well, the other of which seems overcooked. The Menu requires some suspension of disbelief; it is the triple-distilled version of reality, which is a hallmark of great satire. The script is sending up both sides of the blade here, both the chef and the patrons, and does so effectively for most of the film, working with slight exaggerations that push the characters just to the wrong side of the line of plausibility. It earns that modest suspension of disbelief with dishes that look and sound completely accurate to the setting, with customers who viewers will easily recognize as archetypes, with a chef who conforms to the stereotype of the kitchen tyrant who abuses his staff in the name of great food. The first ending taps into a deeper understanding of two of the characters, and how one of them got to this point. The second ending feels more like bombast, and while it’s visually inventive (and funny), it pushed too far over that line of plausibility for me.

Fiennes and Taylor-Joy both landed Golden Globe nominations for their performances as the leads in a musical/comedy, which seems about right – Colin Farrell should win over Fiennes, Michelle Yeoh or Emma Thompson should win over Taylor-Joy, but both of these performances were strong and integral to the film. It’s a relief to see Taylor-Joy get a decent role and deliver within it after the fiasco of her performance in Amsterdam, and it might be her best film work since the very underrated Thoroughbreds (although I haven’t seen the 2020 version of Emma). Fiennes’s performance feels like the Spock-with-a-goatee version of his director character from Hail, Caesar!, a particular style he’s practically trademarked but that this time he twists just enough to make it incredibly sinister – not purely evil, like You-know-who, but menacing, so you feel like something awful is coming but can’t quite put your finger on why until the awful somethings start. He plays Slowik as the black comedy version of Daniel Day-Lewis’s fashion designer in Phantom Thread. I was a little disappointed to see The Menu didn’t get a screenplay nomination at the Globes, but they only give out one screenplay honor, while the Oscars do two and thus have twice the number of nominations available, so I hold out a little hope on that front. Right now this is in my top 5 from 2022, although we still have a lot of big films to watch (notably Aftersun and The Fabelmans), and the fact that I can’t stop thinking about it is probably the highest compliment I can give The Menu. It’s imperfect, but still has so much good stuff in it that it’s worth accepting its flaws.

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→ January 5, 2023
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Glass Onion.

I loved Knives Out, even acknowledging some of its weak points, because the core mystery was done so incredibly well – including plenty of misdirection – and the dialogue sparkled with all kinds of humor, not least from the detective Benoit Blanc. Writer-director Rian Johnson signed a deal with Netflix to produce several sequels, the first of which, Glass Onion, appeared on the site right before Christmas. Glass Onion gets the humor stuff right, arguably even more than the original, and adds a second character who outshines Blanc, but the mystery is inferior to its predecessor and there’s nowhere near the effort to mislead the viewer that a strong mystery film or novel should have.

Glass Onion does give us Blanc (Daniel Craig), this time on a Greek island owned by billionaire tech bro Elon Musk Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who is hosting a weekend murder-mystery party for five of his friends. Blanc received an invitation, but Bron didn’t send him one, so the latter is confused but also pleased to have someone so famous at his gathering. The other guests include Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), who co-founded Alpha with Bron but was forced out in an ugly legal battle; Connecticut Governor Claire DeBella (Kathryn Hahn), who’s running for Senate on Bron’s dime; Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.), Alpha’s chief scientist; Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), a Twitch streamer and men’s rights activist; and Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), a model, fashion designer, and total dingbat. Birdie’s assistant and Duke’s girlfriend are also along for the ride. It’s very And There Were None, along with any of several Poirot novels where he’s invited to a gathering and ends up solving a murder (like Cards on the Table), so of course someone here ends up dead and Blanc has to solve the case.

Glass Onion is stuffed with humor of many kinds, including the ongoing satire of Bron, who is insufferably pretentious but also prone to malapropisms and rather transparently full of himself. He’s also in love with his gadgets and consumes conspicuously. On the other end of the humor spectrum, Hudson is hilarious as a fatuous and truly not very bright sendup of a type, one not unconnected to Hudson herself, since she’s the founder of Fabletics and Birdie started an athleisure line of her own. The film takes place around May of 2020, and we meet Birdie as she’s holding a giant, maskless party, while her assistant Peg refuses to give her back her phone because Birdie tweeted a slur (or more than one). I actually enjoyed the lower-brow humor, not least how dimwitted Birdie can be, than the satire, which was a more hit than miss but still a bit inconsistent.

The mystery, however, doesn’t live up to that of the first film, where suspicion was spread across a wide array of characters, and the script kept trying to redirect your attention to different suspects. Here, there’s one most likely culprit, and the film doesn’t spend much time trying to make you think it’s anyone else. I didn’t want that person to be the killer, because it was the least inspired choice of all. You might know who it is just from that description, which is unfortunate, but I think speaks to the way the ending here disappointed me.

It’s still a rollicking time, though, almost never letting up on the humor, and it’s buoyed by a great performance from Monáe, one of the best of her career. Monáe has always showed talent but she hasn’t had many opportunities to act in strong films since Moonlight. Her role here is far more challenging than it might first appear, as that character has unexpected layers to it, and she’s up to the task, whether it’s delivering dry humor, mockery, or faux-intellectualism, or acting the spy or even a little bit of the action hero. She even outshines Craig, who’s in fine form as Blanc but has far less to do this time around than he did in Knives Out, at least in exploring or growing the character. He has one scene right when all the guests sit down to dinner and Bron explains the rules for the murder mystery (the game, not the real one) where he goes full Blanc in the best way, and I hope in future films we get more of that. Glass Onion is like one of those Christie novels where Poirot doesn’t even show up until the second half of the film – you’re still entertained, but you want more of the character you really paid to see.

Then there’s the bombastic ending, which ties a few things together, including the necessary fulfillment of Chekhov’s gun, but goes on quite some time after the killer is revealed. Knives Out ended so perfectly, tying up every loose end while gently mocking itself and the conventions of the genre, that the shift to a very Hollywood-style resolution was surprising – it’s hard to imagine Poirot or Miss Marple or even Tommy and Tuppence in that situation, which was more befitting of the Continental Op, if even that. What leads up to the slam-bang finish is pretty clever, and the immediate aftermath is a satisfying comeuppance as well. I don’t mind fireworks per se, but I guess I wanted this film to adhere to its genre’s style more like the first one did.

That’s a lot of words about what was wrong with a movie that I ultimately liked, but you can’t talk about Glass Onion without comparing it to Knives Out. Where the first film might have been a little too by-the-book when it comes to the genre, Glass Onion got away from it more than I’d like. I’m here for all the Benoit Blanc films, but I hope the next one has more of him and a stronger mystery, with all of the same kind of humor.

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→ January 4, 2023
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Farha.

Farha was the Jordanian submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and it’s the first full-length film for Palestinian director Darin Sallam, who had been trying to make the movie for nearly a decade. Based on a story passed down for over 70 years about a 14-year-old Palestinian girl’s harrowing experience during the Nakba in 1948, it works with a very simple plot and strong lead performance, but is also hemmed in by the director’s commitment to the original narrative. It’s currently streaming on Netflix.

Farha is the girl’s name, and as the film opens in mid-May, 1948, we see her playing with friends in their village in Palestine as the families there prepare for the arranged marriage of one of their daughters. Farha begs her father to send her to secondary school instead of marrying her off, and he eventually agrees, but while the paper is still in her hand, gunfire erupts as the British Mandate ends and Israeli troops threaten the village. Farha’s father tries to send her away with a neighbor who is driving his own family to safety, but Farha jumps out of the car and returns to her father’s side, so he puts her in a storeroom, locking the door and telling her he’ll return for her as soon as it’s safe. She ends up trapped in the room for several days, witnessing some of the horrors of the war through the keyhole, including an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers.

Farha is both a coming-of-age story and an anti-war film, one that has upset Israeli authorities because it shows Israeli Defense Forces soldiers, one of whom wears a yarmulke, committing acts of senseless, gratuitous violence (albeit off-screen – we hear it, Farha sees it). The story takes place during the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” which refers to the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from what had been British Palestine and would later become independent Israel. The displacement had already begun, with a civil war starting after the announcement of a plan to partition the territory between Jews and Arabs six months earlier. Israel declared independence on May 14th, shortly before the British Mandate was to end, and within days, four Arab nations invaded to try to abolish the Jewish state. Farha doesn’t give a specific date, but it’s at least well into the Nakba given that some neighbors try to get Farha’s father to come fight the Israelis with them.

This movie is tense, as Sallam films nearly all of it from within the storeroom; we only hear what Farha hears and see some of what she sees. Any noise from outside is a threat, and when those IDF troops arrive, every second could be the end. This would be a terrible experience for anyone, but for a 14-year-old girl who was just hoping to continue her education, it’s a horrific way to come of age. Sallam shows the viewer without telling – there’s no narration and after the first fifteen minutes there’s very little dialogue. Once the door closes and locks, life happens to Farha, and she is powerless to stop any of it.

Sallam’s choice to keep the viewer in that room works by centering Farha’s emotions, primarily fear, thus keeping the conflict personal rather than allowing it to spill over into something bigger and more showy (e.g., adding more on-screen violence, turning into a polemic against Israel or Great Britain). The viewer experiences everything through Farha, including her terror and her helplessness. Farha’s plight stands in as a synecdoche for that of Palestinians as a whole – they were, in a sense, trapped in their homeland, with Israel fighting on one side and taking much of their land, while the Arab nations fought Israel sort of on the Palestinians’ behalf, while the people themselves did fight but were by far the weakest force of the three, while more than half of the Palestinian Arab population was displaced by the war.

Farha is a little long for its content; there’s barely enough here for its 92 minutes, with arguably too much time showing Farha alone in the storeroom, although, again, Sallam is sticking to a specific oral history. It could have been 10 minutes shorter and perhaps been even more powerful, though. First-time actor Karam Taher is excellent as Farha, as she must be for this film to work, and I imagine we’ll see much more of her given the reception this film received in Toronto and positive reviews elsewhere. It didn’t make the shortlist of fifteen titles for the Academy Award, which I fear will relegate it to afterthought status, but at the very least, if you have Netflix, it’s worth seeking out.

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→ January 2, 2023
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Elvis.

Elvis Presley was anything but boring, as a person or as an entertainer, which makes it all the more criminal that Baz Luhrman’s biopic Elvis is such a dull, overlong mess. Even a game performance by Austin Butler, who’s doing the sort of impersonation that Oscar voters seem to love, can’t salvage this thing, which could have been 45 minutes shorter yet somehow misses some of the most interesting parts of the singer’s life story. (It’s free for HBO Max subscribers, or you can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Elvis tries to be a cradle-to-grave story, or at least an early childhood to death one, starting out with Elvis as a very young boy who moves with his family to a house in the white part of a Black neighborhood, where he was introduced to the gospel and blues music that he later used (or appropriated) in his own sound. The narrative then winds its way through his rise to stardom, marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu, stint in the army, the comeback special, and so on, until he gets addicted to drugs and dies, in connect-the-dots storytelling that might still have worked if Lurhman had any interest at all in telling the whole of Elvis’s story. Instead, we get a nonsense framing device of Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who is both the narrator and whose perspective is supposed to be our lens on the story, as Parker keeps trying to tell the viewers that he’s not that bad of a guy, and Elvis wouldn’t have been anything without him. It’s a pointless distraction and shifts the focus to a character nobody really cares about – or, if they did, maybe the film could have been called Parker and just put Elvis in the background. (Please, nobody do this.)be an

Presley’s actual life was far messier than the one we see in Elvis, not least of which is that he had several affairs while married to Priscilla, something the film glosses over almost entirely until the point where she announces that she’s leaving him and taking their daughter Lisa Marie with her. Among other sins of the script, such as the superficial treatment of his substance abuse issues or scant discussion of his appropriation of Black music or how his success may have allowed Black artists to follow in his wake, this amounts to a sort of hagiography that paints Elvis as a victim. Col. Parker did take advantage of Elvis financially and probably did so emotionally as well, but the story is so weirdly one-sided – even though Parker is the narrator – that the singer comes off as a pathetic man-child, and often not responsible for his own actions. I doubt this is accurate, and it’s certainly not interesting to watch.

Luhrman also plays loose with some key facts, which I suppose is par for the course in these music biopics, but his depiction of a race riot at an Elvis concert at Memphis’s Russwood Park is almost pure fiction. It plays into Lurhman’s ham-fisted attempts to tie Elvis’s career to the civil rights movement, which comes up again when Luhrman moves the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in time so that it happens during the taping of the comeback special, rather than some weeks before it, so that there can be a Big Moment backstage where Elvis and the producer decide the singer has to make a statement during the show and change the closing number. (There’s some good comedy in that whole sequence, though, as Parker sold the show as a Christmas special, and keeps insisting that Elvis close with a Christmas song and wear an ugly sweater.) A screenwriter can alter some timelines or small facts in service of the story, but here, Luhrman does the opposite – it holds the story back, makes the film longer, and adds no real interest. Even the comeback special, which was the most-watched TV program of its year and has entered music history for its impact on the culture and the way it opened up the second act of his career, is kind of boring in Elvis. I’d much rather watch that special three times, which would match the running time of this mess, than watch Elvis again.

Butler is a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor – Drama, with Colin Farrell in a separate category because The Banshees of Inisherin counts as a Musical or Comedy. And Butler is good, even if he looks more like Miley Cyrus than Elvis when he’s in his stage makeup. The oddsmakers favor Elvis getting a Best Picture nod, which would be a real travesty, both on its face (this movie sucks) and because it’s going to push out something far more worthy. It’s just a waste of a lot of time and money, and the only film I’ve seen this year that I’d rank below it is Amsterdam, which would also fit that same description.

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→ January 1, 2023
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La Caja.

La Caja (The Box) was Venezuela’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, but didn’t make the shortlist of 15 that was announced in December; it’s on MUBI, for which we signed up to watch Decision to Leave, so I watched this as well. It’s a simple, bleak story that is exceptionally well-told, and while the story is quite specific to its setting, the themes of displacement and loss should have a much broader appeal.

Hatzín (Haztín Navarette) is a young Venezuelan teen or pre-teen who has traveled to a village in Chihuahaua, Mexico, to pick up the remains of his father, which were discovered in a mass grave there. After he gets the box, he’s on the bus back to Mexico City when he spots a man in the street (Hernán Mendoza) who looks just like the pictures of his father, whom he hasn’t seen since he was very little. Hatzín gets off the bus and confronts the man, who insists he’s not Hatzín’s father, but Hatzín returns the box of remains to the office and confronts the man, repeatedly, until he takes Hatzín in and ends up bringing him to his work as a recruiter for a maquiladora (factory) near the U.S. border. The work isn’t always savory, and at times is illegal, leading Hatzín to question whether he should stay there or even wants this man to turn out to be his father.

The story is pretty simple, and revolves around just those two questions: Is this man Hatzín’s father, and what will Hatzín do if it turns out that he is? The man, who calls himself Mario, is furious with Hatzín at the start for the boy’s insistence that this is his father and refusal to leave, although of course that could be a sign that Mario doesn’t want his old life – where he at the very least left Hatzín, Hatzín’s mother (since dead), and his own mother – to intrude on his new one. As Mario, he has a wife, child, and a baby on the way, as well as a job, a factory of his own in progress, and a middle-class existence. Or maybe he just thinks this kid is a pest and doesn’t want to be responsible for him. But he then takes Hatzín in and uses him as a helper, especially when he discovers the boy can read and write well and has a good memory. Does he actually care for the boy, or is he just an opportunist?

Meanwhile, Hatzín confronts an escalating set of moral quandaries as he follows Mario through his job, from recruiting desperate people to work in the sewing factory under dubious pretenses to quelling dissent to grand larceny, and more. Hatzín barely had any memories of his father; if Mario is, in fact, his dad, is this the dad he wanted? What happens to us when our memories of those we’ve lost are tainted by reality? Is it better to know the brutal truth, or to leave the past buried? He’s also faced with a more immediate dilemma: If he were to go to the police, would he be betraying his father? What if he does nothing, and it turns out that Mario isn’t his dad? The excellence of La Caja lies in just how many of these moral questions, ranging from basic to profound, it manages to pose despite just two main characters and what had to be a fairly short script.

This is Naverette’s first film or TV role, and he delivers an essential performance – without him, the film can’t work – that doesn’t line up with his lack of experience. Hatzín the character is a stoic, taciturn kid, already resigned to the tragedies that have taken both of his parents from him and the life it implies; when pure chance throws Mario into his path, he’s already mature enough to make the serious choices required of him. Navarette puts that tension to work on his face and in his sparing movements, making it easy to see his future as a noir detective or a sardonic action hero. Mendoza is almost his equal, threading the needle between the gruff and callous businessman he is at work and the caring family man he can be at home – or the maybe-father he is to Hatzín.

You can only find La Caja on MUBI, at least right now, but if you subscribe to that site it’s worth the watch. You can also sign up for it via amazon, with a 7-day free trial, which would also let you watch Decision to Leave, one of the best movies of 2022 that I’ve seen, and Aftersun, which is coming to MUBI on January 9th.

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→ December 31, 2022
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Decision to Leave.

Decision to Leave is the latest film from South Korean director and screenwriter (co-writer, in this case) Park Chan-wook, his first since 2016’s The Handmaiden and only his third as director in the last ten years. It’s a Hitchcockian thriller with a slow burn, reminiscent in many ways of Vertigo, right down to the romance between the male lead and the femme fatale he’s chasing, that also taps into bigger themes of alienation and self-worth, anchored by two incredible lead performances that should be earning broader acclaim.

Detective Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is called in to investigate the death of an immigration worker who fell while climbing a mountain near Busan, a mountain the man liked to climb and livestream. Jang suspects the man’s young Chinese wife, Seo-Rae (Tang Wei), who works as a caregiver to senior citizens, and who has suspicious marks and bruises on her when they police speak to her. Jang only sees his wife on weekends, because she works at a nuclear power plant, and he quickly becomes obsessed with Seo-Rae, following her and imagining he’s with her at work or in her apartment, which she realizes and turns back around by following him. The two end up in a chaste relationship – not without sexual tension – that Jang must keep secret while she’s still a potential suspect. Of course, nothing is as it first appears, and he finds evidence that might point to Seo-Rae’s guilt, leading to a second act where their power dynamic shifts repeatedly as Jang tries to figure out what’s real and what matters.

Some of the plot points in Decision to Leave are a little easy to spot, but the story isn’t the real strength here – it’s the two main characters, and the actors who do such incredible work to flesh them out. Jang has shadings of the noir detective, a tough guy with a grim exterior, capable of solving tough crimes, earning plaudits from his colleagues while he’s also putting them down for their coarse methods, but he’s also dealing with an existential grief that he tries to assuage with Seo-Rae. He’s not maudlin, or quiet, but actually depressed – he doesn’t seem to love his wife, although he will go through the motions to keep them together, and he doesn’t seem to gain satisfaction from his job, even when he’s doing it well. Park Hae-il has won a slew of awards for his portrayal here, deservedly so, as there’s a nuance to the performance that keeps him away from the stock hard-boiled character that’s fine in genre films but would take away from the bigger ideas here. Seo-Rae, meanwhile, is an immigrant from China who frequently apologizes for her poor Korean and appears in many ways to be an isolated figure – perhaps a damsel in distress for Jang to save – but, of course, she might also be a very cunning killer. Tang, who first rose to prominence in Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, is Park’s equal here, playing the did-she-or-didn’t-she part without the cheap seduction common to the archetype; in fact, there’s very little sex at all in this movie, as the script almost dispenses with the idea that these two are physically attracted to each other, or at least removes it from the equation so the focus is instead on who they are and what might be driving them. (Apropos of nothing, I couldn’t believe Tang is 43 years old; her character, at least, seems at least a decade younger than that.)

Park Chan-woo utilizes a number of symbols in the film, two of which recur enough to merit mention. One is the eyes of various characters, including the victim at the start of the film, whose eyes we see several times in close-up. Jang uses eye drops to moisten his eyes frequently throughout the film, which the director has said is his way of showing that the detective has a hard time seeing what’s right in front of him, whether it’s with Seo-Rae or his wife or other cases. Blurred or diminished vision also comes into play with the frequent fog and mist we see in the film, which apparently is a feature of Ipo, where Jang’s wife works. You could also have a field day just with Jang’s bespoke suit and its seemingly infinite number of pockets, and how Seo-Rae seems to know where he keeps various things – as he is always prepared with little supplies, like he has every mother’s purse’s contents scattered throughout his clothes – while his own wife doesn’t.

My only quibble with Decision to Leave is the ending, as it just doesn’t quite stick the landing, but that’s a tiny complaint in a movie of this ambition. Like Hitchcock’s best films, however, much of the film’s inherent mystery lingers after the conclusion – and Decision to Leave does just that, giving you plenty to ponder long after the movie ends. I seldom watch movies twice, but this one likely rewards a second viewing.

Park won Best Director at Cannes for the film, which was also nominated for the Palme d’Or, and at the Grand Bell Awards, the South Korean equivalent to the Oscars, it took home the honors for Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor for Park Hae-il. Decision to Leave was South Korea’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making the December shortlist and I have to assume eventually getting one of the five nominations. But it also seems like it’s going to get shut out of everything else, which seems like a shame – I can’t imagine there are ten better movies in the 2022 crop than this one.

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→ December 29, 2022
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The Eternal Daughter.

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir was a semi-autobiographical film that received general plaudits from critics but was also notable for its casting of Tilda Swinton and her daughter Honora Swinton-Byrne as mother and daughter in the film, with the latter serving as Julie, Joanna’s stand-in. That film led to a sequel last year, and now a connected film, The Eternal Daughter, that features the same two characters but isn’t a direct sequel or continuation of any sort. The artifice this time is that Tilda Swinton plays both Julie and her mother, Rosalind, as we’re about 30-35 years on, and the two women head off for a week’s stay at quite possibly the worst bed & breakfast in Wales – which happens to be in their former family home. (You can rent The Eternal Daughter on Amazon, iTunes, and so forth.)

Julie is hoping to make a movie about her mother’s life, and has taken her mother on this trip to try to entice her mum to tell her more of her story and, as we learn over the course of the film, to better understand her mother, who has always been just inscrutable enough that Julie feels insufficient to the task of summarizing her on film. The hotel is something out of a classic horror film, dark, empty save for the world’s least-helpful clerk (Carly-Sophia Davies, who is superb) and later one other staff member (Joseph Mydell), and constantly surrounded by mist and fog. Julie, Rosalind, and Rosalind’s dog Louis (played by Louis, Swinton’s dog) are alone everywhere, in their room, the dining room, on the grounds, anywhere they go. There’s an air of mystery from the air itself, and the constant darkness. The hotel seems to have weird sounds, and Julie even thinks she sees the visage of an old woman in a particular window on the first floor. The answer to everything does appear near the end of the film, although the mystery isn’t the real point here; it’s about a mother and daughter, and how we can never truly know our parents no matter how close we try to get to them.

Swinton has become so known for playing weird characters – and doing so in weird fashion – that a bravura performance like this might just go unappreciated and even unnoticed. If you take GoldDerby’s Oscar odds seriously, she’s at 100 to 1 to win Best Actress, the lowest probability they assign to anyone who has better than a zero chance of winning, although they only gave seven actresses higher odds in that category. (Also at 100:1 is Ana de Armas, who was considered a likely nominee before Blonde bombed.) This is two performances, of course, and the roles required some improvisation, as Hogg typically does not provide word-for-word scripts to her actors, but provides treatments and works with them as director to see where the dialogue goes. There are several obvious reasons to cast Swinton in both roles, from the physical similarities we expect from a mother and a daughter to the fact that this was filmed early in 2021 when a small cast was probably a greater asset for COVID mitigation, but perhaps the best reason is that she’s an amazing actor and very much rises to this occasion. There’s one scene where she seems to pour it on a little thick, but after the film’s reveal at the end, her emotions in that one conversation are easier to understand.

The twist, or mystery, is not that hard to discern; my wife called it within five minutes, and of course we spent most of the film looking for clues to verify or debunk it, but she was right. It’s something we’ve seen before, although I won’t spoil it by citing other films that have used this conceit, but I will defend the choice again by saying it’s beside the point. When you find out what’s been happening, it provides context to everything that’s come before. It’s not a “did you figure it out?” mystery, and there are no jump scares or shocks here; any review calling this a horror movie, in any sense at all, has completely missed Hogg’s intentions. The gimmick exists so Hogg and Swinton can further elucidate the difficulties we face as adult children who are trying to understand our parents better before it is too late to do so. The fog and mist are fairly obvious metaphors for that last part – we simply cannot see our parents clearly because we haven’t lived their lives, or even seen the first portions of their lives, and have then spent much of our lives looking at them not as people, but as parents.

There are only seven credited actors in The Eternal Daughter, including Louis, since the hotel appears to have no other guests – I can’t imagine why not, as it’s dank, noisy, and the one full-time employee seems to hate her job. Davies is pretty fantastic as that clerk, and waitress, and almost everything else, as she isn’t so much mean as apathetic. Your concerns are not her concerns, and since there’s no one else there like a supervisor, she doesn’t have to worry about whether you ever get that kettle you asked for. Mydell plays Bill, who seems to work there sometimes in a sort of catchall porter/groundskeeper post; it’s a dicey role, as it veers close to the Magical Negro trope, since his main function here is to help and comfort Julie, with just a slight backstory of his own. I think the counterargument here is that his race is immaterial to his character, and there isn’t a good way to give him anything more to do in a script that is about 90% Julie and Rosalind. I have another possible explanation for this, but that would require spoiling something in the story to explain.

I find it incredibly impressive just how deep The Eternal Daughter is despite the sparse cast and single setting, a testament to what good writing can do and in many ways a nod to the movies’ roots on the stage, where words were almost all that mattered because you didn’t have huge casts, sets, or special effects to paper over flaws in the script. This exploration of filial ties felt especially poignant to myself and my wife, as our parents are all alive but getting older, and this desire to hold on to what you can because you can’t hold on to what you desire is something that crosses boundaries of race, class, and so on. The bond between a mother and daughter, and the strain that can coexist with it, is something I know I can’t understand, but I hope I can at least appreciate how Hogg has brought it to life on film. It’s a shame that The Eternal Daughter has been so overlooked, between Swinton’s excellent and – gasp! – understated twin performances and the themes that power the story.

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→ December 14, 2022
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The Wonder.

The Wonder is another adaptation of a book by Emma Donoghue (author of Room), directed by Sebastian Lelio (Una Mujer Fantástica, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), and starring Florence Pugh. It has no reason not to be good. And it is good, imperfect but good, taut and spare and well-acted, with Pugh, who seems very unlikely to get any awards love for her performance, showing once again what a compelling talent she is.

Set in 1862, The Wonder tells the story of Elizabeth Wright (Pugh), a nurse who is called to an Irish village where a young girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), appears to have been fasting for four months, requiring no food or sustenance, subsisting solely on prayer. Her Catholic family wants to believe she’s blessed by God, as does the local priest and several other town authorities, although there’s enough disagreement that the triumvirate of local leaders (Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Dermot Crowley) have called in Mrs. Wright and a nun to watch over Anna for two weeks, taking twelve-hour shifts to determine whether she’s for real or is somehow sneaking or being given food. An Irish journalist with a questionable past (Tom Byrne) shows up as well, and he’s even more skeptical than Mrs. Wright is, but it’s unclear if or how Anna and her family might be pulling this off.

The Wonder isn’t really a film about religious mania or doubt, although those themes are there below the surface, but about the way in which adults use children – and, really, all manner of people – as objects to advance their own ends. The religious leaders and Anna’s own family are so invested in the possibility that her survival without food is the product of divine intervention that they’re willing to overlook signs that she’s dying, even ignoring the protestations of Mrs. Wright that the girl needs food. The nurse herself has a past of tragedy, telling Anna’s family that she’s widowed but leaving out several other details from her history, and it turns out the journalist is doing the same, leaving both of their motivations here open to question as well.

Of course, you can’t read this without seeing an implicit indictment of religion’s capacity to harm and kill, and the way that people will turn to religion, even with that capacity fully on display, in times of strife. The novel and film are set in the wake of the Irish famine caused by a potato blight that led to the deaths of about a million Irish people and the emigration of two million more, a time where you might think that people would ask why God had abandoned them, especially given the island’s history of dedication to the One True Church of Rome even as their overlords in England tossed it aside for divorce and other heresies. Instead, we have a family and a town clinging to that faith as fiercely as ever, impervious to material explanations and physical evidence of harm (as when Anna spits out an entire tooth, a sign of malnutrition), turning even more deeply into religion even when any rational person would see a person surviving without food for four months as a physical impossibility. The script doesn’t dwell much on the science versus faith battle directly, instead pitting the rationalist nurse against the nun and the spiritual leaders as a stand-in for that debate, which had just exploded on the world with the publication of On the Origin of Species just three years prior to the film’s setting.

This film is nearly all about Pugh’s performance, with a strong assist from Cassidy. Pugh has become one of those “whatever she’s in, I’ll watch, unless Olivia Wilde directed it” actors, and while she’s not going to get any awards consideration for The Wonder, it’s certainly worthy of it. Her portrayal of Elizabeth as a skeptic who’s dealing with her own secret pain and finds herself geographically and socially isolated in this small Irish hamlet is compelling and credible, and her interactions with Cassidy’s Anna are the best parts of the movie. The film overall feels a bit small for awards attention – its only nominations so far were from the British Independent Film Awards, where it earned twelve but only won for Original Music – and that might be why Pugh’s been overlooked in a very packed category. I’ll give this the highest praise I can give a film, though: I was never bored, and what’s more, it took me a while to figure out what might be going on.

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